Black History Resource Guide: Primary Sources

Archival resources, blogs, and articles from the National Archives.

An online exhibition with over 100 manuscripts, letters, pamphlets, and other sources documenting the lives of African Americans in Massachusetts from the 1600s through the abolition of slavery in the state. From the Massachusetts Historical Society.

A photoessay by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Documents and photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, from the Digital Library of Georgia

From the National Archives

Documents, sermons, speeches, and more resources related to Dr. King. Also includes the digital King Encyclopedia. From Stanford University.

Primary source documents and photos from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

More than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves

An online exhibition drawing from primary sources in the Library of Congress collections

Selected newspapers articles from 1862 and 1863 about the Emancipation Proclamation.

The papers of Frederick Douglass, digitized and available to read online.

An online, multimedia exhibition from the Library of Congress.

Digitized and available online

Oral histories with former enslaved peoples.

Transcript and audio of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech

Transcript and audio of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech

Transcript and audio of Malcolm X speech

Transcript and audio of Stokely Carmichael speech

Transcript of Shirley Chisholm speech

Transcript, audio, and video of Barack Obama's 2008 victory speech

Transcript and audio of Barack Obama's Senate and Presidential speeches

Transcript from the March 1965 speech