Brown v. Board of Education 50th Anniversary Digital Archive

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Image, Search page graphic
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A joint project between college students and a nonprofit organization, this site collects the documents, recollections, and other media relating to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Many of the documents were submitted by visitors to the website, and the site actively solicits additional resources.

Materials include 10 documents, five video files that document interviews and panel discussions, and links to 15 outside Brown sites. The Interactive section features six interactive activities, including a map showing Jim Crow laws in various states and communities. The site includes relatively few primary sources, but the individual stories featured are valuable.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

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Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38
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More than 2,300 firsthand accounts of slavery and 500 black and white photographs of former slaves are presented on this website. These materials were collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Project Administration, a Roosevelt Administration New Deal bureau.

Each slave narrative transcript is accompanied by notes including the name of the narrator, place and date of the interview, interviewer's name, length of transcript, and catalog information. Each photograph has similar notes. Browse photographs and narratives by keyword, subject, and narrator. An introductory essay discusses the significance of slave narratives and a selection of excerpts from eight narratives along with photographs of the former slaves. This is a rich resource for exploring slavery, historical memory, and New Deal efforts to document America's past.

Atlanta in the Civil Rights Movement

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Logo, Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education
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This well-designed website explores the fundamental role of the churches, businesses, and institutions of Atlanta's Auburn Avenue, as well as the colleges and universities of the Atlanta University Center, in developing black leadership in the civil rights movement. The main section, "Atlanta's Story," is a timeline of Atlanta's civil rights movement between 1940 and 1970 with four essays: "Gradualism and Negotiation" covers the years 1940-1949; "Retrenchment and Redirection" discuses the events of 1950-1959; "Direct Action and Desegregation" examines the years between 1960 and 1965; and "The Quest for Black Power" explores 1966-1970.

Additionally, an extensive bibliography offers a list of more than 120 books and 50 articles both on the Atlanta Civil Rights movement and the movement in general. "Web resources" has more than 50 links to related websites. The site also provides a searchable inventory of special collections materials. Finally, the site offers a small photo gallery of 25 images. A useful starting point for anyone researching the civil rights movement or Atlanta.

Archives of African American Music and Culture

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Logo, Archives of African American Music and Culture
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This site introduces the Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) at Indiana University. It provides information on holdings, exhibitions, and events sponsored by the AAAMC, which focuses on the post-World War II era. The site features listings of more than 70 links to sites featuring classical, religious, and popular music, including rock, blues, rhythm and blues, hip hop, jazz, and gospel, as well as topics dealing with African-American history and culture, organizations, and magazines. The site does not feature any audio presentations, and is useful mainly for its links.

American Colonization Society Collection: Maps of Liberia, 1830-1870

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Map, "Map of the West Coast of Africa . . ." J. Ashmun, 1830
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A collection of 20 maps of Liberia produced or acquired by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in their efforts to settle free black Americans in West Africa. These maps show natural features on the west coast of Africa and locations of native peoples, colonist towns, and mission stations. The collection includes two maps made in 1868-69 by African-American explorer Benjamin Anderson. Users can zoom in to view map details. A "Time Line: History of Liberia" includes a 2,500 word essay with three photographs of Liberian presidents Joseph Jenkins Roberts and James Skivring and Roberts' wife Jane; links to 13 related documents; and a nine-title bibliography.

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820

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Introductory graphic, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy
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Provides detailed data on more than 100,000 slaves and free blacks in Louisiana from 1718 to 1820 gathered from notarial documents by historian Dr. Gwendolyn Hall. Users can search by name of slave, master's name, gender, epoch, racial designation, plantation location, and place of origin. Each record retrieved pertains to an individual slave. Information was compiled from documents created when slaves arrived by ship, were bought and sold, reported as runaways, testified in court cases, manumitted, and at the death of masters and in other circumstances. As French and Spanish records often were more detailed than those kept by the British, the amount of information provided is relatively extensive. Some records contain as many as 114 fields with information on name, birthplace, gender, age, language group, alleged involvement in conspiracies, skills, family relationships, and illnesses, among other categories. Dr. Hall's analysis documents 96 different African ethnicities of slaves in Louisiana during this period.

The site additionally offers tables and graphs presenting Dr. Hall's calculations concerning the data collected and presents results from three useful searches: on African names, individual slaves involved in revolts or conspiracies, and runaways. Seven examples of original documents are displayed, and downloads of complete databases on Louisiana slaves and free blacks are available. An extremely valuable site for professional historians, anthropologists, geneticists, and linguists, in addition to people conducting genealogical searches.

African-Americans--Biography, Autobiography, and History

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Logo, The Avalon Project
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This section, recently added to the Avalon Project, contains complete copies of Martin Luther King Jr.'s August 28, 1963, "I Have A Dream" speech; Frederick Douglass' 1855 My Bondage and Freedom; The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated by Sojourner Truth and edited by Olive Gilbert; W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 The Souls of Black Folk; and Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington. All of the transcripts are legible and available in HTML format.

