African American Studies
Introduction
The Newberry holds primary and secondary sources related to African American studies including, Slave narratives, Diaries, Black music, Photographs, and Ephemera.
Use the sections below to explore. Please call the reference desk at (312) 255-3512 with questions about our holdings, or contact a librarian with research questions.
Search the online catalog by author, title, or keyword(s) such as [list 3 or 4 relevant keywords]
Slaves-Personal Narratives
African-Americans, Great Migration
African-Americans, Musicians
Choose “Held by Library” to find physical items held at the Newberry and Sort By to see the newest or oldest materials. Use the Advanced Search to search for multiple terms or phrases in different fields and to search for materials created during a specific year or range of years. For more information about searching the online catalog, please see our Guide to PrimoVE.
Modern Manuscripts & Archives at the Newberry: Search finding aids Search by the keyword(s) suggested above or browse by topic or subjects and filter results for relevant terms. Newberry Digital Collections: Search digitized collection items
Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, 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.
Black Studies in Video: Includes 500 hours of documentaries, interviews, and archival footage surveying the black experience. Covers African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.
Black Thought and Culture: A full-text database containing the text (and some images) of over 1,300 non-fiction published works of African Americans, ca. 1700-2006.
Chicago Defender: Searchable full-text archive for the years 1909-1975. Offered by ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Helen Morrison Photographs of Kentucky African Americans
Digital portion of the Helen Morrison Photographs collection mentioned in this guide’s Manuscript Collections section. Featured here is the complete set of digitized images from this series, documenting African American life in Depression-era Kentucky, including the original prints developed by Morrison and additional undeveloped negatives.
Negro in the City lantern slides
From a set of lantern slides documenting the daily life of African Americans during the early years of the Great Migration from the rural American South, as well as outreach activities conducted by the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) to assist them with finding work and social services. The first slides show scenes of Black sharecroppers picking cotton and processing sugar. Other slides show African Americans at work in northern cities. A majority of the slides show African American Methodist Episcopal church buildings in cities, such as Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as well as community houses run by the MEC. Other slides show African Americans engaged in job training, such as sewing and dressmaking, and in worship and recreational activities.
Pullman company Archives-Chicago District Pullman Porters
Throughout the twentieth century, Pullman was one of the largest employers of African Americans in the country, hiring them as porters and maids. Many seek the Pullman employee records, which are part of the company records, housed at the Newberry to do genealogical research.
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Gates, Henry Louis, and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds. The New Negro : Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 / Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Zackodnik, Teresa C, and Society of Collectors. African American Feminisms, 1828-1923 / Edited by Teresa Zackodnik. Ed. by Teresa C. Zackodnik. London ; Routledge, 2007. Print.
African American Short-wave Radio Cards
52 QSL cards from African American ham radio operators, CB radio operators, and shortwave radio disc jockeys from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Includes cards from across the United States with the most from Texas and Louisiana. Also includes a variety of other states including Puerto Rico. Most feature humorous illustrations, nicknames, and slogans. Some cards are annotated with handwritten messages
Ernest A. Griffin Family Papers
Papers of family historian Ernest A. Griffin, proprietor of the Griffin Funeral Home on Chicago's south side, including family documents, photographs, audio/visual material, genealogical notes, and materials relating to the history of Camp Douglas (on which the funeral home stood) and Charles H. Griffin who served in a colored regiment during the Civil War. Also includes documentation of the funerals of prominent African Americans.
Records of this railroad sleeping-car operator and manufacturer. The Pullman Company (originally Pullman's Palace Car Company) revolutionized rail travel, dramatically increased employment opportunities for African Americans who served as porters on its cars, and had a significant impact on the American labor movement. Records for the entire firm are included until the mid-1920s division into operating and manufacturing companies; after that date, records mainly chronicle the activities of the operating company. Included are voluminous individual employee records and labor relations documents; the records of individual Pullman cars (e.g., drawings, specifications, photographs); scrapbooks documenting nineteenth-century operations, including the Town of Pullman and the Strike of 1894; records of subsidiary and absorbed companies; administrative, legal, financial, and securities records; and much more.
The following definitions are from A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology copyrighted by the Society of American Archivists. Consult the glossary for 2,000+ additional entries.
Archives: 1. Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control; permanent records. - 2. The division within an organization responsible for maintaining the organization's records of enduring value. - 3. An organization that collects the records of individuals, families, or other organizations; a collecting archives. - 4. The professional discipline of administering such collections and organizations. - 5. The building (or portion thereof) housing archival collections. - 6. A published collection of scholarly papers, especially as a periodical.
Archival description: 1. The process of analyzing, organizing, and recording details about the formal elements of a record or collection of records, such as creator, title, dates, extent, and contents, to facilitate the work's identification, management, and understanding. - 2. The product of such a process.
Administrative Records: A document that has been preserved because it facilitates the operations and management of an agency, but which does not relate directly to programs that help the agency achieve its mission.
EAD (encoded archival description): A standard used to mark up (encode) finding aids that reflects the hierarchical nature of archival collections and that provides a structure for describing the whole of a collection, as well as its components.
Ephemera: Materials, usually printed documents, created for a specific, limited purpose, and generally designed to be discarded after use.
Finding aid: 1. A tool that facilitates discovery of information within a collection of records. - 2. A description of records that gives the repository physical and intellectual control over the materials and that assists users to gain access to and understand the materials.
Inventory: 1. A list of things. - 2. Description · A finding aid that includes, at a minimum, a list of the series in a collection. - 3. Records management · The process of surveying the records in an office, typically at the series level.
Primary source: Material that contains firsthand accounts of events and that was created contemporaneous to those events or later recalled by an eyewitness.
Provenance: 1. The origin or source of something. - 2. Information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection.
Rights management: A system that identifies intellectual property rights relevant to particular works and that can provide individuals with access to those works on the basis of permissions to the individuals.
Secondary source: 1. A work that is not based on direct observation of or evidence directly associated with the subject, but instead relies on sources of information. - 2. A work commenting on another work (primary sources), such as reviews, criticism, and commentaries.
Scope and Content: A narrative statement summarizing the characteristics of the described materials, the functions and activities that produced them, and the types of information contained therein.
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