A&M-SA Research Guides: Black Studies Research Guide: Primary Sources

Digital Primary Source Collections

Below are links to various digital collections that contain a variety of primary sources such as images, oral histories,government documents, newspapers and other historical documents. This is just a sample of collections that are available to researchers.

SAAACAM Oral Histories
In partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAAACAM), the Texas A&M University-San Antonio Library brings you this collection of Oral Histories for public use in research or teaching. We are proud to present you with video recordings of each Oral History with a linked searchable transcript.

Black Life in America (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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The experience and impact of African Americans as recorded by the news media. This collection offers “suggested searches” to guide students to pertinent topics from social justice, politics, arts, literature, key people, etc.
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
The documents presented here represent a selection of primary sources available in several ProQuest databases. The databases represented in this website include American Periodicals, Black Abolitionist Papers, ProQuest History Vault, ProQuest Congressional, Supreme Court Insight and Alexander Street’s Black Thought and Culture.
History Vault: NAACP Papers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
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Four modules are available with this resource:
- Branch Department, Branch Files, and Youth Department Files chronicle the local heroes of the civil rights revolution via NAACP branches throughout the United States, from 1913-1972.
- The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces documents the NAACP's systematic assault on segregated education that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
- The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Legal Department Files consists of the working case files of the NAACP's general counsel and his Legal Department staff for the period from 1956 to 1972.
- The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses focuses on the NAACP's efforts to combat lynching, mob violence, discrimination in the criminal justice system, and white resistance to civil rights efforts.
ProQuest African American Heritage (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
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African American Heritage is a groundbreaking digital resource exclusively devoted to African American family history research.
This collection was created in partnership with leading African American genealogists and recognized leaders in genealogical information to develop a comprehensive mix of resources, records, and tools specifically pertaining to African Americans.

Library of Congress African American Digital Collections
Search or browse through dozens of digital collections from the Library of Congress. The collections contain a variety of primary source materials across various decades.
National Archives- Black History Resources
Explore our nation's history through documents, photos and records on the National Archives site.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Explore the digital collections from the The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. The Library of Congress
The exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

American History, 1493-1945 (Adam Matthew) This link opens in a new window
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This two-part collection provides primary and secondary sources on American history from early settlers through the end of World War II through correspondence, diaries, government documents, photographs, newspapers, broadsides, artwork, and more.

Note: When trying to access this resource, you may encounter a warning "Your connection is not private". Simply click the "Advanced" button at the bottom left of that page, then click "Proceed to americanhistory.amdigital.co.uk (unsafe)" to access this resource. You are seeing this warning because this resource currently does not use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
America's Historical Imprints (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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Offers early American books, pamphlets, broadsides and rare printed materials illuminating more than 250 years of American history, literature, culture, and daily life and enabling researchers to explore America’s past in unprecedented ways.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 1-5 (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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The premier collection of periodicals published between 1684 and 1912 in America. This collection documents American life from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law (HeinOnline) This link opens in a new window
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A collection of materials including statutes, legal cases, books, and pamphlets about slavery in the United States and its continued issues through the early 19th century. Scholarly article content is not included in this free access version.
Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice (Adam Matthew) This link opens in a new window
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Primary source material, such as original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings, maps and images, pertaining to the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today are included in this collection.

Note: When trying to access this resource, you may encounter a warning "Your connection is not private". Simply click the "Advanced" button at the bottom left of that page, then click "Proceed to slavery.amdigital.co.uk (unsafe)" to access this resource. You are seeing this warning because this resource currently does not use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).

