See Also
Directories
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Digital Black HistoryThis website is a free, searchable directory for online history projects that can help further Black history research.
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Digital SchomburgNew York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Links to books, periodicals, images, maps, and more.
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Historical African American Newspapers Available OnlineFrom Marist College, a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google.
Books
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African History and Culture Imprints from the LCP, 1540-1921 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1540-1921
Covers the history of Africa and its diverse people over nearly 400 years and includes more than 1,300 books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1535-1922
Database of more than 12,000 printed books, pamphlets, and broadsides recording African American history, literature and culture from the early 16th to the early 20th century.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Authors Imprints from the LCP 1556-1922 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1556-1922
More than 550 works by authors of African and African American descent, including personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, novels, essays, poems, and more.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Drama This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1847-present
Provides access to approximately 1,310 plays by 210 playwrights, together with detailed information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. This database also includes selected playbills, production photographs, and other ephemera related to the plays.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Caribbean History and Culture Imprints from the LCP, 1535-1920 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1535-1920
This resource covers the diverse history of the Caribbean Islands over nearly 400 years. Includes books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Local Catalog (OU)Many primary sources are reprinted in book form. Try using these keywords with your topic: correspondence, diaries, interviews, papers, "personal narratives" (with the quotation marks so it searches as a phrase).
Government & Legal Information
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African American Heritage (Proquest)A Metropolitan Library (OKC public) database. Sign up for a library card if you don't have one. Search historical records for African Americans that include the Federal Census, Marriage and Cohabitation Records, Military Draft and Service Records, Registers of Slaves and Free(d) Persons of Color, Freedman's Bank, and more.
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Brown v. Board of Education Digital Archive (Univ. of Michigan)Documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present.
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Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1890-present
Included in ProQuest's History Vault database, this resource provides access to texts that document the Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th century from the perspectives of men, women, and children. University of Oklahoma Libraries provides access to two modules:
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers Part 1
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Making Of Modern Law: Trials 1600-1926 This link opens in a new window
Contains works pertaining to the United States, Britain, Ireland, Canada, as well as English-language titles about trials in other jurisdictions, such as France. Resources include published trial transcripts, popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder, unofficially published trial documents, official records of legislative proceedings, administrative proceedings, arbitration sessions, and books and pamphlets about specific trials. Topics include adultery, commercial law, constitutional law, dueling, elections, impeachment, international law, land, military offenses, murder, sexuality, slavery, torts, treason, and wills.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1789-present
Index of legislative information, including congressional publications from 1789 to the present, legislative histories for public laws dating back to 1970, testimony from congressional hearings, bill histories, the Congressional Record and Federal Register, Congressional Research Service reports, information about congressional members and committees, and executive documents (1789-1931). Some full text is available.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new window
A collection of legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world, including more than 1,000 books, pamphlets, and article reviews.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Slaves and the Courts, 1740 to 1860 (Library of Congress)Books and manuscripts drawn principally from the Law Library and Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Includes an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Most of the items date from the nineteenth century.
News, Newspapers, and Magazines
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African American NewspapersCoverage: 1827-1998
A Metropolitan Library (OKC public) database. Sign up for a library card if you don't have one. Hundreds of African American newspapers from across the United States published during the 19th and 20th centuries.
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African American Newspapers: The 19th Century This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 19th century
Provides access to major African American newspapers published in the United States during the 19th century. Publications include Freedom's Journal, The Colored American, The North Star, The National Era, Provincial Freeman, Frederick Douglass Paper, and The Christian Recorder.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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American Race Relations: Global Perspectives, 1941-1996 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1941-1996
Digital archive covering foreign perspectives of American racial issues in the mid-20th century, containing unique primary source documents on racial justice from around the world and providing insight into many important historical events and movements.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Artist and Influence (1981-2011; Alexander Street Press)Annual publication that included interviews, oral histories, photos, original art, poetry, and other firsthand perspectives tracking African American cultural trends in the 20th century.
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Black Enterprise (1970-2000; Google)Magazine for African American professionals and entrepreneurs, with information on careers, small business and personal finance.
