African American Communities

“As Barbara Ehrenreich and others have often noted, the Civil Rights movement was more than the iconic leaders we regularly commemorate such as Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. The movement, like those that preceded it, was an assembly of communities standing up and rejecting second class citizenship, asserting their cultural output, and leaving a trail of documents, words and ephemeral material for future historians and others to interpret.

African American Communities, a collaboration between AM and several notable library and archive collections in the USA, assembles this trail into a comprehensive yet accessible site. The collections explore African American communities through multiple lenses, including history, education, law, inter-community relationships and activism. With a focus on four cities (New York, Atlanta, St. Louis and Chicago) and the state of North Carolina, African American Communities contains oral histories, legal documents, diaries and other material useful to scholars, genealogists, teachers, and others who might have an interest in the topic.

The collection includes materials from institutions such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Atlanta History Center, The Newberry Library in Chicago and the 5th of July Resource Center for Self-Determination & Freedom in Brooklyn. The site provides a comprehensive overview of each collection with detailed descriptions of the archive's contents. As an illustration, the Chicago Urban League Papers contained within the University of Illinois at Chicago's archive are accompanied by a mission statement of the league and a description of its role in fighting for equal opportunity and access for African Americans in Chicago.

The site is arranged such that users can browse or search for materials in a variety of ways. The explore tab opens up links to everything from the floorplans for the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn (a contributing archive), case study essays for Chicago, St Louis, and North Carolina to related subject links on the public web. The tab also contains thematic guides which allow users to explore commentary and materials on a variety of themes, including arts and culture, police and community relations, religion and faith and civil rights. These thematic links provide users with useful materials related to each theme from orienting essays on the topic to material items representing an aspect of the theme.

The oral history collection includes over a 100 video and audio recordings. Perspectives are offered from a range of figures, from well know historians, artists and activists, including Kara Walker, Chuck D and Amari Baraka, to the reflections of Ernest Swain, the son of an Atlanta florist who grew up in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. Each interview is transcribed and users can jump to a particular section of each recording via these transcriptions. The site also contains 100 of images, including political cartoons, newspaper scans and other ephemera.

African American Communities provides an in-depth look at primary resources from both well-known organizations and figures and everyday people and places. With material that would be valuable for a high school history project to a doctoral dissertation, this collection is a worthy addition to the primary resources collection of any academic library.”

Featured in Volume 30, Issue 8 of Reference Reviews.