African American Studies Research Guide

The African American Trail Project is a collaborative public history initiative housed at Tufts University. Originally inspired by the scholarship of Tufts Professor Gerald R. Gill (1948-2007) and driven by faculty and student research, this project maps African American and African-descended public history sites across greater Boston, and throughout Massachusetts. The African American Trail Project aims to develop African American historical memory and intergenerational community, placing present-day struggles for racial justice in the context of greater Boston’s historic African American, Black Native, and diasporic communities.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century guide includes a digital collection of published works by 19th-century black women writers, biographies for each author, citations and much more.

Compiled by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy provides a searchable database of genealogical information for enslaved Africans, including slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.

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).

This archive has compiled documents and photographs related to the 1952 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. The archive is divided into four main areas of interest: Supreme Court cases; busing and school integration efforts in northern urban areas; school integration in the Ann Arbor Public School District; and recent re-segregation trends in American schools.

The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) is an expanding resource compiling independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. DLAS houses tens of thousands of records relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C. as well as a number of northern states. DLAS contains detailed personal information about over 100 thousand individuals, including enslaved people, enslavers, free people of color, and more.

The Freedmen's Bureau was created in 1865 to assist refugees and freedmen, women, and children with securing food, clothing, and shelter in the aftermath of the American Civil War. This archive contains searchable labor, property, education, and other social records relating to the agency's efforts.

Two dollars in 1880 bought a yearlong subscription to the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a newspaper published in New Orleans by the Methodist Book Concern and distributed to nearly 500 preachers, 800 post offices, and more than 4,000 subscribers in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Lost Friends notices, which ran well into the first decade of the 20th century, featured messages from individuals searching for loved ones lost in slavery.

This searchable database provides access to more than 2,500 advertisements that appeared in the Advocate between November 1879 and December 1900.

This is an online gateway to archival collections focusing the African American experiences in Chicago and other places. 

"Now made accessible in one online space, the BMRC Archives Portal brings together the work of four different projects—two at the BMRC (the Survey Initiative and Color Curtain Processing Project) and two from the University of Chicago (Mapping the Stacks and UNCAP). Collections from BMRC members are featured and collections information from other repositories are included, amassing a unique treasure trove for the study of Black history and culture. Researchers of all ages and backgrounds can use the portal as a tool to find the collections, voices, and stories that are essential to our history and to the stories we're writing now. "