Guides: Identity Studies: Find Popular and Primary Sources

Selected Websites for Africana

This page has a mix of freely available websites and popular resources like magazines. These are meant to be helpful to researchers in Africana Studies. They are not necessarily subscription-based article databases where one would find scholarly articles, but are carefully selected by the subject librarian in collaboration with faculty and are generally thought to be credible. However, please evaluate these for your purposes before using them.

General Interest
Newspapers
Digital Libraries
Mixed Content Archives
Statistics

General Popular and Primary Resources

Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
This collection chronicles the transformative decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s through the lens of an independent alternative press. Independent Voices provides access to over 1,000 titles of publications from feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, gays, lesbians and more.

ColorLines
ColorLines is a daily news site featuring investigative reporting and news analysis from the perspective of communities of color.
The Grio
African-American news website
Ebony Magazine
Oldest continuously running African-American magazine, focuses on news and culture.
All Africa
Site that aggregates news on Africa

Newspapers

Chicago Defender (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
A Chicago-based weekly newspaper, serving a primarily African-American audience. This collection covers issues published from 1910-1975.

AFRO Archives
Digitized collection of black newspapers, including Afro-American National Edition, Afro-American Ledger, Baltimore Afro-American, and Washington Afro-American.
New York Times (ProQuest)
(1980-present) articles only

Digital Library Collections

African Online Digital Library
The African Online Digital Library (AODL) is a portal to multimedia collections about Africa. MATRIX, working in cooperation with the African Studies Center at Michigan State University, is partnering with universities and cultural heritage organizations in Africa to build this resource.
Civil Rights Digital Library
The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.
Digital Library of the Caribbean
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Digital Collections)
Relying on the expertise of distinguished curators and scholars, Digital Schomburg provides access to trusted information, interpretation, and scholarship on the global black experience 24/7. Users worldwide can find, in this virtual Schomburg Center, 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.

Mixed Content Archives

African American Music Reference (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
African-American Music Reference is a comprehensive reference database that chronicles the rich history of African-American music through 1970. It includes coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression. Resources include biographies, anthologies, encyclopedias, images, lyrics (digitized and fully searchable), song sheets, chronologies, critical textbooks, a comprehensive discography of the top African-American artists, and links to editorially selected Web resources.
Black Abolitionist Papers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
This primary source collection details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
This collection includes the FBI Files on Martin Luther King Jr.; Centers of the Southern Struggle, a collection of FBI Files covering five pivotal arenas of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s: Montgomery, Albany, St. Augustine, Selma, and Memphis; and records from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, detailing the interaction between civil rights leaders and organizations and the highest levels of the federal government.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 1 (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Contains organizational records from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, along with papers of civil rights leaders.
Black Thought and Culture (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
A collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders, teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures, covering 250 years of history.

The Freedom Archives
The Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings as well as print materials dating primarily from the late-1960s to the mid-90s. These collections chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice.
Black Past
This resource contains three main areas: African American History, African American History in the West, and Global African History. Under each of those headings you will find a vast array of resources, including encyclopedia entries, full text primary documents, major speeches, and historical timelines.
Navigating the Green Book
The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome. NYPL Labs is in the process of extracting the data from the Green Books themselves and welcomes you to explore its contents in new ways.
African Activist Archive Project
The African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.
African American History Online (Library of Congress)
Over 400 years of the African American experience is documented through primary source materials at the Library of Congress.
Beyond the Veil (Duke University)
A selection of recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.