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Black Life in America Series 3: 1976-Today This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1976-present
Black Life in America, Series 3 offers a window into African American history, culture and daily life as well as the ways the dominant culture has portrayed and perceived people of African descent. Updated daily with new content, this database provides in-depth coverage of issues involved in America's ongoing conversation on race, including coverage of historic changes such as Barack Obama's election and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Oklahoma Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1892-2019
Access to 40 historic Black Oklahoma newspapers, including The Black Dispatch, The Oklahoma Guide, Tulsa Star, and The Muskogee Cimeter.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Periodicals: From the Great Migration through Black Power This link opens in a new window
This open access collection includes periodicals published by Black Americans during the early 1900s to the 1980s. Publications include those from women's organizations, religious groups, and labor organizations.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Contains the non-fiction published works of over 1,000 leading African Americans, including artists, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, entertainers, and more. Resources cover over 250 years of history and include interviews, journal articles, letters, speeches, trial transcripts, and other materials. Includes access to Black Panther, the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black World / Negro Digest (1961-1976; Google)Founded in 1943, Negro Digest (later Black World) was the publication that launched Johnson Publishing. During the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement, Negro Digest/Black World served as a critical vehicle for political thought for supporters of the movement.
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Chronicling America This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1756-1963
Access to hundreds of historic American newspapers from across the country. Resources include the Historical African American Newspaper Collection, which features 300 newspapers from nearly every state, and the Indians of North America Newspaper Collection.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Colored American Magazine (1900-1909; HathiTrust)One of the first periodicals to highlight Black writers’ literary and political contributions. Higher quality scans available from Yale.
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The Crisis (1911-2011; Google)Magazine founded by W.E.B. Du Bois. 1910-1922 available from the Modernist Journals Project.
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Ebony (1950-2000; Google)Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson.
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Essence (1970-2005; Proquest)Lifestyle, fashion and beauty magazine for African-American women. 1988-present available through EthnicNewswatch
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Ethnic NewsWatch Complete This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1959-present
Ethnic NewsWatch provides access to full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. Subject coverage includes culture, religion, independent press, and ethnic studies. The database also contains Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, which provides historical coverage of Native American, African American, and Hispanic American periodicals from 1959-1989.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Historical African American Newspapers Available Online (Marist College)From Marist College, a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google.
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Historically Black Newspapers via ProQuest This link opens in a new window
Searches the full text of the Atlanta Daily World, The Chicago Defender, Los Angeles Sentinel, New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and The Pittsburgh Courier.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press, and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century. Includes access to the Black American Series and the Native American Series.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorials.
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Jet (1951-2005; Google)News, culture, and entertainment related to the African-American community.
Noted Digital Projects
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Freedmen and Southern Society Project (Univ. of Maryland)Documents explaining how Black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867.
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SlaveVoyages (The Slave Voyages Consortium)A collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.
Oral Histories
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Behind the Veil (1890s-1950s; Duke Univ.)Preserve the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South.
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Black Women Oral History Project Interviews (1976-1981; Harvard Univ.)Oral memoirs of women in their 70s, 80s, and 90s from all over the United States.
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Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project (1936-1938; Library of Congress)Includes more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Also available in paper at E 441 .A58, Bizzell Library, as American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.
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Civil Rights in Black and Brown (Texas Christian Univ.)Interviews with black, white, and Mexican people in Texas about the civil rights movement.
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OU Libraries Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Access over 40 digitized collections from OU Libraries Special Collections. Resources include images, correspondence, newspaper articles, rare books, and audio. Highlights include broadcasts from the Indians for Indians Radio Show, a 1598 edition of Chaucer's works from the Nichols Rare Book Collection, and images from the American School Collection.
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Television News of the Civil Rights Era (1950-1970; Univ. of Virginia)Aims to collect, digitize, and present television news footage from the period.
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Tulsa Race Massacre Survivors (Tulsa Reparations Coalition)Accounts from survivors of the Massacre of 1921. Also see the Greenwood Resource Portal from the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation, and Otis Clark and Wess & Cathryn Young, Voices of Oklahoma.
Personal or Organizational Papers
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Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1890-present
Included in ProQuest's History Vault database, this resource provides access to texts that document the Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th century from the perspectives of men, women, and children. University of Oklahoma Libraries provides access to two modules:
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers Part 1
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Frederick Douglass Papers (1841-1964; Library of Congress)The bulk of the material dates from 1862 to 1895.
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King Papers PublicationsWritings and spoken words of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Local Catalog (OU)Many primary sources are reprinted in book form. Try using these keywords with your topic: correspondence, diaries, interviews, papers, "personal narratives" (with the quotation marks so it searches as a phrase).
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Microfilm Collections (OU)See this guide for information on collections such as the NAACP papers, Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and more.
Miscellaneous (databases with multiple formats, genres, etc.)
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African American History Online (Infobase)A Metropolitan Library (OKC public) database. Sign up for a library card if you don't have one. Covers more than 500 years of African-American history using biographies, primary sources, images, videos, timelines, maps, and charts.
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African History and Culture Imprints from the LCP, 1540-1921 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1540-1921
Covers the history of Africa and its diverse people over nearly 400 years and includes more than 1,300 books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1535-1922
Database of more than 12,000 printed books, pamphlets, and broadsides recording African American history, literature and culture from the early 16th to the early 20th century.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements This link opens in a new window
This open access collection provides access to the digitized histories of civil rights activism by Black, Latine, Indigenous, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities. Materials are drawn from universities, public libraries, community archives, and historical societies and include photographs, unofficial letters, correspondence, demonstration plan outlines, meeting minutes, newsreels, interviews, and musical recordings.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Authors Imprints from the LCP 1556-1922 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1556-1922
More than 550 works by authors of African and African American descent, including personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, novels, essays, poems, and more.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Drama This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1847-present
Provides access to approximately 1,310 plays by 210 playwrights, together with detailed information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. This database also includes selected playbills, production photographs, and other ephemera related to the plays.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1900-present
Black Studies Center consists of scholarly journals, commissioned overview essays by top scholars in Black studies, and historic indexes. This resource includes the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, the Black Studies Periodicals Database, the Black Literature Index, and historical black newspapers such as The Chicago Defender.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Contains the non-fiction published works of over 1,000 leading African Americans, including artists, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, entertainers, and more. Resources cover over 250 years of history and include interviews, journal articles, letters, speeches, trial transcripts, and other materials. Includes access to Black Panther, the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Caribbean History and Culture Imprints from the LCP, 1535-1920 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1535-1920
This resource covers the diverse history of the Caribbean Islands over nearly 400 years. Includes books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online tutorial.
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Exploring Race in Society This link opens in a new window
This open access database provides content covering important issues related to race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusiveness in today's society. Resources include essays, journal articles, government agency reports, photographs, speeches, and other primary sources. A wide range of topics are covered, including affirmative action, food insecurity, environmental racism and environmental justice, the black lives matter movement, voting rights and voter suppression, police use of force, sports team branding changes, neighborhood gentrification, and much more.
For more information about using this resource, view the publisher's online print or video tutorial.
Microfilm
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American Missionary Association Archives Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LouisianaCall Number: Microfilm 783Library has -- Ohio (reels 157-177) -- Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon (reel 178).
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Black Workers in the Era of the Great Migration, 1916-1929Call Number: Microfilm 596 and guide
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Martin Luther King, Jr., FBI fileCall Number: Microfilm 579 and guidept. 1. FBI file (16 reels), Guide online
pt. 2. The King-Levison file (9 reels) Guide online
Also see this site. -
Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI Assassination FileCall Number: Microfilm 549 and guide
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Papers of the Civil Rights CongressCall Number: Microfilm 581 and guidept. 1. Case files (40 microfilm reels) -- pt. 2. Files of William L. Patterson and the National Office (42 microfilm reels) -- pt. 3. Publications (19 microfilm reels) -- pt. 4. Communist Party USA files (16 microfilm reels) -- pt. 5. Citizens Emergency Defense Conference files (8 microfilm reels).
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Papers of the NAACP, 1909-1972Call Number: varies, click on title for call numbersPlease note that one set, Papers of the NAACP. Part 12, Selected Branch Files, 1913-1939, Series D, The West, is at the Law Library.
Guides online. (Search for NAACP.) -