African American History & Culture

Topic Location Louis Stokes Wing 6th Floor, Center for Local & Global History 525 Superior Ave, 44114

Louis Stokes Wing

6th Floor, Center for Local & Global History

525 Superior Ave, 44114

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African American History & Culture Databases

Unless specified, the following resources are available to all in Ohio or have a library card from any public library in Ohio.

Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress

CPL Cardholders only

Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress

This collection comprises the Legal Case and Communist Party files of the Civil Rights Congress, documenting the many issues and litigation in which the CRC was involved during its 10-year existence. These papers provide valuable insight on the activities of the Civil Rights Congress, most notably in cases involving civil rights and civil liberties issues, […]

HistoryMakers Digital Archive

CPL Cardholders only

HistoryMakers Digital Archive

Unique scholarly and educational resources for exploring African American history and culture. Large and varied scope, with interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present. Rather than focus on one particular part of a person’s life or a single subject, such as […]

James Meredith, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Integration of the University of Mississippi

CPL Cardholders only

James Meredith, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Integration of the University of Mississippi

When James Meredith sought to legally become the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, the duty of upholding the federal law allowing him to do so fell upon the Justice Department and the FBI. Meredith launched a legal revolt against white supremacy in the most segregated state in America and the iconic […]

Liberation Movement in Africa and African America

CPL Cardholders only

Liberation Movement in Africa and African America

Militant Black nationalism and pan-Africanism influenced and paralleled African America’s interest in Africa. Africa’s entrance into the international arena and American Cold War politics helped fuel the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The Black Liberation Movement supported and extended the influence of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) […]

Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement

CPL Cardholders only

Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement

The collection consists of materials from the years 1913 through 1998 that document African American author and activist Amiri Baraka. The extensive documentation includes poetry, organizational records, print publications, articles, plays, speeches, personal correspondence, oral histories, as well as some personal records. The materials cover Baraka’s involvement in the politics in Newark, N.J. and in […]

Proquest Black Studies

CPL Cardholders only

Proquest Black Studies

ProQuest’s Black Studies brings together content into one destination for research, teaching, and learning purposes. This database combines primary and secondary sources, including leading historical Black newspapers, archival documents and collections, key government materials, videos, writings by major Black intellectuals and leaders, scholarly journals, and essays by top scholars in Black Studies. This database includes […]

Republic of New Afrika: Independence, Reparations, and Citizenship

CPL Cardholders only

Republic of New Afrika: Independence, Reparations, and Citizenship

The Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was a social movement organization that proposed three objectives. First of these objectives was the creation of an independent Black-majority country composed of the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina and the Black-majority counties adjacent to this area in Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida. Second, they demanded […]

Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive

CPL Cardholders only

Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive

A unique achievement in the field of historic archives, this resource consists of millions of cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts and maps from many different countries documenting the African slave trade. Content is divided into these broad categories: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, Slave Trade in […]

Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Communist Party

CPL Cardholders only

Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Communist Party

This collection contains the correspondence of both Esther Cooper and James E. Jackson, James Jackson’s lectures, research notebooks, speeches, and writings (published and unpublished), subject files, correspondence, internal documents and printed ephemera pertaining to the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the periodical Freedomways. James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson, African American communists and civil […]

We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961

CPL Cardholders only

We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961

To test President John F. Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) proposed a Journey of Reconciliation. The “Freedom Ride” had an interracial group boarding buses destined for the South. At rest stops, whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. “I think all of us were prepared for as […]

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