A companion to Ken Burns's film of the same name, Unforgivable Blackness provides an extensive look into issues surrounding race relations, sports, and definitions of freedom during the Progressive Era. In the documentary, Burns delves into the life of Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavy Weight Champion of the World. Johnson is explored as a man unapologetic for his strength, dominance, and defiance of society’s "rules."

This well-designed website has appeal for those teaching a variety of subject matter and content at the high school level. Background information is plentiful for those unfamiliar with early 20th-century boxing history, and sections are written at an appropriate Lexile level for high school use. Fight of the Century includes an interactive link filled with photographs, music, newspaper excerpts, political cartoons, and six audio clips (Flash Player required). Discussions of political cartoons and the depictions of African Americans during the early 1900s may be necessary before viewing Fight of the Century with students. Primary sources are plentiful throughout, including full text of the Mann Act, as well as Johnson’s FBI files.

Ghost in the House and Sparring provide information concerning four of Johnson’s contemporaries, including boxers Joe Louis and Sam Langford. Knockout also details Johnson's dalliances with a number of white women, which led to his conviction under the Mann Act. While important to the overall discussion of race relations, this section and coinciding discussions should only occur with more mature high school groups. An additional section, For Teachers, includes 10 lesson plans that may be used in a range of classroom settings—from math and civics, to history and sociology. Lesson plans are well thought out and descriptive, yet still leave room for open dialogue and connections with relatable current events. The website was last updated in 2005, which has resulted in a lost connection with three of the eight website links listed under the Resources section.

Overall, this website provides an in-depth and user-friendly overview for those interested in connecting issues of race relations and the Progressive Era into their classrooms.

This site is dedicated to the study of the life and legacy of Malcolm X. Only one of three "initiatives" is publicly available (Columbia faculty, staff, and students may also access the site's "multi-media study environment" section). "Oral histories," "outreach," and "Malcolm X biography project" are under construction. A chronology traces Malcolm's life from his birth in May 1925 to his assassination in February 1965, with short entries on major events. "Government Documents" offers FBI files on Malcolm X—4,000 pages of surveillance reports—covering the period 1954 to 1964. A brief summary accompanies each report and the files can be searched by keyword. The site's project journal, focusing on particular themes and issues, has seven articles on Malcolm X and eight weblog postings. Additionally, the site offers an e-seminar "Life after Death: Malcolm X and American Culture" by Columbia professor Dr. Manning Marble for a fee (available free to Columbia faculty, staff, and students). When this site is completed, it will be a good starting point for researching the ideas and life of Malcolm X.

In the early 20th century, Macon, Georgia's Douglass Theater was one of Georgia's primary entertainment venues for blacks outside of Atlanta. Over the course of its more than 60-year history, the theater featured famous vaudeville acts, singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, boxing matches, as well as both silent and talking films. This website features 100 documents from the files of the theater's owner, Charles Henry Douglass, a prominent black businessman in Macon. Letters, financial statements, contracts, theater newsletters, and advertisements shed light not only on events and business transactions at the Douglass Theater, but on the wider business community supporting African American theaters in the South. A good place to begin is the "Introduction to the Douglass Theater in Macon," a detailed background essay with links to a variety of documents from the collection, including account book pages detailing one week's profits in 1923, and a series of letters exchanged between the theater's temporary manager in the late 1920s and his brother documenting the challenges of the theater business. The materials are transcribed and annotated, and browseable by author, date, type, subject, and title.

This website covers a topic that often goes overlooked—that slavery spread as far north as Canada.

Resources include portions of a slave autobiography; slave narratives; Underground Railroad stories and songs; articles from abolitionist newspapers; short timelines (1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1899, and 1900-present); more than 60 biographies of slaves; 10 images, including maps, photographs, artworks, and newspaper scans; radio and documentary links; and a collection of web links relevant to the topic. The included glossary and chapter quizzes are not currently working.

However, the site could prove useful for locating primary sources which attest to the geographical breadth of slavery in North America.

Laurel Grove is a one-room school house in Northern Virginia. In the 1990s, a community team successfully blocked a developer's bulldozer, formed the Laurel Grove School Association, and restored the one room schoolhouse. An interdisciplinary team of community members, curriculum experts, teachers, historians, and museum curators recovered the history of the school from oral histories and local archives, refurbished the classroom, and crafted a history curriculum to teach slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and life under Jim Crow. Today the school is a museum along the African-American heritage trail.

