History of Africa and the African Diaspora

A list of digital collections related to African American history across the United States.

AODL is an open access digital library of African cultural heritage materials created by Michigan State University in collaboration with museums, archives, scholars, and communities around the world.

A digital repository for millions of books and periodicals in the public domain, this collection includes multiple texts about and from the African continent in multiple languages (e.g., Swahili, etc.).

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Includes texts from around the world, including from across the African continent.

Search over 16 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 5.1 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

The African American story is central to our nation’s history, and thus forms a major part of the objects, archives, and collections held throughout the Smithsonian today. The contributions of African Americans in countless fields, along with materials documenting the struggles and achievements inherent to the African American story, can be found in the records of every museum. This image gallery represents some of the many Smithsonian collections documenting the significant work of African Americans throughout history.

Aggregates digital collections from around the U.S. and offers excellent tools to discover and explore them. Focuses on 17th to 21st centuries.

Interface in English. Content in English or other languages.
Digitized collections from the Library of Congress, includes manuscripts, books, photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. Strongest between the 17th and 21st centuries. Content dating back to B.C.E.
Open Access.

The core of this presentation consists of "stock" arrangements for bands or small orchestras of popular songs written by African Americans from 1883 to 1923.

The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. Dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950.

The filmwork of Alan Lomax is a resource for students, researchers, filmmakers, and fans of America's traditional music and folkways. Shot throughout the American South and Southwest over the course of seven years (1978--1985) in preparation for a PBS series, "American Patchwork," which aired in 1991, these videos consist of performances, interviews, and folkloric scenes culled from 400 hours of raw footage, many of which have never been seen publicly.

Includes music, photographs, essays, and more relating the music from across the 20th century with a focus on the 1940s to 1960s.

This library contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users.

Offers more than ten thousand songs from the dawn of the modern age.

Includes biographies, reviews, and articles of soul music and artists.

The 1960s-80s is considered the ‘golden age’ of African music, and in East Africa, Tanzania was famed for having one of the most active and vibrant music scenes of them all. Not only was the music catchy, warm, and bright, it was a used consciously as a powerful tool for building national unity, pride, and pan-African solidarity after years of colonialism.

Dig deeper into music by discovering direct connections among over 641,000 songs and 211,000 artists, from Hip-Hop, Rap and R&B via Electronic / Dance through to Rock, Pop, Soul, Funk, Reggae, Jazz, Classical and beyond.

More than 250 digital facsimiles of pamphlets from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This collection includes letters from Munro’s purchase of a house which served as the Mt. Pleasant Home for Destitute Children, as well as legal documents from parents and guardians who signed care of impoverished African American children over to the home, financial documents, photographs, and an extensive run of the Laing School Visitor newsletter.

This collection of photographs, newspaper clippings and various manuscripts documents one of America’s foremost early twentieth-century African-American magic acts.

A small collection at the NYPL associated with the author James Baldwin. Dating to 1938, this archive of writings and related documents is indispensable to understanding the significance of Baldwin’s career as a writer and an engaged public man of letters.

The papers of educator, lecturer, suffragist, and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) consist of approximately 13,000 documents, comprising 25,323 images.

Presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The online collection, containing approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865.

The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000. The collection, which contains approximately 7,500 items in the Manuscript Division.

Includes over 100,000 items of correspondence (more than three quarters of the papers), speeches, articles, newspaper columns, nonfiction books, research materials, book reviews, pamphlets and leaflets, petitions, novels, essays, forewords, student papers, manuscripts of pageants, plays, short stories and fables, poetry, photographs, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, videotapes, audiotapes, and miscellaneous materials. The bulk 1877-1963.

The Samson Adams papers are the estate and business documents of Adams, a free African American man living and working in Trenton, New Jersey, in the late 18th century. Adams worked as a carpenter and laborer, and produced and traded in a variety of items, including soap, milk, corn, and construction materials.

A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Interviews with several of Florida's civil rights leaders who were active at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States and in Florida during the 1950s and 1960s.

Kent State University was placed into the international spotlight on May 4, 1970, after 13 students were shot by members of the Ohio National Guard at a student demonstration. The Kent State Shootings Oral Histories project collects and provides access to personal accounts of the May 4, 1970, shootings and their aftermath.

Multiple digital collections at the US Library of Congress feature oral histories. These collections engage the breadth of 20th and 21st centuries focused on lived experience.

Offers full-text content, including Ellis Island oral history narratives, exclusive Black Panther party interviews, and more. Indexes English-language interviews that are either publicly available on the Web or held by repositories and archives around the world. Many have full text transcripts.

Since 1973, the SOHP has conducted 6,000 interviews with men and women–from mill workers to civil rights leaders to future presidents of the United States.

The Oral History Digital Collection contains a selection of interview transcripts produced by the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at The University of Southern Mississippi. Currently, a majority of the interviews in the collection document the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. T

Includes more than 600 images from the late 19th and early 20th century. Includes portraits and images of daily life.

Historical documents and photographs relating to African American history from the 16th century to the present. Items were selected in the course of developing the NYPL website "African American Migration Experience."

This database includes family photos, early African American educational Institutions, and personal collections highlighting the life of African Americans in the 19th century.

Browse a subject listing of digital images included in the North American Slave Narratives. The collection is also searchable.

This collection present ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997.

Selected and curated resources relevant to narratives of escape from enslavement. Associated with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with the NYPL.

Sydney Howard Gay, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard and chief operative of an underground railroad outpost located at the newspaper's offices in New York City. The Record of Fugitives in its entirety consists of two notebooks and several pages of addenda.

An initiative of the University of Georgia providing access to a variety of primary sources from the Civil Rights Movement including letters, pamphlets, oral histories, photographs and film. Search or browse by year, event, people or topic.

This curated collection brings together diverse archival footage documenting the Civil Rights movement.

On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record new interviews with people who participated in the struggle, over a five year period beginning in 2010. More than 200 video interviews are available.

The selected images tell a story of struggle, community challenges, and hope for Black Miami in the 20th century. Through a combination of personal papers, books, professional photography, fliers and reports of civil rights activities this exhibition on Black Miami presents a sobering glimpse at what was and illustrates a path of civic involvement and pride.

Interface and content in English.
The main objective of the Burnham-Nobles Archive is to document racial killings in the Jim Crow American South. The current version of the Archive documents incidents between the years 1930-1954. 7 By American South, we mean eleven states of the Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. By racial killings, we mean killings where racial animus or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms and customs can be documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports and supporting documents. Browse and use advanced filters for People, Incidents, and Documents regarding more than 1,000 cases.
Open Access.

Features hundreds of primary sources from the long conventions movement. Primary sources include minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images.

A collection of transcribed papers, photographs, and sounds related to Garvey and the movement.

This site contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts and 500 black-and-white photographs of former
slaves.

The Digital Library on American Slavery is an expanding resource compiling various independent online collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface.

This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them.