Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

African American Heritage combines resources, records, and tools to aid African American family history research.

African American Music Reference offers the first comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression and it is the only electronic access to this information. Resources include biographies, anthologies, encyclopedias, images, lyrics (digitized and fully searchable), songsheets, chronologies, critical textbooks, a complete discography of the top African American artists, and links to editorially selected Web resources. Rare and previously unpublished items are included. Dates of Coverage: 1900s - present

African American Police League Records, 1961-1988 documents how African American policeman attempted to fight discrimination and police brutality, and improve relations between African Americans and police.

Over 2,500 images, more than 700 primary sources with specially written commentaries, and nearly 200 maps have been collected to enhance this reference content .

American Politics in the Early Cold War—Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, 1945-1961 presents major White House files from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, including international relations and domestic concerns during the Cold War.

Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records, is a collection of primary source documents from a wide range of archival repositories. Covering 1901 to 1991, the focus is on the political side of the freedom movement, the role of civil rights organizations in pushing for civil rights legislation, and the interaction between African Americans and the federal government in the 20th Century. This database contains collections of primary source documents from the records of federal government agencies, the personal papers of African Americans and records of civil rights organizations.

Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, consists of primary source documents from the personal papers of African Americans and records of civil rights organizations. Covering 1895 to 1992, the focus is on the experiences of individual African Americans, as told through diaries, personal correspondence and more. In addition, important records from a number of organizations including the American Committee on Africa, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, Revolutionary Action Movement, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2 module is highlighted by the records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett, and the Robert F. Williams Papers. Rounding out this module are the papers of Chicago Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and records pertaining to the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of sharecroppers and spent eighteen years of her adult life as a sharecropper and timekeeper on the Dee Marlow plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She was fired in 1962 because of her attempt to register to vote. The following year she became a registered voter and also became the field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was instrumental in starting the Delta Ministry, and she was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She led a delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964. She became chairman of the board of the Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care Center founded in Ruleville, Mississippi, in 1970, by the National Council of Negro Women. She also served as a member of the board of the Sunflower County Day Care Center and Family Service Center and on the policy council of the National Women's Political Party of Mississippi. This collection comprises correspondence plus financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items.

Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI vigorously investigated and tracked the activities of Communist groups, Communist-front groups, and other radical organizations in the United States. This module consists of records of the FBI and the Subversive Activities Control Board from 1945-1972. Highlights of this module include J. Edgar Hoover's office files; documentation on the FBI's so-called "black bag jobs," as they were called before being renamed "surreptitious entries"; and the "Do Not File" File. The "Do Not File" file consists of records that were originally supposed to be destroyed on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's order, however, through both intended and inadvertent exceptions to this order, large portions of these files survived. Another key collection in this module consists of the records of the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB). The SACB files constitute one of the most valuable resources for the study of left-wing radicalism during the 1950s and 1960s.

The Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s collection provides access to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents of the internal organization, personnel, and activties of some of the most prominent AMerican radical groups and their movements to change American government and society. Organizations, persons, and events covered in this collection include The Counterintelligence Program of the FBI (COINTELPRO), Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panther Party, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, the fire bombing and shooting at Kent State University, Malcolm X, Mississippi Burning, Muslim Mosque, Inc., Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) , Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weatherman Underground Organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Communist infiltration of the Souther Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

The NAACP Papers: Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files provides a comprehensive view of the NAACP's evolution, policies, and achievents from 1909-1970. Included are minutes of directors' meetings, monthly reports from officers to the board of directors, proceedings of the annual business meetings, significant records of the association's annual conferences, plus special reports on a wide range of issues. Topics covered include discrimination in public employment, the Ku Klux Klan, the depiction of Blacks in motion pictures, economic equality, the church and civil rights and the changing attitudes of Black youth.

NAACP Papers: Branch Department, Branch Files and Youth Department files chronicles the local heroes of the civil rights revolution from 1913 to 1972 including attorneys, community organizers, benefactors, students, mothers, teachers, and more.

NAACP Papers: Major Campaigns - Legal Department Files contains papers of the NAACP Legal Department from 1956 - 1972. This includes working case files. Topics covered in these cases include school desegregation, abuses of police procedure, freedom of speech, desegregation of public facilities, voting rights, housing discrimination, and employment discrimination. Files include background correspondence as well as court documents including transcripts of court proceedings.

The focus of NAACP Papers: Major Campaigns - Scottsboro, Anti-lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses is on efforts to combat lynching, mob violence, discrimination in the criminal justice system, and white resistance to civil rights.

NAACP Papers: Special Subjects covers topics that did not rise to the level of major campaigns but shows the scope of NAACP activism and interest. Topics include communism, anticommunism during the red scare, the congressional prossectuion of Hollywood personalitites, prison conditions throughout the United States, African colonial liberation movements, the emergency of the Black Power movement, and much more.

The NAACP's Major Campaigns - Education, Voting, Housing, Emlpoyment, Armed Forces provides documentation on the systematic assault on segregated education that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This collection contains files from 1955 to 1965 that focus on the NAACP's efforts to implement the Brown decision as well as to combat de facto segregation outside of the South.

Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problem areas in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict. Documenting three pivotal decades in the fight for civil rights, this resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson and Thurgood Marshall.

This collection contains documents from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) along with other anti-Vietnam War organizations. These documents offer opportunities for research on the 1960s through the lens of influential anti-war organizations.