History - African American Experience

This website contains approximately 1,600 primary source documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom:
1. Resistance to Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860)
2. The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877)
3. Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932)
4. The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945)
5. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975)
6. The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)

Explore 15 separate collections of primary source documents, photographs, and sound recordings documenting the African American experience from slavery through the civil rights era.

Discover thousands of artworks, artifacts and stories from cultural organizations across the United States.

BlackPast.org, an online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 4,000 entries, the complete transcript of more than 300 speeches by African Americans, other people of African ancestry, and those concerned about race, given between 1789 and 2016, over 140 full text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and six gateway pages with links to digital archive collections, African and African American museums and research centers, genealogical research websites, and more than 200 other website resources on African American and global African history. Additionally, 100 major African American museums and research centers and over 400 other website resources on black history are also linked to the website, as are nine bibliographies listing more than 5,000 major books categorized by author, title, subject, and date of publication.

In Motion presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. With 16,000 pages of text, 8,300 illustrations, numerous maps, and lesson plans, this exhibition documents 400 years of migration to, within and out of the United States.

Mapping Inequality offers unprecedented online access to the national collection of "security maps" and area descriptions produced between 1935 and 1940 by one of the New Deal's most important agencies, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation or HOLC (pronounced "holk"). This interactive map illuminates the racism and discrimination that has shaped American housing policy.

Users worldwide can find exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora

The Voyages Database contains records of nearly 35,000 separate slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866, gleaned from original documents and historical publications located in archives, libraries, and other institutions throughout the world. Each record in the Voyages Database offers information on a single slaving voyage; some of the details include the country of origin, the individual(s) who sponsored it, the voyage itself (its itinerary, dates of travel, and outcome), captains and crew members, slaves transported, and the sources providing this voyage information.

In interviews recorded between 1932 and 1975, twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom.