The Black Intellectual Tradition by Derrick P. Alridge

The Chicago Defender and the Atlanta Daily World, historical Black newspapers which covered Black news from many other regions.

Digital Library of Georgia, which includes the Civil Rights Digital Library, among other collections.

Umbra Search, which draws on digitized African-American historical materials from around the US.

These libraries and archives include digitized materials from their collections as well.įor other digital collections of Black historical materials, see for example: Reference staff at these organizations can provide more information about their holdings of Black historical resources. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL)

Atlanta University Center’s Woodruff Library Archives Research Center.

Local archives here in Atlanta with significant African-American historical materials, including materials relating to African-American literary figures, include

The second-largest library dedicated to African-American historical collections is here in Atlanta: the Auburn Avenue Research Library, a branch of the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library is literally just down the street from Georgia State University. Research libraries have emerged which focus specifically on African-American historical collections: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, a branch of the New York Public Library, is the largest library of this type in the United States. We can also ask about what kinds of materials are held in archives and Special Collections libraries. We can ask how the ways in which history is written, how history gets “done” may have limited Black history to a smaller number of undoubtedly important figures, who cannot be downplayed, but whose stories do not have to outweigh other, lesser-told stories. We can also ask questions about Blacks’ contributions to American culture, to American politics, to every aspect of American history and life.

Slavery and civil rights activism are major points of entry into Black history, but Black history involves more than enslavement’s beginning, duration, and end, and more than the resulting struggle for civil rights, important as those histories are.

Black history is part of American history. Woodson in 1925), Black History Month has been observed for over forty-five years. Established in 1976 (as an expansion of Negro History Week, first established by Carter G.

The Black Intellectual Tradition by Derrick P. Alridge