Databases

The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) is an independent scholarly organization that aims to foster dialogue about researching, writing, and teaching black thought and culture. They support the research of scholars in the field through an array of fellowships, awards, and prizes, including the Pauli Murray Book Prize and the C.L.R. James Research Fellowships. They publish the popular blog Black Perspectives, the leading online platform for public scholarship on global Black thought, history, and culture.

The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) has long believed that one important step toward ending racism and injustice is a better understanding of our shared history. By providing [free] resources that give context for the Black experience in Oklahoma, we hope to spark civil discourse and open dialogue about the role of race in the history of our state. While these conversations about our past may not be comfortable, they are necessary to understand where we have been and how we can best move forward together. - Description from the OHS website.

ProQuest’s openly available Black Freedom Struggle website features 2,000 expertly selected primary source documents – historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more – from pivotal eras in African American history.

Published from 1987 to 1995, Black Sacred Music sought to establish theomusicology—a theologically informed musicology—as a distinct discipline, incorporating methods from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy to examine the full range of black sacred music. Topics included black secular music, the early days of rap, soul, jazz, civil rights songs, the religious music of Africa and the African diaspora, spirituals, gospel music, and the music of the black church.

The Black Theology Papers Project aims to preserve and promote the intellectual heritage of black theology. The journal publishes one annual issue featuring papers presented by the Black Theology Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

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. 

These original photographs document the involvement of Queens College students and other Northerners in the Civil Rights Movement of the early to mid-1960s, including Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Virginia Student Help Project, the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, and the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).

This online collection presents newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the African American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became one of the most famous orators, authors, and journalists of the 19th century.

The Frederick Douglass Newspapers collection contains more than 565 issues of three weekly newspaper titles, which have been digitally scanned from the Library of Congress collection of original paper issues and master negative microfilm.

The Equal Justice Initiative has created an interactive experience inspired by the original Lynching in America report. This project tells the story of racial terror in America and explores how its legacy continues to shape our nation today. The Lynching in America project includes audio stories from generations affected by lynching, an interactive map on the impact of lynching, and more.
 

1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Online Exhibit from the Museum of Tulsa History. The online exhibit includes photos, audio recordings, documents, and resources for further research.

The processed records of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund consist of approximately 80,000 items of which more than 90% (251,413 images) have been digitized and open for research use.

Spanning the years 1915-1968, with most dating from 1940 to 1960, these records document the work and procedures of the organization as it combated racial discrimination in the nation’s courts, establishing in the process a public interest legal practice that was unprecedented in American jurisprudence. The organization’s records cover a host of topics, including segregation in schools, on buses, and in public facilities; discrimination in housing and property ownership; voting rights; police brutality; racial violence; and countless other infringements of civil rights.

The Solomon Sir Jones films consist of 29 silent black and white films documenting African-American communities in Oklahoma from 1924 to 1928. Tulsa footage can be found in at least five of the films (film two, film eighteen, film twenty, film twenty-seven, and film twenty-eight) and includes several shots of the Greenwood area.

Online collection of photographs related to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Curated by I. Marc Carlson, the former Librarian of Special Collections at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library.

Umbra Search brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country to make African American history more broadly accessible.

Umbra Search celebrates the vital efforts of the individuals and institutions that have helped to preserve and make accessible online hundreds of thousands of pieces of African American history and culture, and pays homage to the Umbra Society of the early 1960s, a renegade group of Black writers and poets who helped create the Black Arts Movement.

The Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves, today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA, Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage.