Internet Resources
- African American Heritage: National Parks ServiceRead stories—from escaped slaves and abolitionists, to soldiers, intellectuals, and business entrepreneurs—preserved in our national parks and historic places
- The Black American ExperienceChronicles the lives, passions, and contributions of African Americans who have left their stamp on history. Each program paints an intimate portrait of some of the most influential and inspiring individuals during turbulent and changing times in American history.
- Black Archives of Mid-AmericaThe mission of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, Inc. is to collect, preserve and make available to the public materials documenting the social, economic, political and cultural histories of persons of African American descent in the central United States, with particular emphasis in the Kansas City, Missouri region. Black Archives of Mid-America is an educational resource and provides access to its collections for research, exhibition and publication to honor our community heritage and to catalyze public awareness.
- Black History Is American HistoryRacism is an age‐old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women.
- The Changing Definition of African-AmericanHow the great influx of people from Africa and the Caribbean since 1965 is challenging what it means to be African-American.
- Colonial Williamsburg: The African American ExperienceDuring the 18th century, half of Williamsburg’s population was Black. Learn more about the daily life and culture of African Virginians.
- Constitutional Rights Foundation: Overview of the African-American ExperienceThis resource from the Constitutional Rights Foundation provides a historical overview of the African-American experience.
- International African American MuseumThis museum is about a journey that began centuries ago in Africa, and still continues. It is about the journey of millions of Africans, captured and forced across the Atlantic in the grueling and inhumane Middle Passage, who arrived at Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina and other ports in the Atlantic World. Their labor, resistance and ingenuity and that of their descendants shaped every aspect of our world.
Databases
- African American Experience This link opens in a new window
African American Experience supports research and scholarship in the field of African American Studies with a full library of works analyzing the contributions and challenges of African Americans throughout history. This database includes more than 80 scholarly articles, 8,000 primary and secondary sources, and more than 1,000 biographies.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States This link opens in a new window
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States is a unique database that covers aspects related to Black Freedom in the United States, including slavery, the abolitionist movement, Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and civil rights. You will find over 3,000 primary source documents focused on six different phases of African American freedom.
- Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new window
Slavery in America and the World brings together essential legal materials relating to the history of slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. You will find hundreds of pamphlets and books written about slavery, whether defending it, attacking it, or simply analyzing it.
Books & Films: Check Out at McKee Library
Between the World and Me
Hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States" (The New York Observer) "This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
A black woman recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
They Can't Kill Us All
An indispensable work of journalism that "is electric, because it is so well reported" (Dwight Garner, New York Times) by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Wesley Lowery that describes the earliest days of #blacklivesmatter and brings to life the quest for justice in the murders by police of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray as well as an intimate, moving portrait of the activists working to dismantle systemic racism in America Conducting hundreds of interviews over the course of one year of reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims other victims' families as well as local activists.
I Can't Breathe
A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police--from the bestselling author of The Divide NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement.
Me and White Supremacy
The New York Times andUSA Todaybestseller! "Layla Saad is one of the most important and valuable teachers we have right now on the subject of white supremacy and racial injustice."--New York Timesbestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert Based on the viral Instagram challenge that captivated participants worldwide, Me and White Supremacytakes readers on a 28-day journey of how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would spread as widely as it did. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and nearly 100,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook.
I'm Still Here
From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion.
Sister Outsider
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. "[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware."--The New York Times In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "
Lessons from Little Rock
In his compelling memoir detailing the Little Rock Desegregation Crisis of 1957, "Little Rock Nine" member Terrence Roberts opens the door to the life he and his family lived in the segregated South in the 1950s-a place where some birth announcements in the daily paper addressed new parents as Mr. and Mrs., while others did ¬ a place where some patrons were welcomed to sit at restaurant tables, were welcomed to sit at restaurant tables, while others had to take their food to go; a place where some could walk to school or work without fear, while others could ¬ a place where some teens were prepped for lives of prosperity and respect, while others were not. Roberts gives an eye-witness account of what readers will recognize as history, yet to the young man living through these tumultuous events was just life in a country on the cusp of momentous change. Book jacket.
Under Our Skin
Can it ever get better?This is the question Benjamin Watson is asking. In a country aflame with the fallout from the racial divide--in which Ferguson, Charleston, and the Confederate flag dominate the national news, daily seeming to rip the wounds open ever wider--is there hope for honest and healing conversation? For finally coming to understand each other on issues that are ultimately about so much more than black and white?An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin,Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick "A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
Streaming Media
- Black American History: Crash Course SeriesOver the course of 50 episodes, we're going to learn about Black American History. Clint Smith will to teach you about the experience of Black people in America, from the arrival of the first enslaved Black people who arrived at Jamestown all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement.
- The Black Fatherhood ProjectIn THE BLACK FATHERHOOD PROJECT, filmmaker Jordan Thierry leads viewers through an honest and essential exploration of fatherhood in Black America, providing historical context and conversation for an issue at the core of the Black experience today.
- Boss: The Black Experience in BusinessFrom award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson comes a film that educates, informs, and examines more than 150 years of African American men and women who have embodied the qualities that are the heart of the American entrepreneurial spirit.
- Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in AmericaChronicling the history and personal experiences of African Americans on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the 1960s and beyond – Driving While Black explores the background of a phrase rooted in realities that have been a part of the African American experience for hundreds of years – told in part through the stories of the people who lived through it.
- I'm Not Your NegroAn Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism.
- Quest An Intimate Portrait of an African-American FamilyThis New York Times Critics' Pick, filmed with vérité intimacy for nearly a decade, is a moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Christopher "Quest" Rainey, and his wife, Christine'a "Ma Quest" raise a family while nurturing a community of hip hop artists in their home music studio. It's a safe space where all are welcome, but this creative sanctuary can't always shield them from the strife that grips their neighborhood.