Six lesson plans (scaffolded for K-12) focus on understanding racial issues in Virginia from 1800 through the 1930s, on working with primary sources, and with an emphasis on critical thinking skills. Essays fill in the historical background including Slavery and Free Negroes, 1800-1860, A Look at Virginians During Reconstruction, The Impact of the Jim Crow Era on Education, and A Child's Life in a Segregated Society. Lesson plans are geared to standards and exemplify exploration of local resources to teach American history.

The Laurel Grove website is a work-in-progress, building on the open-source Omeka web-publishing platform especially for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and history enthusiasts developed through George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.

This extensive companion to the PBS documentary of the same name provides interpretive and primary material on the history of African-Americans during slavery and Reconstruction, including essays, personal narratives, original documents, historical readings, and lesson plans. The "Time and Place" chronology of slavery and Reconstruction places the main events of U.S. history relating to African Americans between 1619 and 1881 in their historical context. "Slave Memories" allows visitors to hear the voices of African Americans recorded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) on their experiences in slavery and Reconstruction. "Resources" includes 17 print resources, 23 books for children, and 30 websites related to slavery. "Slave Experience" allows users to explore slave life through the themes of legal rights and government; family; men, women, and gender; living conditions; education, arts, and culture; religion; responses to enslavement; and freedom and emancipation. Each features essays, historical overviews, original documents, and personal narratives.

A K-12 learning section features historical readings of narratives, slave stories and letters, student plays, links to 19 sites with primary sources, and six lesson plans for middle and high school. This website is a valuable resource for teachers as well as an excellent introduction and overview for those with an interest in the history of slavery and slave life in America.

In 1968, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense established a chapter in Seattle, one of the first outside of California. This website, devoted to portraying the history and collecting the memories of that chapter, is "the most extensive online collection of materials" for any Black Panther Party chapter. It includes 13 oral histories and brief biographies of key Black Panther Party members, 53 photographs documenting Black Panther events in the late 1960s, more than 100 news stories covering Party activities from 1968 to 1981 (four years after the Party was dissolved), testimony and exhibits from the 1970 Congressional Hearings investigating the Party, and all five issues of the Seattle Black Panther Party "Bulletin." A "Slide Show" highlighting some of these materials is a good place to begin for those unfamiliar with Black Panther Party history.

This website is part of the larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which provides extensive materials that can serve as historical context, such as a guide to civil rights groups from the 1910s to the 1970s, 14 2,000-word essays on the ethnic press in Seattle, 13 other "Special Sections" on topics such as segregation in Seattle, and 37 in-depth essays on historical topics such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In addition, a "For Teachers" section provides eight lesson plans using the website's material for middle and high school students.

(Note: This website is now subscription-only.)

Designed for students, scholars, and librarians, this site provides access to thousands of primary source documents, maps, images, bibliographic entries, and subject entries drawn from reference resources in African American studies. Six published volumes furnish the majority of the resources: the Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895; Black Women in America, Second Edition; Africana, a five-volume history of the African and African American experience; the African American National Biography project, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; the Encyclopedia of African American Art and Architecture; and the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

These sources present a wealth of primary source documents, more than 1,000 images, and close to 100 maps, which illustrate events from 1500s South America through the Clinton Presidency. The site also includes more than 5,000 biographies and 3,000 subject entries on events and people, such as 19th-century African American midwives in the Western United States, prominent abolitionists, and charts on African American professional baseball. Useful for research, reference, and class projects on all aspects of African American history.

A collection of 104 sound recordings from annual folk festivals held at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), an African-American teaching college in central Georgia. Also provides 63 items of written documentation about the festival and the recording project, including recording logs, program notes, a student newsletter about the festival, and correspondence between the festival's co-founders, educators John Wesley Work III, Lewis Wade Jones, and Willis Laurence James, and noted folklorists Benjamin A. Bodkin and Alan Lomax, who represented the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song. Includes biographies of approximately 500 words each on Work, Jones, and James; a 6,000-word "Special Presentation" entitled "Noncommercial Recordings" by Bruce Bastin, excerpted from his book Red River Blues; and a 30-title bibliography. The collection is searchable by performer, title, and keyword, but lyrics are not available, which makes this collection difficult to use, since the performers speak and sing in thick dialects, made even more opaque by Web delivery. The collection is an extraordinary record of non-commercial American music and musical styles, of particular use to music specialists, but also of interest to those studying broader cultural trends. For example, 16 recordings reflect wartime opinions and concerns.