LibGuides: ENGL 111: African American Education (Lewis): Find Primary Sources

Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL)
The LCDL produces digital collections and projects that support research about the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and historically interconnected sites in the Atlantic World. LCDL is committed to a multifaceted approach that incorporates historical and anthropological scholarship, oral history, integrative archival practices, digital librarianship, and spatial, temporal, and environmental information. Together with its institutional partners, LCDL helps students, scholars, and a wide range of public audiences develop a better understanding of the history and culture of the South Carolina Lowcountry relative to the nation and the world.
Somebody Had To Do It Collection
The “Somebody Had to Do It” project is a multidisciplinary research project documenting the experience of the first African American children to attend formerly all-White schools through video oral histories. The Project takes its name from the often-stated response of the no longer young activists who stepped forward, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to end educational apartheid.

Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI)
LDHI is a digital public history project hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) at the College of Charleston. LDHI launched in 2014 as a digital consultation service, scholarly editorial resource, and online platform for partner institutions and collaborative scholars to translate multi-institutional archival materials, historic landscape features and structures, and scholarly research into digital public history exhibition projects
Desegregation at the College of Charleston
This LDHI exhibit shares the history of local Black organizers' and national organizations' legal battle to successfully gain access to the College of Charleston in the mid-twentieth century, both as students and faculty. It also illuminates African Americans' presence on the College of Charleston's campus from its founding to the present.

Umbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through an aggregating search tool found on umbrasearch.org. Umbrasearch.org brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.

Additional Resources

African American Experience This link opens in a new window
An American Mosaic Online Resource. Developed with the guidance of African American librarians and subject specialists, The African American Experience is both a broad and deep online database collection on African American history and culture. Providing thesis-driven, peer-reviewed scholarly essays, as well as primary source documents and classroom resources, it is a collection that taps a tremendous variety of sources essential to understanding African American history and its relation to greater U.S. history.
African American Newspapers (1827-1998) This link opens in a new window
Online access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 1 This link opens in a new window
Branches out to cover other aspects of African American life in the 20th century, like religion, sports, education, fraternal organizations, and even the field of entertainment.
NAACP Papers - Collection 2 This link opens in a new window
The NAACPs Major Campaigns Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces

Auburn Avenue Research Library Historic African American Education Collections
From the Digital Library of Georgia, the Auburn Avenue Research Library Historic African American Education Collections contains eleven late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century manuscript collections that document the historical development of education for African Americans, primarily in the South, from the early 1860s to the early 1950s.
Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement
The Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.