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African American History: Web Resources

Center for African American Studies

Web Resources

American Black Journal - Originally, Colored People's Time, aired in 1968 during a time of social and racial turmoil. ABJ programs represent a wide variety of African-American viewpoints on important issues affecting the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, and the nation as whole: labor unrest in the automobile industry, urban civil disturbances in Detroit, 1967 riots across the nation, the emergence of outspoken African American political leaders, and the explosion of Motown music.
 
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 - Born in Slavery contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress.

Visualizing Emancipation - A digital-humanities project from the University of Richmond. Edward L. Ayers, historian and president of the University of Richmond, calls the emancipation of slaves during the Civil War “the least-understood social transformation in American history.” A new interactive map he helped build shows that emancipation didn’t occur in one moment, he says, but was “an unfolding,” happening from the very first years of the war to the very last....It happened because of African-Americans, not merely for them, or to them.

James Baldwin Bests William F. Buckley in 1965 Debate at Cambridge University - In 1965, James Baldwin accepted an invitation by Cambridge University to debate the “father of American conservatism” William F. Buckley on the subject, “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.”

Robert Penn Warren Archive: Who Speaks for the Negro?  - Digital archive includes interviews with James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Africana & Black History - Historical documents, rare visual materials, and contemporary photo-journalism relating to the entirety of African American history from the 16th century to the present.

Additional Resources

Jim Crow