African Americans in Massachusetts

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Image, African Americans in Massachusetts: Case Studies of Desegregation in...
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This site features primary documents related to the 19th-century desegregation of the Boston and Nantucket, MA school systems. It includes a timeline with links to 71 expandable and downloadable primary sources. The documents consist of census records, maps, reports of the local school committees, and articles from William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. The site also contains a bibliography with more than 30 items. Designed to develop student critical thinking skills, materials encourage middle and high students to understand different points of view. For example, students can study petitions from those supporting desegregation and petitions from those in opposition. In addition students will better understand the relationship between Massachusetts' early desegregation cases and the 20th-century Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Complete with primary sources and lesson plans, the site not only offers useful curriculum for lessons in America's long march to free and integrated public education but helps students identify how contemporary debates about education parallel the 19th-century Massachusetts desegregation cases.

National History Day Project: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

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Print, The Bird of Freedom and the Black Bird, 1863, F.P., NYPL Digital Gallery
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I'm an 8th-grade student currently looking for information for my National History Day project on the topic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It would be very helpful if some of these questions would be able to be answered.

  • What groups of people, if any, were negatively affected?
  • What were some consequences because of the passing of the act, good or     bad?
  • Were there any important events or political ideas that were led up by the     Act passing?
  • What were some key leaders and other people that led up to the Act?
  • What might be some successes because of the Act passing?
  • Lastly, what are some failures that the Act was unable to address?
Answer

It is great to hear that you are participating in the National History Day program at your school. I really hope that this project allows you to experience what it is like to work as a historian, analyzing and interpreting primary sources and secondary sources to draw conclusions about the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Your questions about the Act are a good jumping-off point for starting your research. It sounds like you want to analyze the effects and consequences of the legislation on "groups" of people. However, the questions did not specify whom you might be thinking about. So, a good place to start is with the particular groups affected by the legislation. What was the goal of the act? How, for instance, did it affect people experiencing workplace discrimination and school segregation in the United States prior to 1964?

After you establish the aims and audiences of the act, you can move on to looking at important events, political ideas, and key leaders. The act was a part of the broader Civil Rights movement, so consider how the push for civil rights led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as how the act pushed the movement forward. There are lots of great resources on the web for this kind of research and our Website Reviews section is a good tool for this. It allows you to browse sites by keyword, topic, and time period to locate information pertaining to the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This feature will also help you bypass the millions of websites that a regular search engine will provide, and only return legitimate websites about historical research.

For example: Using the search box, try entering keyword terms that are critical elements of the legislation (i.e. segregation and discrimination).

Keyword: segregation
Topic: African Americans
Time Period: Post War US, 1945-Early 1970s
Resource Type: Any

The results of this specific search will generate ten different websites that vary in topic. Two might be of particular interest. Television News of the Civil Rights Era has the actual footage of African American students waiting to be picked up by the local school bus for the first time in four years. Other sites, like the Kellogg African American Health Care Project will provide first-hand accounts from African Americans during the era of segregated health care.

Information about the experiences of individuals will reveal how segregation and discrimination deeply influenced the lives of ordinary Americans. Finding clues to some of the answers to your questions should help you refine those questions and help you make your assessments about the failures and successes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I hope you find the answers to all of your questions.

After Slavery

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Textbooks often present a quick, uncomplicated overview of Reconstruction—a vast oversimplification of a time of social upheaval, tension, and violence. After Slavery: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas, a joint project of Queen's University Belfast, the University of Memphis, and the University of London, provides primary sources that take a closer look at the time period.

Focusing on the themes of labor, race, and citizenship, After Slavery presents sources from North and South Carolina as examples of trends nationwide. A 2,500-word Introduction explores Reconstruction and the rationale for choosing the Carolinas as the project's focus. About the Project explains the structure and rationale behind the website's learning units.

The Learning Units form the heart of the site. Ten units cover topics including emancipation, mobilization, land and labor, black soldiers, conservative reactions, justice, gender, poverty and white supremacy, coercion and resistance, and the Republican Party. Each unit includes a 400-word introduction and six or more primary documents with three to eight discussion questions each. Units can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs. An introductory essay explains the mission behind creation of the units, and Recommended Reading lists more than 80 books, 50 articles, and 15 primary sources.

As of December 7, 2012, other materials on the site are still content-light. Interactive Maps uses Google Maps to pinpoint only two events—the Hamburg Massacre and the Cainhoy Riot—with five to seven subevents included in each, as well as five-item lists of related sources.

Interactive Timelines includes three timelines with one-sentence descriptions on each item. Timelines look at general Reconstruction history as well as Reconstruction in North and South Carolina. Teacher Resources currently features links to more than 30 digital collections and exhibits, research tools, military records, audiovisual resources, and more. The section notes that lesson plans will be added in the future.

A valuable resource for teachers looking to complicate the textbook narrative on Reconstruction, and for teachers covering North or South Carolina history.