Find Primary Sources Online

Founded by W.E.B. Dubois, 'The Crisis' served as the magazine of the NAACP, battling against racial hatred and discrimination in the United States.

Digitized copies from 1968-1973.

Transcripts of primary source documents such as laws, legal cases, and speeches by Black activists.

Historical articles from black newspapers such as the Atlanta Daily World, Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, and Philadelphia Tribune.

Primary sources on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, in a variety of formats.

Letters, memos, reports, and photos surrounding President Truman's Executive Order to desegregate the military.

Interviews with participants in North Carolina civil rights campaigns. Audio files with transcripts.

Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Writings, posters, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines dedicated to the Black Power struggle in 1960-1970s America.

Primary source documents from 1790 to the present.

SNCC was a young African-American grassroots organization that came to prominence in the 1960s. It conducted voting registration drives throughout the Jim Crow South.

Contains films from the nightly news of two local television stations in Virginia, but includes speeches by Martin Luther King and JFK, as well as coverage of demonstrations, public meetings, and debates.

Thie website brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials on African-American history from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.

Transcripts of primary source documents such as laws, legal cases, and speeches by Black activists.

Transcriptions of interviews with formerly enslaved Americans.

Extensive collection of 40,000 anti-slavery writings in downloadable PDF format.

Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Diaries letters, speeches, and a handwritten draft of 'The Life and Times' of this African-American abolitionist.

Pamphlets by African-American writers on slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics.

Scanned images of pages from the Boston abolitionist newspaper The Liberator (1831-1865).

Pamphlets revealing African-American history and culture, from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900.

Exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.

A collection of rare books and manuscripts from the Library of Congress.

Information on 36,000 slaving voyages, with images of manuscripts and ships.