North American Slave Narratives (UNC)
This collection from UNC's Documenting the American South documents the individual and collective story of African Americans' struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.
Harper's Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857-1874
The materials are presented in order to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper’s view of black Americans.Website visitors should be warned that several of the words, descriptions, and images from Harper’s Weekly are considered racially offensive by today’s standards.
The Freedmen's Bureau
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands...
...often referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865. The Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine. Browse or search various collections including marriage records, labor records and murders covering the years 1865-1872.
Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South
Race and Place is an archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia. The Jim Crow laws segregated African-Americans from white Americans in public places such as schools, and school buses. The archive contains photos, letters, two regional censuses and a flash map of the town of Charlottesville. The Jim Crow laws were not overturned until the important Brown versus Board of Education court ruling in 1954 (but not totally eliminated until the Civil Rights Act of the 1964).
Goin' North Collection: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia This site contains 22 oral history interviews as well as a digital archive with more than 400 images, newspaper articles and other documents that capture the migration of African Americans to Philadelphia from the south.
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (known as the Moynihan Report, 1965) was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor[1] under President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States. In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the first of several terms as US senator from New York and continued to support liberal programs to try to end poverty. His report focused on the deep roots of black poverty in the United States and controversially concluded that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of blacks toward economic and political equality.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience Contains a collection of images, maps and texts that relate to the Great Migration as well as provide a historical overview. The content is made available by the New York Public Library.
Digital Public Library of America- The Great Migration A collection of primary source documents (photos, documents, newspaper articles, etc) that relate to the Great Migration.
Southern Journey Oral History Collection
This collection of oral histories, completed from 1991 to 1994, contains narratives of 119 individuals describing the activities and people involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the southern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. The narratives also detail daily life for the African American community during this volatile period in the United States.
The Green Book Digital Collection (New York Public Library)
The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome. The NYPL has digitized the collection.
The Green Book: Documenting African American Entrepreneurs (Library of Congress)
In 2018, independent scholar and documentarian Candacy Taylor received an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center to document contemporary business owners and employees who work for more than a dozen still-active businesses that were listed in The Green Book, a historically significant travel guide published between 1937 and 1967. The Green Book listed businesses—e.g., restaurants, hotels, barbershops, taverns, drug stores, and garages—that welcomed African American customers. Only 3% of the 9,500 businesses listed in The Green Book are still in operation and Taylor traveled across the United States to interview their current owners and employees. The interviews explore the histories of these ongoing establishments, their strategies for staying in business, and the business’s current relationships with their changing communities.
Civil Rights Digital Library
The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.
The Long Civil Rights Movement: Photographs from the Ronnie Moore Papers, 1964 -1972
These photographs capture the political, economic and social empowerment of African Americans in the South and the North during the 1960s and 1970s. The shift in the Civil Rights Movement from direct protests targeting disenfranchisement and segregation in the 1960s to federally-funded programs that were created to raise the economic viability of African Americans in the 1970s are depicted.
Print Culture of the Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1980
This digital collection highlights the newspapers, posters, broadsides, pamphlets, and other printed ephemera produced by student groups, leading civil rights organizations, and individuals, which document the efforts of civil rights efforts in the United States.

Independent Voices (JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
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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.

Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress
The Frederick Douglass Papers provide full-text access to a wealth of materials relating to the life, work, and legacy of African-American slave and anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass.
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They include: personal diaries; correspondence; speeches; political pamphlets; and writings. Also accessible are documents by other contemporary abolitionists, including Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, and Gerrit Smith. Topics covered include: the emancipation of slaves in the USA; racial prejudice; prison reform; and women's suffrage. Most materials cover the period 1841-1964 and users may search the site by keyword or browse by subject. A time-line of Douglass's life and some background information on his importance are provided. A bibliography of further readings and a finding aid to the collection is also available.
Say it Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches
Provides access to materials relating to an American Radio Works documentary on famous Black American speeches of the 20th Century.
It includes free access to a transcript and audiofile. The programme discusses key black civil rights speeches from Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and Clarence Thomas. The site includes discussion of their importance, plus biographies of the orators and links to other civil liberties materials online.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division
A digital collection of photographs and print from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Avoice: The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Virtual Library Project
The Avoice Web site is designed to capture and preserve the rich history of political and legislative contributions of blacks for future generations. This virtual online library is a central source of information about historical and contemporary African American policy issues important to researchers, academics, educators and students.
Behind the Veil
A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.
Bureau of Justice Statistics; Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics; Uniform Crime Reporting System.
Prisoner statistics

Congressional Publications (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
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This database contains documents, reports, and other detailed information from both the House and the Senate dating back to 1789. Includes Congressional Record and US Serial Set Collections 1 and 2A-E, 1789-2011.

Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
BlackPast.org
BlackPast.org is an online reference center that makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 4,000 entries, the complete transcript of more than 300 speeches by African Americans, other people of African ancestry, and those concerned about race, given between 1789 and 2016, over 140 full text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and six gateway pages with links to digital archive collections, African and African American museums and research centers, genealogical research websites, and more than 200 other website resources on African American and global African history. Additionally, 100 major African American museums and research centers and over 400 other website resources on black history are also linked to the website, as are nine bibliographies listing more than 5,000 major books categorized by author, title, subject, and date of publication.
Umbra Search African American History
Portal to digitized material on African American history from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.
FBI Records: The Vault
3,000 FBI documents available for public viewing online through the Freedom of Information Act. Includes a Civil Rights section, and files on famous historical figures.
Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination (Library of Congress)
Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section (later transferred to the Office of War Information) were encouraged to document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America during the years the unit was in operation. They were particularly encouraged to photograph billboards and signs as one indicator of such developments. Although no documentation has been found to indicate that photographers were explicitly encouraged to photograph racial discrimination signs, the collection includes a significant number of this type of image, which is rarely found in other Prints and Photographs Division collections.

Historical Newspapers

African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1827-1998 (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1827-1998, provides online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. This unique collection, which includes historically significant papers from more than 35 states, features many rare 19th-century titles. Newly digitized, these newspapers published by or for African Americans can now be browsed and searched as never before.
African American Newspapers (Coherent Digital) This link opens in a new window
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African American Newspapers provide important original source material--written by African-Americans for African-Americans--readily available for research and fresh interpretation by history buffs, educators, and students.
Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
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A digital newspaper archive that includes cover-to-cover full-text and full-image articles starting from the 19th century. Includes news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, advertisements, etc.
Includes: Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Daily World, Austin American Statesman, The Baltimore Afro-American, Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Cleveland Call and Post, Los Angeles Sentinel, Los Angeles Times, Louisville Defender, Michigan Chronicle, New York Amsterdam News, The New York Times, Norfolk Journal and Guide, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
Access World News (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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Research diverse perspectives, topics and trends that align with curricular areas such as Political Science, English, Sociology, Humanities, Business, International Studies and more. Features reliable, credible information from a wide variety of international, national and local news sources. Also available remotely 24/7 on any device.
San Antonio Express-News Historical Archive, 1867-2015 (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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Access the San Antonio Express-News from 1867-2015. For 1990-present, see Access World News (NewsBank).
Chronicling America (Library of Congress) This link opens in a new window
This site allows users access to scanned newspaper pages from 1880-1910 for newspapers published in the United States. Users also have the ability to find information about published American newspapers from 1690 to the present.
New York Times All Access Digital Pass (The New York Times Company) This link opens in a new window
Search and browse The New York Times from 1851-present. Users must go through the library’s link to register for an account. Once registered, an account is valid for one year and may be used to access The New York Times website directly.
Creating an Account with the New York Times:

On the New York Times page, click on the Create Account link.
You must use your university email when registering. For example:
- John.Doe@jaguar.tamu.edu for students.
- jdoe@tamusa.edu for faculty and staff.
You will have access to the New York Times for one year.
Questions? Call the University Library at 210-784-1500.

Finding Primary Source Books in our Catalog

Books are for the most part considered secondary sources, but they can sometimes be considered a primary source.

Examples of primary books could include autobiographies, diaries or books that compile primary source materials. To find these books, include the following keywords into the search box, or in the subject field when using the advanced search option:

sources,
personal narratives,
diaries or journals,
interviews ,or
correspondence

For example, I could enter the terms African Americans History Sources into the Library Catalog search box to find books that contain primary documents that relate to African American History.

** To find additional primary sources, look at the citations and bibliography in the books you have already found to see what primary sources the authors used.