research topics about african american history

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Black History

Civil Rights Movement Timeline

The civil rights movement was an organized effort by black Americans to end racial discrimination and gain equal rights under the law. It began in the late 1940s and ended in the late 1960s.

Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Black History Month

February is dedicated as Black History Month, honoring the triumphs and struggles of African Americans throughout U.S. history.

Black History Milestones: Timeline

Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement.

Coretta Scott King

After her husband became pastor, Coretta Scott King joined the choir at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. Hear two of her friends and members of the congregation remember Mrs. King’s legacy and her voice.

When Segregationists Bombed Martin Luther King Jr.’s House

On January 30, 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.’s house was bombed by segregationists in retaliation for the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously strikes down segregation in public schools, sparking the Civil Rights movement.

How the Montgomery Bus Boycott Accelerated the Civil Rights Movement

For 382 days, almost the entire African‑American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses, a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

The Black Explorer Who May Have Reached the North Pole First

In 1909 African American Matthew Henson trekked with explorer Robert Peary, reaching what they claimed was the North Pole. Who got there first?

How Madam C.J. Walker Became a Self‑Made Millionaire

Despite Jim Crow oppression, Walker founded her own haircare company that helped thousands of African American women gain financial independence.

8 Black Inventors Who Made Daily Life Easier

Black innovators changed the way we live through their many innovations, from the traffic light to the ironing board.

Harlem Renaissance: Photos From the African American Cultural Explosion

From jazz and blues to poetry and prose to dance and theater, the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century was electric with creative expression by African American artists.

This Day in History

Pioneering Black doctor performs successful open‑heart surgery

Frederick douglass delivers his “what to the slave is the fourth of july” speech, fdr signs order banning discrimination in the defense industry, martha jones becomes first black woman to receive a u.s. patent, martin luther king jr. writes “letter from a birmingham jail”, misty copeland becomes american ballet theater’s first black principal dancer.

African American Studies

• African American Studies Overview

Topics in African American Studies

History & culture, civil war and slavery, civil rights, organizations.

• Find Articles at Lavery Library

Reference Librarian

The boxes below bring together numerous websites that provide information about specific topics in African American Studies. 

Topics include:

• Civil War & Slavery
• African American Leaders
• African American Organizations

Library Collections (outside Fisher)

• African-American Odyssey Freely accessible and searchable collections of documents and ephemera related to African Americans in the United States from the 17th century to present. Created and maintained by the Library of Congress.
• Black American Feminisms A multi-disciplinary bibliography of Black American Feminist thought across many academic fields.
• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture From the website: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.

News and Media Organizations

• The 1619 Project From the website: The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. For full access to the New York Times, follow these instructions.
• Africans In America PBS overview of African American history includes excerpts from primary sources.

Collections Curated by Organizations

• African American Mosaic A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture.
• African Diaspora Music Project From the About page: To create a repository for the concert works (those intended for the concert stage; aka classical works) of composers of the African Diaspora. (The African Diaspora in this context is defined as those composers throughout the world descended from people of West and Central Africa).
• Black Past This site includes an online encyclopedia of hundreds of famous and lesser-known figures in African America, full-text primary documents and major speeches of black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present.
• Facing History and Ourselves By studying the historical development of race in US history, the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. Excellent resources for teachers and student teachers.
• Tangled Roots This project produced by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition is a collection of primary documents from the 17th century to the present "about the shared history of African Americans and Irish Americans." Also see the Center's archive of more than 200 digitized items dealing with African American history.

Colleges and Universities

• Documenting Slave Voyages From the website: Led by Emory, a massive digital memorial shines new light on one of the most harrowing chapters of human history.
• The Geography of Slavery in Virginia "The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers."
• Making of America: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies From the website: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, part of Cornell Universities Making of America collection
• North American Slave Narratives A collection of "approximately two hundred texts, including all known narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before 1920."
• The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies From the website: Official records of the Union and Confederate armies, part of Cornell Universities Making of America collection

Library of Congress

• Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in America: A Visual Record Hundreds of images depicting slavery and the slave trade, includes maps, illustrations and photographs.
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938 A Library of Congress collection of more than 2,300 first person accounts of slavery plus 500 photographs. Some audio narratives are included as well.

State and Local Histories

• African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts This Massachusetts Historical Society exhibit features 117 documents including letters, warrants, bills of sale and antislavery material.
• Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts A Massachusetts Historical Society collection of 840 visual materials from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society that illustrate the role of Massachusetts in the national debate over slavery. Included are photographs, paintings, sculptures, engravings, artifacts, banners, and broadsides that were central to the debate and the formation of the antislavery movement.

Curated Collections

• Slavery Images From the website: A visual record of the African Slave Trade and slave life in the early African Diaspora.
• SlaveVoyages From the website: This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them.
• Valley of the Shadow A digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.

Museums and Digital Collections

• Civil Rights Digital Library From the website: The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. more... less... Documents the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s through a digital video archive of historical news film, extensive links to related digital collections, and secondary Web-based learning resources such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities.
• The Civil Rights Movement History Channel website includes chronologies, film clips, photos.
• Freedom Now Collection of documents and photographs illustrating the history of the Mississippi Freedom Movement. The site is a collaborative project of Brown University and Tougaloo College.
• Historical Publications of the United States Civil Rights Commission U.S. Commission on Civil Rights - Historical Publications.
• Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia Museum at Ferris State University provides images of racist objects, images and cartoons along with essays.
• Who Speaks for the Negro? From the website: materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. The original materials are held at the University of Kentucky and Yale University Libraries.

Oral Histories

• Oral Histories of the American South - Civil Rights Collection of oral histories from a number of Southern oral history programs.
• Oral History of the March on Washington Available from the Smithsonian Magazine, from the website: Americans who marched on Washington 50 years ago under a blazing sun recall the day they were part of a turning point in history.
• "Born in the Wake of Freedom:" John Mitchell, Jr., and the Richmond Planet The history of the oldest African American newspaper and it's most famous editor. An exhibit created by the Virginia Newspaper Project.
• The Frederick Douglass Papers The first release of this Library of Congress collection contains over 2000 items and "contains the writings of Douglass and such contemporaries in the abolitionist and early women's rights movements as Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, and others."
• Malcolm X: A Research Site This web page is designed to be a resource for scholarship in Black Studies and the political development of activists in the Black Liberation Movement.
• Martin Luther King Jr. Project Project sponsored by Stanford University and the MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Includes a brief, selected documents, and a searchable database of transcriptions of MLK papers and secondary works.
• UCLA African Studies Center (Marcus Garvey UNIA Papers Project) Web site accompanying the publication of Garvey's papers, includes sample documents, narrative and some photographs.
• W.E.B. Dubois Papers at University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a biography, exhibits, photographs and selected books and articles by W.E.B. Du Bois.
• The Association for the Study of African American Life and History The mission of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) is to promote, research, preserve, interpret and disseminate information about Black life, history and culture to the global community.
• Association of Black Women Historians From the website: The ABWH constitution outlines four organizational goals: to establish a network among the membership; to promote Black women in the profession; to disseminate information about opportunities in the field; and to make suggestions concerning research topics and repositories.
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.
• National Association of African American Studies Information and support for research related to the African and African American, Hispanic, Latino(a) and Chicano(a), Native American and Asian experiences.
• National Council for Black Studies From the website: The National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) was established in 1975, when African American scholars came together to formalize the study of the African World experience, as well as expand and strengthen academic units and community programs devoted to this endeavor.
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• Last Updated: Sep 11, 2024 4:27 PM
• URL: https://libguides.sjf.edu/afam