Digital Archives

Listed below are major digitized archival holdings in African American history. Click on the name of the archive and you will be taken to the opening page of the collection. The archives are grouped by state.

United States/International

• African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. The Library of Congress
• African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
• Black History at Harper’s Weekly, 1857-1874
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers’ Project, Library of Congress
• A Digital Collection Celebrating the Founding of the Historically Black College and University
• Freedom Lawsuits: Enslaved People Challenging their Status in Court in the St. Louis Missouri Area, 1814 to 1850
• From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909
• Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860, Library of Congress
• The African American Mosaic, Library of Congress
• The Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress
• The Freedmen’s Bureau Online
• The History of Jim Crow
• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• Visualizing Abolition: Documents Related to the Abolition of Slavery in the Western Hemisphere
• Voices of Civil Rights

California:

• The California Underground Railroad, California State University, Sacramento
• The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project
• The Martin Luther King Project, Stanford University

Connecticut:

• Tangled Roots: A Project Exploring the Histories of Americans of Irish Heritage and Americans of African Heritage

District of Columbia

• Avoice: The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Virtual Library Project
• Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

Georgia:

• Civil Rights Digital Library
• Papers of the American Slave Trade: Part 1, Port of Savannah Slave Manifests, 1790-1860

Indiana:

• The Archives of African American Music and Culture, Indiana University
• The Frederick Douglas Papers, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis

Illinois:

• The Booker T. Washington Papers, University of Illinois Library

Kentucky:

• Notable Kentucky African Americans Database

Louisiana:

• Louisiana Slave Database and Louisiana Free Database, 1719-1820

Massachusetts:

• The Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois

Michigan:

• Brown v. Board of Education Digital Archive, University of Michigan Library
• University of Detroit Mercy Black Abolitionist Archives

Minnesota:

• The Duluth Lynchings Online Resource

Mississippi:

• Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archives, University of Southern Mississippi Archives
• Freedom Now: An Archival Project of Tougaloo College and Brown University

Missouri:

• Black Archives of Mid-America
• Desegregation of the Armed Forces, The Truman Presidential Library & Museum
• Freedom Lawsuits: Enslaved People Challenging their Status in Court in the St. Louis Missouri Area, 1814 to 1850
• The Amistad Trials of 1839-1840, University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law
• The Dred Scott Case, Washington University Libraries
• The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1937
• Visualizing Abolition: Documents Related to the Abolition of Slavery in the Western Hemisphere

New Jersey:

• The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences

New York:

• African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
• Harlem History
• Powerful Days in Black and White: The Photographs of Charles Moore
• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, Cornell University
• The African-American Migration Experience, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

North Carolina:

• 1898 Wilmington Race Riot, Final Report, 31 May 2006
• African-American Women: On-line Archival Collections
• Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies
• North American Slave Narratives
• Plantation America: The Work of Slaves, Duke University Library
• The Church in the Southern Black Community
• The Digital Library on American Slavery
• The John Hope Franklin Collection on African American History, Duke University Library

Pennsylvania:

• Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project

Ohio:

• The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920

Virginia:

• American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
• Born in the Wake of Freedom: John Mitchell, Jr., and the Richmond Planet
• Race and Place: An African-American Community in the Jim Crow South, Charlottesville, Va., University of Virginia Library
• The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
• Virginia Runaways

Washington:

• Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington

Wisconsin:

• African American Newspapers and Periodicals: Freedom’s Journal
• Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries