Library Black Studies 431 / HIST 455

• Reference Universe
  Searchable index of the library's entire reference collection, both print and electronic.
• Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History
  Articles surveying all aspects of the black diaspora; strongest on U.S.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the present
  Essays on all aspects of recent African American history: people, events, places, etc.

• America, History & Life (1964 to present)
  Covers the world's scholarly literature on the history and culture of the United States and Canada.
• JSTOR
  Full-text backfiles of over two thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. (Alumni access)
• Project Muse
  Online database of more than 200 journals from nonprofit publishers. (Alumni access)
• Discover: Start here for books, articles & more
  Simultaneously search research databases plus the Five Colleges Libraries Catalog to find full-text articles, books and more.

• African American Newspapers (Readex) (1827-1998)
  Provides access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers from more than 35 states and chronicles a century and a half of the African American experience.
• America's Historical Newspapers (1690-1980)
  Searchable archive of American newspapers including Early American Newspapers (1690-1922) and Hispanic American Newspapers (1808-1980).
• Congressional Publications
  Index to U.S. congressional material, some full text.
• Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
  Combined search of the historic Boston Globe, Chicago Defender, Chinese Newspapers Collection, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, New York Amsterdam News, New York Times, South China Morning Post, Times of India, and Washington Post.
• Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974
  Resource brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.
• Women's Magazine Archive
  A searchable archive of leading women's interest magazines, dating from the 19th century through to the 21st.
• National Museum of African American History & Culture
  The recently opened Museum now owns close to 37,000 objects, many of which have been digitized and can be found in their online collections.

Print collections

As explained on the Primary Source Research Guide, you can use the 5 Colleges Catalog or WorldCat to identify collections of primary source material. Common Subject Keywords include:

African Americans    Civil Rights    20th Century    Sources

You might also go to the Advanced Search and start with keywords related to your topic in one search box, and narrow down your search to primary source material by copying and pasting the following into another search box (just make sure the AND option is selected in the drop-down menu between search boxes). "archival resources" or archives or correspondence or diaries or interviews or notebooks or sketchbooks or "personal narratives" or photographs or sources or speeches 

• Civil Rights History Project (Library of Congress)
  The activists interviewed for this project belong to a wide range of occupations, including lawyers, judges, doctors, farmers, journalists, professors, and musicians, among others. The video recordings of their recollections cover a wide variety of topics within the civil rights movement, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists.
• Civil Rights Digital Library (Digital Library of Georgia)
  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.
• FBI Records Vault: Civil Rights
  The Vault is the FBI's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Library, containing 6,700 documents and other media that have been scanned from paper into digital copies
• Farmworker Movement Documentation Project (UC San Diego Library)
  Includes photographs, oral histories, videos, essays and historical documents from the United Farm Worker Delano Grape Strikers and the UFW Volunteers who worked with Cesar Chavez to build his farmworker movement. See also the Jerry Cohen (AC 1963) Papers: http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/amherst/ma179_main.html
• Freedom Summer Project (Wisconsin Historical Society)
  The Wisconsin Historical Society owns one of the nation's richest collections documenting the Civil Rights movement, and over 40,000 documents are available online, including official records of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the personal papers of movement leaders, and much more.
• The King Center Digital Archive
  The King Center Imaging Project brings the works and papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to a digital generation. The collection is dynamic, so more documents are being regularly added.
• KZSU Project South Interviews (Stanford University Collections)
  This collection contains transcripts and audio recordings of meetings and interviews with Civil Rights workers in the South recorded by several Stanford students affiliated with the campus radio station KZSU during the summer of 1965.
• Liberator Magazine
  Liberator was a monthly magazine published from 1961 to 1971. The masthead declared it to be “The voice of the Afro-American protest movement in the United States and the liberation movement of Africa”.
• Rosa Parks Papers (Library of Congress)
  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, as well as 2,500 photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division, documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.
• Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement (American Archive of Public Broadcasting)
  "Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement" presents educational and noncommercial radio programs from the 1950s and 1960s that offer historic testimonies – in interviews, speeches, and on-the-spot news reports – from many movement participants, both well-known and unknown.