Freedom Now! An Archival Project of Tougaloo College and Brown University

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Brochure, Fundraising to aid. . . , 1970, NAACP, Tougaloo College Archives
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This searchable archive offers more than 250 documents from the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the struggle to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi in the early 1960s, and the continuing Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange that grew out of it. The Freedom Movement was "one of the most inspiring and important examples of grass-roots activism in U.S. history." The archive includes books; manuscripts; periodicals; correspondence; interview transcripts; photographs; artifacts; and legal, organizational, and personal documents.

The collection can be searched by document type, keyword, or topic, including black power/black nationalism, college students, gender issues, incarceration, labor issues, legislation, media, non-violence, protest, segregation, and state government. The site offers two lesson plans on the Mississippi Freedom Movement based on documents in the database, one focused on the experiences of college-aged civil rights workers during the Freedom Movement and the other on voter registration. Other teaching resources include links to five websites on teaching with primary documents, six sites related to the African-American civil rights movement, and eight related books. This site is a useful resource for researching the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the history and people of the civil rights movement, or African-American history.

Black Past

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Photo, Chester Himes (1909-1984), Black Past
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This is a large gateway website that organizes and links to more than 400 other websites that focus on African American history. These range from websites that offer collections of primary historical documents to websites useful to researchers in other ways, such as African American genealogical websites, and the websites of Historically Black Colleges, historical sites and museums, and various African American media outlets.

The website itself also contains a large amount of material—an online 1500-entry encyclopedia of people, places, and events in African American history; the texts of 125 speeches by African Americans; the texts of 100 court decisions, laws, and government documents that bear on the African American past; timelines of African American history; audio tapes from the 1963 Open Housing hearings in Seattle; and summary accounts of important events in African American history.

Slavery in Canada

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 Photo, William Henson escaped from slavery. . . , Daniel G. Hill, NYPL
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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.

Slavery and the Making of America

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Image, Graphic from Religion, Slavery and the Making of America
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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.

Seattle Black Panther Party History and Memory Project

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Photo, Seattle Black Panther Party History and Memory Project
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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.

Now What a Time : Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943

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Logo, Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals
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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.

Freedom Bound: The Underground Railroad in Lycoming County, PA

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Photo, Caves, Lycoming County, PA
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An interactive site on the Underground Railroad in Lycoming County, PA. Users go to a map of the environs near Williamsport dotted with 13 relevant locations. Clicking on a location brings up images and streaming audio testimony from oral historian Mamie Sweeting Diggs, who details their significance using stories passed down from her great grandfather, Daniel Hughes, an agent and conductor on the railroad.

A river raftsman, Hughes brought logs down the Susquehanna River to Maryland, and then returned leading slaves on foot through a mountain trail. Slaves hid in warehouses, caves, and Hughes's own home. Helped by Hughes and his cohorts, the slaves headed for nearby Freedom Road, from which they would travel to Canada by foot or train.

More than 50 photographs and prints document the places where the story took place. Diggs relates four additional stories from Hughes. This site succeeds in illuminating the workings of the Underground Railroad.

Fats Waller Forever Digital Exhibit

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Cover, "Swing Magazine," December 1939
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In a well-organized and enjoyable format, this site introduces Thomas Wright (Fats) Waller, one of jazz music's most renowned pianists. This exhibit features recordings and photographs of Fats Waller at the pinnacle of his career. The introduction to this exhibit "Life and Time of Fats Waller" includes a 1,000-word essay about Waller's legendary piano style. Visitors will also want to read the 500-word essay about his recording legacy and a 1,200-word essay that describes the continued influence of Waller's music today. Many of the more than 50 photographs, displayed in a slide-show format, have appeared in other publications, but others are shown for the first time. They include pictures of theater marquees and billboards, scenes aboard a ship bound for Europe, and pictures of Waller backstage as well as on-stage in performance. Other kinds of documents in the collection include seven record covers, several handwritten drafts of music, and a letter penned by Waller. As users navigate the sections, recordings from some of Waller's most memorable compositions play, including "Spreading the Rhythm Around" and "Honeysuckle Rose." For those seeking to learn more about the life and musical achievements of Fats Waller, the site includes 20 references to relevant books and articles.

Dox Thrash: An African American Master Printmaker Rediscovered

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Graphite and brown pencil, "Self-portrait," Dox Thrash, Early 1930s
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The art of Dox Thrash (1893-1965) is exhibited in more than 60 images—mostly reproductions of his prints, but also including drawings and photographs of the artist at work. Born in Griffin, GA, Thrash spent most of his life in Philadelphia, which he expressively documented in his artworks. The exhibit proceeds along a timeline from birth to death that allows visitors to read a biographical narrative placing his life in appropriate historical context and to view images relevant to each period. Texts and images also can be downloaded in PDF format. Thrash's prints illuminated aspects of African American community life in Philadelphia with scenes of street life, workers, domestic scenes, and leisure activities. Thrash also portrayed scenes drawn from his experience as a soldier in World War I, life on the road, and the lynching of blacks.

In addition to his artistic creations, Thrash invented a new and influential printmaking technique—the carborundum process—in the 1930s as he worked in the WPA Graphic Arts Workshop. The exhibit provides descriptions and images of nine techniques Thrash used, and also includes four audio files of the curator discussing the process of putting the exhibit together. Valuable for students of the history of art and for those interested in expressive depictions of African American life and culture in Philadelphia.

Documenting the American South

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Image for Documenting the American South
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Nearly 1,400 documents address aspects of life in the South from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. The database features 10 major projects.

The First Century of the First State University presents materials on the beginnings of the University of North Carolina. Oral Histories of the American South offers 500 oral history interviews on the civil rights, environmental, industrial, and political history of the South. First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860–1920 offers 140 diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives. North American Slave Narratives furnishes about 250 texts.

The Library of Southern Literature makes available 51 titles in Southern literature. The Church in the Southern Black Community, Beginnings to 1920 traces the role of the church as a central institution in African American life in the South. The Southern Homefront, 1861–1865 documents non-military aspects of Southern life. The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940 provides close to 600 histories, descriptive accounts, institutional reports, works of fiction, images, oral histories, and songs.

North Carolinians and the Great War offers 170 documents on the effects of World War I and its legacy. Finally, True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina analyzes 121 documents written by students. All projects are accompanied by essays from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.