Research Guides: AFST 101: Introduction to Africana Studies (HC): Primary Sources Online

Source Collections for Black History

Black Life in America: The Experience and Impact of African Americans as Recorded by the News Media
- This link opens in a new window
Newly created resource. Delivers full texts and videos from more than 19,000 American and global news sources, including over 400 current and historical Black publications from 1704 to the present. To start use the Suggested Searches to find subtopics or enter a keyword search.
Abdul Alkalimat - Websites
Websites from a scholar-activist with primary source documents, conference proceedings and resource lists concerning many different aspects of Black studies. Includes websites devoted to Malcom X , the Black experience viewed globally and action plans for the future of Black Studies.

Adam Matthew Explorer
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Search across 63 primary source databases from Adam Matthew covering historical, cultural and political topics from around the world. The databases reproduce letters, diaries, government records, illustrations and other materials drawn from museum and library collections.
Sample search: "black panther party"
Results include the organization's publications, reports from other groups, posters, newspaper articles and more
Relevant individual databases within the collection include:
African American Communities
Race Relations in America (1943-1970)
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007
You can do a more targeted search within an individual database and filter by date and other categories.
Use your initial keyword search to find the databases that have the fullest coverage of your topic. In the case of the Black Panther Party, that database is Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975.

African American History (Library of Congress)
Digital collections of documents, visual material, and other resources.

African American Newspapers: the 19th century
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Contains full-text articles about the cultural life and history during the 1800s, including presidential and congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. Also contains large numbers of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience. Covers 1827-1902 (with gaps).

African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection (Library of Congress)
The 800 + titles in the collection range in date from 1822 through 1909. Most were written by Black authors and address a variety of issues.
Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg Research Guide
This is a guide to resources related to bibliophile and curator Arturo Schomburg. Some images, documents and books are available online. The guide includes a bibliography of his writings in chronological order.
Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement
This digital collection features over 700 documents focusing on the histories of civil rights activism by everyday Black citizens. There are plans for three more collections in 2024-2025 with documents from Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities.
Black authors, 1556-1922: imprints from the Library Company of Philadelphia
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
This collection features works by authors of African or African-American descent over three centuries.
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States
Browse by subject or time period to find over 1600 documents dating from 1790 through 2000.
A Black Philadelphia Reader : African American Writings about the City of Brotherly Love
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Featuring the works of famous authors―including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Sonia Sanchez and John Edgar Wideman―alongside lesser-known voices, this reader is an immersive and enriching composite portrait of the Black experience in Philadelphia.
Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
"Black Quotidian explores everyday lives of African Americans in the twentieth century. Drawing on an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, Matthew F. Delmont guides readers through a wealth of primary resources that reveal how the Black press popularized African-American history and valued the lives of both famous and ordinary Black people"--Home page.
Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia (Temple University)
Draws on archival sources to document Philadelphia's history including:
Columbia Avenue Riots (1964)
Desegregation of Girard College (1954-1968)
Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944
Colored Conventions
From 1830 until the 1890s Black people organized state and national political meetings known as Colored Conventions. See digitized versions of proceedings, newspaper coverage, and petitions related to the Conventions.
Digital Harlem: Everyday Life 1915-1930
Drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.

Ethnic Newswatch
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Find articles from newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, peoples of color and native press in America. Searchable in both English and Spanish, with titles in both languages. Articles from 1959-present.

History : African American: Primary Sources (University of Washington)
See the many open access resources on this page (those without a padlock icon). Note in particular the section for Civil Rights.
Jim Crow : Voices from a Century of Struggle. Part One, 1876-1919 : Reconstruction to the Red Summer
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
This collection of 80 dramatic firsthand writings by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others brings to life the struggle for racial justice from the Civil War to World War I.
Last Seen: Finding Family after Slavery
This project digitizes and transcribes ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. These ads began appearing in the 1830s and greatly increased in frequency in the years immediately following emancipation (1865) and continued well into the 20th century. The project is based at Villanova University and welcomes crowd-sourced transcriptions from the digital community.
Lynching in America
Documents more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the United States during the period between Reconstruction and World War II.
Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers
Presents information found within manumission documents held by Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections. The 339 manumissions are primarily from the greater Philadelphia area, and were created between 1765 and 1790. A major goal of this website is to highlight and center the stories and lives of enslaved people.

Papers of Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of the Black power movement
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
The collection consists of materials from the years 1913 through 1998 that document African American author and activist Amiri Baraka. Documents Baraka's involvement in the politics in Newark, N.J. and in Black Power movement organizations such as the Congress of African People, the National Black Conference movement, the Black Women's United Front. Later materials document Baraka's increasing involvement in Marxism.

Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement
- This link opens in a new window
Features transcriptions of close to 700 interviews from the 1970s with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.
SlaveVoyages
Data-driven collaborative websites focused on the enslaved in Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American trafficking.
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Digital Gateway
Organized in 1960 and mentored by the legendary Black organizer, Ella Baker, SNCC activists became full-time organizers, working with community leaders to build local grassroots organizations in the Deep South.
To Enter Africa from America: The United States, 1862-1919 Africa and the New Imperialism,
The website explores American involvement in Africa and how that affected race relations in the U. S. for african Americans.
Voices of Civil Rights (Library of Congress)
Online exhibition featuring 20 oral histories recorded in 2004 by civil rights activists. Accompanied by historic photos and posters.

Image Sources

JSTOR Images (formerly Artstor)
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design.

Digital Image Collections
New York Public Library has digitized many of its notable art and photography collections to aid researchers.
Image Sources (Princeton University)
See sources for images including libraries, museums and organizations.
Images of African Americans from the 19th Century (Schomburg Center)
Phtographs are drawn from collections of family photographs, the records of a professional woman's school, work by two photographers who documented early African-American institutions of higher learning, and the personal collections of various individuals.
Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964 (Yale University)
Photographs of artists, entertainers, activists, educators, and public intellectuals taken by Carl Van Vechten from 1939 tthrough 1964.
Songs without Words
A digital collection of anti-lynching drawings published in African American periodicals during the 1880s and 1890s. The collection makes available hard-to-find images that African American editors and artists used to shape political consciousness before 1900.
Umbra Search
Search for digitized images from many libraries, archives, and museums relating to Black history.
Example: image "black panthers"