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HIST 162 Movement for Black Lives -- Professor Crosby: Research Tools

African American Magazines

Resources through The New York Public Library

These online resources are accessible to anyone with a  New York Public Library card, which is available to anyone with a New York State address.

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century. This full text database includes nine rare African American newspapers from the 1800s. In this database you can read Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States, as well as Provincial Freeman, a newspaper founded in Canada for African Americans who escaped slavery or chose to leave the United States.

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998. This database includes over 270 newspapers from 35 states, including titles such as Alaska Spotlight and Afro-Hawaii News.

ProQuest African American Historical Newspapers. Explore African American historical newspapers from major cities from 1912 to 2005 including the New York Amsterdam News and the Chicago Defender.

Independent Voices. This database includes independent magazines and journals from the later half of the 20th century, with strong coverage of the Black Power movement and the post-Vietnam era.

Essence Magazine in the Women's Magazine Archive. Read the first issues of Essence magazine and their coverage of film, literature, politics and culture, from 1970-2005.

African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress, 1933-1947. This database includes digitized archives and manuscripts from the National Negro Congress, an organization established in 1936 to "secure the right of the Negro people to be free from Jim Crowism, segregation, discrimination, lynching, and mob violence" and "to promote the spirit of unity and cooperation between Negro and white people." This digitital archive includes over 98,600 images.

African American Experience. This full-text digital resource explores the history and culture of African Americans, as well as the greater Black Diaspora. This database is a great resource for middle school, high school, and undergraduate researchers.

Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress. This archive, from NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, documents the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) which was established in 1946.

NAACP Papers. This fully-searchable database of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s archives contains nearly two million pages of internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices.

ProQuest Civil War Era (1840-1865). This database includes more than 2,000 pamphlets and eight newspaper titles for the years 1840-1865, covering a vast range of Civil War Era research topics reflecting points of view of Northern, Southern, and Border States.

Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law. This database brings together all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world, as well as materials on free African-Americans in the colonies and the U.S. before 1870. Included are every statute passed by every state and colony, all federal statutes, all reported state and federal cases on slavery, and hundreds of books and pamphlets on the subject.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive.  A historical archive of several million cross-searchable pages of books, serials, supreme court records and briefs, and key manuscript collections from the United States, Great Britain, and France concerning debates of slavery and abolition, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Institution of Slavery, and the Age of Emancipation.

African American Historical Serials Collection. This database documents the history of African American life and religious organizations from materials published between 1829 and 1922.  The archive includes 170 titles from 75 different institutions.

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995. This database includes over 170 periodicals, published in 26 states, by and about African Americans, such as academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, and annual reports. 

Black Studies Center.This fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies includes scholarly essays, periodical literature, historical newspaper articles, reference books, dissertations and more.

Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience.  This resource, developed in cooperation with NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, provides an encyclopedic treatment of the formation and development of Black Studies. This database provides a core collection of primary and secondary resources in Black Studies, including full-text articles, book chapters, dissertations, reference materials, timelines, images and multimedia.

LGBT Life with Full Text. This database provides complete indexing and abstracting of content related to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies in over 230 journals, magazines, and newspapers. Users can access publications such as In Life: A Black Gay Anthology and Fighting Words: Personal Essays by Black Gay Men. 

Archives of Sexuality and Gender. This online archive contains 18 digitized archival collections exploring LGBTQ history and culture since 1940. Patrons can access independent LGBTQ publications such as, the Black Lesbian Newsletter and the National Coalition of Black Gays.

The New York Public Library provides more than 500 online research options, many accessible from home with a library card, we challenge you to go beyond the search engine and dig deeper online with NYPL. 

Research Databases

Some of these databases have scholarly articles (secondary sources), while others have news articles that can be used as primary sources or secondary sources, depending on what you are researching.

To find books (both primary sources and secondary sources), use these research databases.

Selected Books from Milne's Collection

* A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, edited by Herbert Aptheker This is a seven volume set; volumes 2 through 7 will be useful for this class. The topics are:

Volume 2 From the Reconstruction Era to 1910
Volume 3 From the Emergence of the N.A.A.C.P. to the Beginning of the New Deal
Volume 4 From the New Deal to the End of World War II (1933-1945)
Volume 5 From the End of the Second World War to the Korean War
Volume 6 From the Korean War to the Emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Volume 7 From the Alabama Protests to the Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Upper Level E185 .A58

* Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1991. Upper Level. E185.96 .B35 1991

* We Ain't What We Ought to be: The Black Freedom Struggle, From Emancipation to Obama, by Stephen Tuck. 2010. Milne 4 Hour Reserves  E185 .T797 2010

Bracey, John H., Jr, ed. Black nationalism in America.

Broderick, Francis L. and August Meier, eds. Negro protest thought in the twentieth century.

Federal enforcement of school desegregation

Equal Opportunity in Suburbia. Uncatologed government document.

Decade of School Segregation.

Civil Rights USA: public schools, southern states.

Foner, Philip S., ed.Voice of Black America; major speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797-1971.

Grant, Joanne, ed.Black protest: history, documents, and analyses, 1619 to the present.

Levy, Peter B., ed. Let freedom ring: a documentary history of the modern civil rights movement.

School desegregation: the courts and suburban migration.

Statement on metropolitan school desegregation.

Title V1 and school desegregation.

United States Commission on Civil Rights. Police and the Blacks; U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings.

United States Commission on Civil Rights. Racial Isolation in the Public Schools.