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.

Radicalism and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A.

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Dr. Simon Hall, Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, lectures on the shift of some activists away from nonviolent protest to radicalism during the Civil Rights Movement. He looks at activists' disillusionment with the federal government and the change in focus of organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, which became the Student National Coordinating Committee).

The Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A.

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From the History Faculty website:

"In recent years historians of the civil rights movement have moved their focus away from the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. to explore the role played by 'ordinary people' in the struggle for racial equality. While not denying King's importance as a tactician, figurehead and orator historians have argued that, at root, the civil rights movement was a people's movement and that the countless inspiring contributions made by local blacks was a critical component of the movement's success."

"After setting out the problems that the civil rights movement sought to tackle, the presentation charts some of the civil rights movement's major tactics—litigation, boycotts and direct action, and voter registration drives—emphasizing the importance of ordinary African Americans and their allies to these efforts. The presentation ends with a re-consideration of King's role, highlighting his importance as a 'bridge' between the local campaigns and national politics."

Dr. Simon Hall, Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, presents this lecture.