Primary Sources: African American History

1Hood Media is a collective of socially conscious artists & activists who utilize art to raise awareness. The mission of 1Hood Media is to build liberated communities through art, education and social justice.

"The African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania is a full service organization that continuously provides access and opportunity to over 500 African American business owners and professionals. Additionally, the Chamber’s membership includes other minority groups, over 60 non-profit organizations, and over 50 majority businesses."

The African American Collection, comprised of archives and museum artifacts located at the History Center, is dedicated to the preservation, dissemination, and interpretation of the life, history, and culture of Africans and African Americans in Western Pennsylvania.

To help aid individuals in our most vulnerable communities, Leroy Ball, President & CEO, Koppers, is inviting his team and other Pittsburgh corporations, organizations and concerned individuals to partner with the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh to launch a fund drive to purchase and distribute essential goods such as disinfectants, paper towels, toilet paper and hand sanitizer to some of the region's most economically distressed communities, such as the the Hill District, Homewood, Duquesne, Homestead, the Mon Valley and the Northside.

Named for the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright August Wilson, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center is a multi-purpose venue featuring three art galleries, live performance spaces, meeting areas, and unique educational classrooms for the young and old alike. Designed by renowned architect Allison Williams, the AWAACC is both a visually iconic landmark welcoming visitors to the eastern entrance of the Cultural District and a beacon of cultural excellence for the global arts community.

This open letter from the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh addresses the murders of multiple Black people and subsequent BLM protests that occurred in the summer of 2020 and is followed by a list of Black and African American-led arts organizations in Pittsburgh.

A list of Black-owned businesses, including restaurants, apparel and fashion, organizations, groups, health and wellness, and more.

An entry into a series of virtual town hall meetings affirming the city-wide agenda that Black Pittsburgh matters. Main topic for this meeting is housing and economic development.

From director Danny Miller and Dr. Rueben Brock (Professor of Psychology at California University of Pennsylvania) comes a documentary that explores the history, culture, and politics of Pittsburgh's Black community. The film highlights Pittsburgh's rich culture. It also explores recent reports that suggest Pittsburgh is the worst major American city for African Americans.

The Black Political Empowerment Project (B-PEP) was created in response to the absence of Black people on the City Council of Pittsburgh in the mid-80s.

Free at Last? takes the visitor on a journey that begins with life as usual in Africa, stops over in the slave castles that lined the West African coast, travels across the gruesome Middle Passage onward to slavery in the Americas, and, as W.E.B. Du Bois characterized it, through a descent into hell. Through the exhibition, the journey brings us to the American colonies, Pennsylvania, and the Pittsburgh region, where the core of the story dates to Pittsburgh’s founding 250 years ago.

The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is the largest and most pre-eminent civil rights organization in the nation. Their mission is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all persons.

The continuation of the historic and prestigious Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most important Black newspapers in the country.

Take a journey through more than 200 years of the African-American experience in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Nearly 90 sites of local, regional and national significance are represented in this guide of African-American history in the region.

Mission is to assist the Black community in achieving self-sustaining practices, through strategic leadership, collective giving, grantmaking and advocacy. Created in the format of a Community Foundation, POISE receives funds from a variety of donors. These funds may be unrestricted, and used to support our grantmaking strategy, or donor-directed for specific charitable purposes.

Soul Pitt Media is a successful multi-channel local media company that serves the African-American population in Western PA and the surrounding communities by delivering the latest, most informative, and most comprehensive content via its award-winning internet and print platforms TheSoulPitt.com and Soul Pitt Quarterly print magazine.

This live broadcast special focuses on many of the obstacles and opportunities facing metropolitan Pittsburgh’s African American communities.

Steel Smiling bridges the gap between Black people and mental health support through education, advocacy and awareness. Their 10 year vision is to connect with every Black person in Allegheny County to a positive mental health experience that improves their quality of life by 2030.

The Teenie Harris Archive at Carnegie Museum of Art is a richly detailed chronicle ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights movement, entertainers to local heroes, sports to churches, and any other hallmark of everyday family life. It includes over 70,000 images is one of the most detailed and intimate records of the black urban experience known today.

