Reparations - African American Studies

Featuring select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history.

Twenty two digital collection on African American history.

Primary sources that document the cultural history of the American South. Includes diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, titles about slavery, and regional literature. Emphasis is on the 19th century. The subject browse under the letter S gives a sense of the range of materials related to slavery.

Milestone Documents in African American History represents a unique and innovative approach to history reference. Combining full-text primary sources with in-depth expert analysis, the 124 entries in the set cover nearly four hundred years of African American history.

Lengthy and detailed article written by Alan Greenblatt for CQ Researcher

This HeinOnline collection brings together a multitude of essential legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. It includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.

The SlaveVoyages website is 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.

Featured in this collection are more than 2,000 images from the Schomburg Center, one of the world’s leading cultural institutions on the African American experience. Most focus on early community leaders and institutions in the United States: schools, churches, the military, and businesses. The works range from glimpses of Africa in the 1800s to 20th century protests.

Established by an act of congress in 2003, the NMAAHC is devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life. This selection of images, freely available with creative commons licenses, represents a broadly based interpretation of African American culture, presenting diverse histories including the enslavement of the people, protest and civil rights movements, and the lives of celebrated citizens and everyday people. It provides most of the museum’s online offerings including art, artifacts, fashion, musical instruments, letters, portrait photographs and cartes de visite, books, broadsheets, political buttons and all types of ephemera, collectively documenting the lives of African Americans from around 1700 to the 2010s.