African American Booklist: Archival Collections

The Amistad Research Center is committed to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to original materials that reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history, the African Diaspora, human relations, and civil rights.

The Archives Research Center’s collections primarily document the African American experience through civil rights, race relations, education, literature, visual and performing arts, religion, politics, and social work. The core of our manuscript holdings are built upon the Atlanta University Trevor Arnett Library's Negro Collection. Under the auspices of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, the archival and manuscript holdings continue to develop and expand.

To understand the Avery Research Center, it is important to consider its rich history. Founded in 1865 as the Avery Normal Institute, this community hub provided education and advocacy for the growing Charleston African American community and trained blacks for professional careers and leadership roles. Although the Institute closed its doors in 1954, it graduates preserved the legacy of their alma mater by establishing the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture.

The Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc. was founded in 1977 by Dr. Dorothy Jenkins Fields as a non-profit organization to collect and preserve the rapidly vanishing material that reflects the African American experience in Miami-Dade County. Over the years, the collection has grown, and the Black Archives is now a national resource for this history of the 19th and 20th centuries, providing a rich repository of materials that is used by scholars, students, teachers, the media and the community alike.

The mission of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, Inc. is to collect, preserve and make available to the public materials documenting the social, economic, political and cultural histories of persons of African American descent in the central United States, with particular emphasis in the Kansas City, Missouri region. Black Archives of Mid-America is an educational resource and provides access to its collections for research, exhibition and publication to honor our community heritage and to catalyze public awareness.

The Black Male Archives is a website started to highlight the many characteristics, professions, and perspectives of Black Men.

The David C. Driskell Papers collection is organized into 11 series, or divisions, which document Driskell’s journey as an artist, scholar, educator, and curator, but also the artistic practice of his peers. The largest of the series, “Series 4: African American Art and Diaspora, 1901-2012” (52 archival boxes) consists of materials Driskell collected to inform his own studies. The second largest series, “Series 5: Artists and Individuals, 1930-2012” (47 boxes), contains correspondence between Driskell and other artists, some of which is included in the current exhibition. There are also series devoted to audio and video materials (Series 10) and photographs and 35mm slides (Series 11). Material drawn from both these series is included in the exhibition as well. Like all great archives, spending sufficient time with the David C. Driskell Papers is, in some way, to approximate his journey, his education, his experience among his peers.

The Gordon Parks Foundation permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and electronic media and supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Gordon described as "the common search for a better life and a better world."

Since the early 1970s, Hiphop has become the most influential artistic, educational and social movement for youth and young adults. From The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute's inception in 2002 under the direction of Professor Marcyliena Morgan, students, faculty, artists, staff and other participants in Hiphop culture have been committed to supporting and establishing a new type of research and scholarship devoted to the knowledge, art, culture, materials, organizations, movements and institutions of Hiphop. In response to this exciting and growing intellectual movement The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute serves to organize and develop collections, initiate and participate in research activities, sponsor events and acquire material culture associated with Hiphop in the U.S. and throughout the world...

Collections include Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., Booker T. Washington, Freedmen's Hospital School of Nursing, and many more.

The King Library and Archives in Atlanta is the largest repository of primary source materials on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement in the world. The collection consists of the papers of Dr. King and those of the organization he co-founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as the records of 8 major civil rights organizations and of several individuals active in the Movement. The archives also include more than 200 oral history interviews with Dr. King’s teachers, friends, family and civil rights associates.

The library of the New-York Historical Society holds among its many resources a substantial collection of manuscript materials documenting American slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. The fourteen collections on this web site are among the most important of these manuscript collections. They consist of diaries, account books, letter books, ship logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers, and records of institutions. Some of the highlights of these collections include the records of the New York Manumission Society and the African Free School, the diaries and correspondence of English abolitionists Granville Sharp and John Clarkson, the papers of the Boston anti-slavery activist Lysander Spooner, the records of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the draft of Charles Sumner's famous speech The Anti-Slavery Enterprise, and an account book kept by the slave-trading firm Bolton, Dickens & Co.

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.