Research Guides: AAAS 130b: Black Brandeis, Black History: Digital Collections of Primary Sources

Suggested resources

HistoryMakers Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
An African American video oral history archive. Provides access to oral history interviews with historically significant African Americans. Includes many interviews with Brandeis alumni and faculty, as well as people who have worked at Brandeis.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century This link opens in a new window
Includes records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle. Includes the records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Example source: Papers from the Brandeis local chapter, Community Relations Department, of the Congress of Racial Equality.
NAACP Papers This link opens in a new window
Covers records from the NAACP from 1909-1970. The papers include special reports on a wide range of issues including the Ku Klux Klan, discrimination in public employment, economic equality, the church and civil rights, equal access to education, voting, employment, and housing. Example source: From the NAACP Papers, materials mentioning Brandeis in a folder related to African American education and school desegregation.

Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974 This link opens in a new window
Includes diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, newspapers, press, underground press, alternative publications, and scholarly commentary. This collection includes materials about Ford Hall 1969, digitized from collections in Brandeis University Archives & Special Collections. Additionally, this database contains materials that may provide historical context for your research topics, such as the 1968-69 student strike at San Francisco State College.

W.E.B. Du Bois Papers
"Includes over 100,000 items of correspondence (more than three quarters of the papers), speeches, articles, newspaper columns, nonfiction books, research materials, book reviews, pamphlets and leaflets, petitions, novels, essays, forewords, student papers, manuscripts of pageants, plays, short stories and fables, poetry, photographs, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, videotapes, audiotapes, and miscellaneous materials. Scholar, writer, editor of The Crisis and other journals, co-founder of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan African Congresses, international spokesperson for peace and for the rights of oppressed minorities, W.E.B. Du Bois was a son of Massachusetts who articulated the strivings of African Americans and developed a trenchant analysis of the problem of the color line in the twentieth century." (UMASS Amherst Special Collections)
1964 Freedom Summer Project
Freedom Summer was an effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system.
African Activist Archive Project
Records of activism in the United States that support "the struggle of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s."

Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984 This link opens in a new window
Contains reproductions of hundreds of FBI files documenting the federal scrutiny, harassment, and prosecution to which black Americans of all political persuasions were subjected. Covers 1920-1984.