LibGuides: E 376: African American Literature since the Harlem Renaissance: Primary Sources: Best Bets

Best Bets

Poster for Melvin A. Butler Third Annual Memorial Black Poetry Festival, 1974. (Resource found using Umbra Search)

Black Drama
Contains approximately 1200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
HistoryMakers
This resource’s unique content is primarily composed of video oral histories recording the African American experience in the first-person.

Umbra Search
Contains hundreds of thousands of digitized materials about African-American history and culture that comes from libraries, archives, and special collections nationally, including photographs, correspondences, audiovisual items and other resources.

Black Studies in Video

Unlimited users.
This collection is a black studies portfolio that brings together seminal documentaries, powerful interviews, and previously unavailable archival footage surveying the black experience. The collection contains 500 hours of film covering African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.

A select few of historical African-American newspapers in our collection.

Atlanta Daily World (Historical)
Full page and article images of Atlanta Daily World (1931-2010) and Atlanta World (1931-1932), with searchable full text.
Baltimore Afro-American (Historical)
Searchable database of the "Afro-American", one of the most widely circulated African-American newspapers on the Atlantic Coast. Includes full-text and full-image newspaper articles published from 1893 to 2010.
Chicago Defender (Historical)
1910-2010. The Chicago Defender was the most influential African-American newspaper of the 20th century. With the majority of its readership outside the Chicago region, it served as the de facto national black newspaper in the U.S.
New York Amsterdam News (Historical)
Full page and article images of various editions of the New York Amsterdam News newspaper, with combined coverage from 1922 to 2010. Later issues of the New York Amsterdam News are in the Ethnic NewsWatch database.