Juneteenth: Databases

ProQuest's African American Biographical Database (1790-1950) is a unique electronic collection of biographical information on African Americans with over 40,000 entries from over 290 titles. The African American Biographical Database is a resource of first resort when you are looking for biographical information, including photographs and illustrations, for African Americans. From the famous to the everyday person, the database includes profiles and full-text sketches providing both biographical detail and illuminating narratives chronicling the lives of Black Americans.

Millions of African Americans are descended from slaves, making genealogical research challenging prior to 1870, the date of the first census to include all free people. This guide provides published resources and case studies to aid in your research.

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. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The initiative promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement through its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement, 2) a civil rights portal a seamless virtual library on the Movement by connecting related digital collections on a national scale, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources - such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities - to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process. The CRDL advances cross-disciplinary approaches, promoting a seamless-infrastructure for learning, professionals, archivists, humanities scholars, educators, university graduate and undergraduate researchers, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. 

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse collects documents and information from Civil Rights cases across the United States. It is available to scholars, teachers, students, policymakers, advocates, and the public, to allow greater understanding of historical and contemporary American Civil Rights Litigation.

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

The database, which continues to grow, already includes 50 civil rights cases. You'll find iconic campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycott and some that are less known, like the 1958-59 sit-ins in Kansas City, MO and the 1960 St. Paul's College student boycott of a segregated movie theater in Virginia. The database is sponsored by Swarthmore College with support from Tufts and Georgetown Universities.

NMAAHC Open Access, a database where you can explore and reuse thousands of digital items from the NMAAHC's collections. NMAAHC has released these images and data into the public domain as Creative Commons Zero (CC0), meaning you can use, transform, and share our open access assets without asking permission from the Smithsonian.

Users worldwide can find, in this virtual Schomburg Center, exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.

In conjunction with the Thurgood Marshall Law Library's strategic plan to enhance its civil rights collection in support of the School's Law's teaching and research mission, the Library has worked since 2001 to create a complete electronic record of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications held in the Library's collection and available on the USCCR Web site. The publications are made available over the Internet as page image presentations in PDF format. Each item is linked from the appropriate bibliographic record in the Catalog. Publications are also searchable by keyword and accessible by date, title and SuDoc number.

Umbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available widget and search tool, umbrasearch.org; digitization of African American materials across University of Minnesota collections; and support of students, educators, artists, and the public through residencies, workshops, and events locally and around the country.

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