From their website: "As the largest comprehensive social service/civil rights organization in Southwestern Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Urban League helps others to help themselves through extra-curricular educational opportunities, health advocacy, housing counseling, parental education and support for early childhood and youth development, hunger prevention services, sustainable wage career preparation, and other programs that lead to improved ability to achieve economic empowerment and self-reliance."

The host of the CNN series 'United Shades Of America', W. Kamau Bell sits down with Ebro in the Morning to discuss some of his experiences and upcoming episodes of the hit show as he traveled around different communities in America.

A history of the Tulsa Race Massacre with photos, documents, and oral histories from survivors.

Focusing on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and cities and towns in North Carolina, this collection provides digital access to pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories about the African American experience.
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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

Contains primary source material, including unedited news film, about the people, places, events, and more of the Civil Rights Movement.

Digital materials held at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Many images are within the Smithsonian Institution's Open Access Initiative.

Speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by staff and participants at Fisk University's Race Relations Department and annual institute, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.
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Primary source resources for slavery and abolition studies, providing documents between 1490 and 2007. Special attention is given to varieties of slavery, slavery's legacy, the social-justice perspective and slavery's existence today.
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Vast collection of significant historical content created by public media.

Focusing on the twentieth-century black press, Black Quotidian presents ideas, sounds, images, and movements that are so important to African-American history

Allows users to search a directory of 23,000 American newspaper titles published from 1690 to the present

A collection of historical newspapers within the United States that are arranged by state.

Local, regional, and national newspapers published by Klan organizations and by sympathetic publishers across the U.S. in the 1920s.

Contains information on over 850,000 news stories. Some may be available through streaming video.

Provides full text access to documents in American History going from 1000 AD to the present.

Digital materials from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, covering American history from the first European settlers to the mid-twentieth century.
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Provides full text access to documents in law, history, and diplomacy.

An extensive collection of primary sources found within American history, including images and written works.

Contains over 600 articles, over 60 ebooks, and links to almost 6,000 web sites dealing with a wide range of topics within the discipline of history. Emphasis is on primary sources.

Includes archival primary source materials from LGBTs, feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals and the New Left, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, anarchists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines.

A free and open access collection maintained by a nonprofit organization.

This site contains 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles related to the social history of the United States from the antebellum era through reconstruction.

The Gilder Lehrman Collection contains more than seventy-five thousand items documenting the political, social, and economic history of the United States. These materials range from iconic historical treasures, such as the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation, to personal letters that tell the stories of citizen-soldiers and their families. Chronologically, the Collection ranges from 1493 to the end of the twentieth century. The main strengths lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in the study of slavery and abolition. They have significant holdings across the twentieth century, especially in World War II and civil rights history, and are actively acquiring additional materials from this period.

Resources collected by the University of Nevada Las Vegas focusing on Afro-Latinx history and African American history.

American Black Journal is an historic television program that has been presenting issues and events from African-American perspectives since 1968.

Over 3300 funeral programs documenting the funeral services of Georgia residents, primarily from the Atlanta, Georgia area. Most of the programs are from services held during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A majority of the programs are from churches in the Atlanta, Georgia area, with a few programs from other states such as South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, among others. The programs typically contain a photograph of the deceased, an obituary, a list of surviving relatives, and the order of service. The collection provides extensive genealogical information about the deceased, including birth and death dates, maiden names, names of relatives, past residences, and place of burial. Alongside this genealogical information, the obituaries provide a rich source of local history.

Explore the Black Archives' digital collections for primary source material.

A worksheet to help students examine, explore, and engage with primary source material focusing on the history of Black Brooklyn. Good for curriculum building.

A list of resources, primary sources, articles, lesson plans, documents, etc broken down by topic available through the National Archives.

A primary source guide from Yale, focusing on Blackness in Latinx and Latin America. This page lists many additional digital collections and resources that fall under this topic. Many of these resources should be available to non-Yale community members.

Twenty issues of the Black Panther Party newspaper from 1968-1973. Downloadable PDFs.

An online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. Includes encyclopedia entries, speech transcripts, full text primary source documents, biographies, timelines, genealogical resources, links t museum and research resources, and more.

The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960. The materials in this collection include photographs, correspondence, speeches, event programs, publications, oral histories, and other artifacts.

The California Eagle, the West's oldest African-American newspaper, was published from 1879-1964. John James Neimore established it in Los Angeles as The California Owl in 1879, to ease black settlers' transition to the West. The paper provided housing and job information, and other information essential to surviving in a new environment.

The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color. For nearly 100 years, The Crisis has been the magazine of opinion and thought leaders, decision makers, peacemakers and justice seekers. It has chronicled, informed, educated, entertained and, in many instances, set the economic, political and social agenda for our nation and its multi-ethnic citizens.

The Emmett Till Archives at Florida State University Libraries consists of primary and secondary source material related to the life, murder, and memory of Emmett Louis Till.

This online collection presents newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the African American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became one of the most famous orators, authors, and journalists of the 19th century.

The K. Leroy Irvis Papers document the life of one of Pennsylvania's prominent politicians. Irvis, a Democrat, represented Pittsburgh in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from 1958-1988. Among his achievements, Irvis was elected Speaker of the House in 1977, the first African-American to hold that position in any state legislature in the United States since Reconstruction. The collection contains a wide variety of material, including correspondence, legislative material, interviews, photographs, publications, and campaign literature.

The Records of the NAACP Pittsburgh Branch consist of an extensive collection of correspondence, minutes, local headquarters activities, chapter records, membership campaigns, bills and receipts, reports, pamphlets and other miscellaneous information.

The personal material in this collection documents the time period when Robert J. Simonds worked for ALCOA (Pittsburgh, Pa.) in public relations and personnel. Simonds next worked for Kelchum, Inc., a fund-raising consultancy, where he spent the next 30 years before retiring as Executive Vice-President. He continues to work as a fund-raising consultant and is now associated with First Counsel, Inc. as president of the North Group and chairman of FCI International.

The records of the Urban League of Pittsburgh, founded in 1918, contain minutes, correspondence, department reports, photographs and Urban League Fellows theses from 1915-1963. The emphasis of the Urban League was on African-American employment and training; topics include federal housing projects, youth employment, worker discrimination and African-American welfare work. Digital reproductions of selected images are available online.

The papers of African American painter and educator Jacob Lawrence and artist Gwendolyn Knight in the Archives of American Art were digitized in 2007. The papers have been scanned in their entirety, and total 9,877 images.

Emilie Davis was an African-American woman living in Philadelphia during the U.S. Civil War. This website is a transcription of Emilie’s three pocket diaries for the years 1863, 1864, and 1865. In them, she recounts black Philadelphians’ celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, nervous excitement during the battle of Gettysburg, and their collective mourning of President Lincoln. The diary allows readers to experience the war in real time, as events unfolded for Civil War Americans.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. It was established by Act of Congress in 2003, following decades of efforts to promote and highlight the contributions of African Americans. To date, the Museum has collected more than 36,000 artifacts and nearly 100,000 individuals have become members. Follow this link to access their digital collections.

The documents in this collection describe one of the darkest episodes in American history. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 constituted two days of violence that left an unconfirmed number of dead citizens and destroyed 35 square blocks of the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood. The Tulsa Race Massacre has also been known as the “Tulsa Race Riot” and the “Greenwood Massacre.” This collection features documents and images from various Oklahoma state government agencies, such as the Governor’s office and the Attorney General’s office, regarding the investigation into the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. The collection includes eye-witness testimony, letters, telegrams, police reports, and court cases.

Recordings provided by the Pacifica Radio Archives on the Internet Archive.

The William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection (ca. 500 items) spans the years 1773 to 1987, with the bulk of the material dating from the Civil War period, 1861-1865. Most items document African Americans in military service, especially the United States Corps d'Afrique and the United States Colored Troops, which were organized during the Civil War. Also included are many documents concerning slavery and various other Civil War documents that mention African Americans. The Revolutionary War and World War I are also represented.