Guide to African American Documentary Resources

American Visionary: Legends of Tuskegee www.cr.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/tuskegee/index.htm
This three-part web exhibit highlights the achievements of Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver
and the Tuskegee Airmen. It features collections at Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site and Tuskegee Airmen
National Historic Site located in Tuskegee, Alabama, and selected items from the Booker T. Washington National
Monument in Hardy, Virginia, and George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond, Missouri. The
exhibit also features collections from the Library of Congress, National Digital Library; National Archives and
Records Administration; and the Department of Defense.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers' Project memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/
First-hand recollections of slavery by thousands of former slaves were recorded in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. This collection from the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions includes texts of more than 2000 narratives and 500 photographs.
Dred Scott Case www.library.wustl.edu/vlib/dredscott/
Washington University Libraries has worked with the St. Louis Circuit Court and the Missouri State Archives to put 170 pages of the original Dred Scott documents on the Libraries' web site. The project makes available to scholars and the public, records for the cases concerning Dred and Harriet Scott tried in St. Louis courts between 1846 and 1852. These documents are part of a massive collection of Civil Court records dating from 1798 through the present. The collection is an incredibly rich resource for historical research.
Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress
memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/doughome.html
The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The first release of the Douglass Papers, from the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, contains approximately 2,000 items (16,000 images) relating to Douglass's life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor, orator, and public servant. The papers span the years 1841 to 1964, with the bulk of the material from 1862 to 1895. The printed Speech, Article, and Book Series contains the writings of Douglass and such contemporaries in the abolitionist and early women's rights movements as Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, and others. The Subject File Series reveals Douglass's interest in diverse subjects such as politics, emancipation, racial prejudice, women's suffrage, and prison reform.
Freedom Summer Letters and Posters www.lib.usm.edu/~archives/m323.htm
University of Southern Mississippi Libraries' Special Collections Digital Program announces the online release of
correspondence and civil rights posters from the Joseph and Nancy Ellin Freedom Summer Collection. The Ellins,
ivy-league educated teachers from New York City, came to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1964 to work in the
Freedom Schools established as a part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.The Ellin digital collection is a
phase of the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, which provides oral histories, manuscripts, and images
documenting the history of race relations in Mississippi.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 memory.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/sthome.html
The exhibition contains over 100 pamphlets and books published between 1772 and 1889 concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Of the cases presented here, most took place in America and a few in Great Britain. Among the voices heard are those of some of the defendants and plaintiffs themselves as well as those of abolitionists, presidents, politicians, slave owners, fugitive and free territory slaves, lawyers and judges, and justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Significant names include John Quincy Adams, Roger B. Taney, John C. Calhoun, Salmon P. Chase, Dred Scott, William H. Seward, Prudence Crandall, Theodore Parker, Jonathan Walker, Daniel Drayton, Castner Hanway, Francis Scott Key, William L. Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Denmark Vesey, and John Brown.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM www.cup.org/eltis.html
"Considered to be the most comprehensive computerized record of the trans-Atlantic slave trade...will challenge traditional perception about the inaccessibility of information on slave roots." It documents the forced migration of an estimated 12 million Africans from 1519-1867. It is a data set compiled by respected historians and draws on the archival work of international scholars.
The Booker T. Washington Papers, University of Illinois Press www.historycooperative.org/btw/
The Booker T. Washington Papers Online is a free and searchable web site designed to provide researchers worldwide with full access to the thousands of pages comprising this 14-volume printed work, originally published by the University of Illinois Press. In addition to easy navigation and searching across the multiple volumes, the Web site will allow page-by-page local printing via Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collections, Cornell University, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections www.library.cornell.edu/mayantislavery/ (Digitization Forthcoming)
In 1870, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, was instrumental in bringing an extensive collection of slavery and abolitionist materials gathered by his close friend, Reverend Samuel Joseph May, to the Cornell Library. Numbering over 10,000 titles, May's pamphlets and leaflets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Much of the May Anti-Slavery Collection was considered ephemeral or fugitive, and today these pamphlets are quite scarce. Sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes all document the social and political implications of the abolitionist movement. The pamphlets in Samuel J. May's great Anti-Slavery library are now available as electronic searchable text for the first time. The May Anti-Slavery pamphlets can be accessed through Cornell's catalog, and by searching the collection from this Web site. By 2004, the collection will be digitized for full online access.
Contemporary African Artists Database rmc2.library.cornell.edu/ContemporaryAfricanArt/
This venture funded by the Rockefeller Foundation is a database of contemporary African atists and generate a series of bio-bibliographical dictionaries, all fully illustrated. It aims to promote networking among African artists throughout the world and to encourage new initiaitves in the collection, documentation, and dissimination of contemporary Africa Art. The database is classified by country and will include artists who have been working since he 1920's, in addition to important artists from earlier dates. Both database and printed volumes will include sections on public and private art museums, galleries, archives, collections, art shcools, and other resources relevant to each country.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record http://gropius.lib.virginia.edu/slavery/
This project of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and The Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia Library This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public. In brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World. The hundreds of images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.

©Elaine L. Westbrooks