Primary Sources (African American History): Primary source websites

Digital collections and presentations from the Library of Congress

All 103 issues of Freedom's journal, an African-American New York newspaper printed from March 1827 to March 1829, is available online in PDF form thanks to the efforts of the Wisconson Historical Society.

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews.

Crossroads to Freedom connects the world with Memphis history through an archive of documents, newspapers, images and oral histories. Special focus on Civil Rights movements of the 1950's-70's.

A mapping project based on statistics taken from various New York archives. Digital Harlem forms one part of a collaborative research project on everyday life in Harlem between 1915 and 1930. Created by researchers at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia.

Access digital collections from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

3,000 FBI documents available for public viewing online through the Freedom of Information Act. Includes a Civil Rights section, and files onfamous historical figures.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865. The Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine.

Drawing upon the rich resources of the National Archives of the United States, the editors of this project explain how black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867. Supported by the University of Maryland.

Search through approximately 500 historical photographic portraits including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and cabinet card photographs. Digitized courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. A project by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and University of Virginia.

Digital Collections preserved and made availalble by the US Library of Congress

The images in Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. Our growing collection currently has over 1,200 images. This website is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public.