Africana Studies Databases: Africana Studies

"Provides a comprehensive view of the NAACP's evolution, policies, and achievements from 1909-1970. Included are minutes of directors' meetings, monthly reports from officers to the board of directors, proceedings of the annual business meetings, records of the association's annual conferences, plus special reports on the most important issues for the NAACP. The records of the annual conferences are excellent for studying the major concerns of the NAACP on a yearly basis."

"The NAACP branch files in this module chronicle the local heroes of the civil rights revolution via NAACP branches throughout the United States, from 1913-1972. The contributions of scores of local leaders—attorneys, community organizers, financial benefactors, students, mothers, schoolteachers, and other participants—are revealed. These files will allow students new opportunities to explore the contributions of NAACP local leaders. The Youth Department Files reveal the energy and talent of college students and other young people."

"The NAACP was involved in several subjects that did not rise to the level of major campaigns but were still vital to the organization. This module contains records on those subjects, revealing the wide scope of NAACP activism and interest. These files cover subjects such as civil rights complaints and legislation, the Klan, Birth of a Nation, the Walter White-W. E. B. Du Bois controversy of 1933-1934, communism and anticommunism, NAACP’s relations with African colonial liberation movements, the War on Poverty, and the Black Power Movement."

"Major campaigns for equal access to education, voting, employment, housing and the military are covered in this module. The education files document the NAACP's systematic assault on segregated education that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The voting rights files cover the NAACP's campaign against the white primary, discriminatory registration practices, the grandfather clause, and the triumphs of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

"This NAACP module consists of the working case files of the NAACP’s general counsel and his Legal Department staff for 1956 to 1972. The files document the NAACP’s aggressive campaign to bring about desegregation throughout the United States, particularly in the South. In total, this module contains over 600 cases from 34 states and the District of Columbia. The cases pertain to school desegregation, abuses of police procedure, employment discrimination, freedom of speech, privacy, freedom of association, and housing discrimination."

"This module focuses on NAACP's efforts to combat lynching, mob violence, discrimination in the criminal justice system, and white resistance to civil rights efforts. Other files cover segregation and discrimination complaints regarding public accommodations and recreational facilities. A particularly rich set of records in this module is the NAACP file on one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the 20th century--the case of the Scottsboro Boys. The NAACP's efforts to win passage of a federal law against lynching are also documented."

"makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980.

The launch of apartheid policies by the National Party in 1948 heralded 40 years of legally entrenched white dominance over South African politics, society and business. Punitive restrictions placed on travel, education, work and political activism instigated the formation of organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), saw support increase for the Communist Party and fuelled the growth of international anti-apartheid organisations.

These previously restricted letters, diplomatic dispatches, reports, trial papers, activists’ biographies and first-hand accounts of events give unprecedented access to the history of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The files explore the relationship of the international community with South Africa and chart increasing civil unrest against a backdrop of waning colonialism in Africa and mounting world condemnation."

"The Confidential Print series, issued by the British Government between c. 1820 and 1970, is a fundamental building block for political, social and economic research.

The series originated out of a need to preserve the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. These range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet and to heads of British missions abroad.

The documents in Confidential Print: Africa begin with coastal trading in the early nineteenth century and the Conference of Berlin of 1884 and the subsequent Scramble for Africa. They then follow the abuses of the Congo Free State, fights against tropical disease, Italy’s defeat by the Abyssinians, World War II, apartheid in South Africa and colonial moves towards independence. Together they cover the whole of the modern period of European colonisation of the continent from the British Government’s perspective."

"Founded by former slave John Henry Murphy, Sr. when he merged three church publications, The Baltimore Afro-American became one of the most widely circulated African-American newspapers on the Atlantic Coast. In addition to featuring the first black female reporter (Murphy’s daughter) and female sportswriters, the paper’s contributors have included writer Langston Hughes, intellectual J. Saunders Redding, artist Romare Bearden, and sports editor Sam Lacy, whose column influenced the desegregation of professional sports. Through the decades, the newspaper fought for equal employment rights, urged African-American participation in politics, and advocated state-funded higher education for blacks. In the 1930s, The Afro-American launched “The Clean Block” campaign, which is still in existence today, to clean up inner-city neighborhoods and fight crime. It stationed correspondents in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, providing first-hand reports to readers. In the 1950s, working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the newspaper’s efforts contributed to the outlawing of public school segregation."

"The Chicago Defender has been a leading voice of the black community well beyond the Windy City, with more than two-thirds of its readership outside Chicago. The newspaper was a proponent of The Great Migration, the move of over 1.5 million African Americans from the segregated South to the industrial North from 1915 to 1925. It reported on the Red Summer race riots of 1919 and editorialized for anti-lynching legislation and the integration of blacks into the U.S. military. This newspaper also supported the aviation career of Bessie Coleman, the first African American female pilot, and promoted the writing of Langston Hughes, a poet and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and Gwendolyn Brooks, poet laureate of Illinois."

"This digital edition of the American Antiquarian Society’s extraordinary holdings of slavery and abolition materials delivers more than 3,500 works published over the course of more than 100 years."

"comprehensively detail(s) 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 massive, international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings and publications of the activists themselves. The approximately 15,000 articles, documents, correspondence, proceedings, manuscripts, and literary works of almost 300 Black abolitionists show the full range of their activities in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Germany."

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is devoted to the study and understanding of the history of slavery in America and the rest of the world from the 17th century to the late 19th century. Archival collections were sourced from more than 60 libraries at institutions such as the Amistad Research Center, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Archives, Oberlin College, Oxford University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Yale University; these collections allow for unparalleled depth and breadth of content.

In its entirety, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive consists of more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries covering the history of the slave trade. The archive is not just valuable to researchers in African history, but the wider scope of African studies and African-American studies

"This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today."

"Slavery and the Law features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867. These petitions were collected by Loren Schweninger over a four year period from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The petitions document the realities of slavery at the most immediate local level and with amazing candor. Slavery and the Law also includes the important State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865."

Introduction to U.S. History: Slavery in America is a digital collection of over 600 documents in 75,000 pages selected by Vernon Burton and Troy Smith from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and drawn from the Sabin collection and other Gale sources. This project documents key aspects of the history of slavery in America from its origins in Africa to its abolition, including materials on the slave trade, plantation life, emancipation, pro-slavery and anti-slavery arguments, the religious views on slavery, etc.

In addition to contextual essays and highlighted documents regarding the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, the Secession, and the Fifteenth Amendment, this digital archive provides access to a wide variety of documents: personal narratives, pamphlets, addresses, political speeches, monographs, sermons, plays, songs, as well as poetic and fictional works published between the 17th and late 19th centuries.