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Exploring Online Sources
Begun in 1995, after a five-year pilot project, the National Digital Library Program has been digitizing selected collections of documents that deal with different aspects of America’s cultural heritage. The materials from the National Digital Library Program are available online through the American Memory Project.
American Memory
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html
Collections going up online as part of the American Memory Project include photographs, books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings. Documents can be downloaded for free and easily integrated into classroom and research projects.
In terms of Afro-American resources, a good starting point is African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907. This is a collection of 351 pamphlets spanning roughly ninety years of African American history and culture. Significant figures found in the collection include Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Alexander Crummell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaphome.html
Photographic materials dealing with African American history can be found throughout the American Memory Project. As part of the work of the Farm Security Administration, for example, hundreds of thousands of photographs were taken across the country. Many document discrimination against Blacks and Native Americans. Examples of “Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination” have been conveniently pulled together by staff at the American Memory Project. Thirty images can be found at the address:
Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination
http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/085_disc.html
These images demonstrate the enforcement of racial segregation throughout the country. Typical is a photograph dating from 1943 of a Colored Waiting Room sign in the Greyhound Bus Station in Rome, Georgia.
Documents like the “Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination” bring home to students, in a very tangible way, the reality of racial discrimination in the United States in the twentieth century.
Rome, Georgia. September 1943. Esther Bubley, photographer. "A sign at the Greyhound bus station." [Sign: "Colored Waiting Room."] Location: E-5153 Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-75338.
Text documents can provide similarly powerful examples. The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture, for example, provides users with access to a wide-range of documents on African American History, including sources on African Colonization, Abolition, Slavery and Black Migration. Links to Narratives by Ex-Slaves collected as part of the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s bring home to students the reality of the experience of slavery in ways that cannot be gotten across by just relating facts and historical time lines.
The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html
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14. Media, Computers, and Education.