African American Literature

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.

There are many excellent collections here, including:

• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project


• Civil Rights History Project


• Frederick Douglass Newspapers, 1847-1874


• Frederick Douglass Papers at LoC


• LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive


• Rosa Parks Papers


• Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860


• Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories


• Zine Web Archive


• Zora Neale Hurston Plays at LoC

In the late 1930s, the WPA conducted interviews with formerly enslaved individuals. This site provides transcripts and an annotated index.

Text and audio works by black abolitionists.

Hosts transcribe-a-thons for Douglass's works and hosts transcripts.

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life.
The actual primary sources underlying this project can be found on the Digital Records page.

Unlike most studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, this project focuses not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers. It does so primarily by systematically exploring a sample of legal records and black newspapers.

Digital collections from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the NYPL. Includes many fantastic collections, including:

• Black New Yorkers


• Revisiting Rebellion: Nat Turner in the American Imagination


• Black Power! The Movement, The Legacy


• Ready for the Revolution: Education, Arts, and Aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement


• Emmett Till Project


• Abolition of the Slave Trade: The Forgotten Story


• Harlem, 1900-1940


• In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience


• Malcolm X: A Search for Truth

It looks old fashioned, but this list of guides to the LoC collections is really helpful for navigating the wealth of materials they have online.

The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 5000 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1865.

Documents the civil rights work by Queens College students in the 1960s.

Interactive collection based on archival materials on the slave trade, including maps, timelines, and more.

Digital collection of children's literature and associated artifacts dealing with race and childhood.

While this site is aimed at k-12, it has good background information and quality reproductions of works of art related to the Civil Rights Movement, Race in America, the Harlem Renaissance, and more.