Black History Month: Visualizing Black History
In honor of Black History Month (February), the Google Art Project is hosting African-American historical image collections from over fifty collections and institutions, including curated exhibits and individual images from these institutions, among others:
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library)
- US National Archives
- Museum of Uncut Funk
- The Gilder-Lehrman Institute
- LIFE Photo Collection
- The Black Archives of Mid-America
- The DuSable Museum of African American History
- SCAD Museum of Art
- Atlanta History Center
- The High Museum of Modern Art
- New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
- Virginia Folklife Program
To browse the Google Art Project’s entire Black History and Culture collection, click here.
The GSU Library’s own Digital Collections also include several collections of images and materials relating to African-American history, including:
Other significant online sources for photographs and images relating to African-American history are available here:
- Digital Library of Georgia, including the Civil Rights Digital Library
- Digital Public Library of America (for African-American history, try starting with the DPLA’s Activism in the United States exhibit)
- New York Public Library Digital Collections: Africana and Black History
- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (contains image collections sorted by subject)
- EBONY Archives (freely available via Google News)
- ARTstor (Art history database that includes many historical images. **Access for GSU affiliates only.)
- Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice (**Access for GSU affiliates only.)
- Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive (**Access for GSU affiliates only.)
- Archives Unbound: includes numerous collections on civil rights and 20th-century African-American history. (**Access for GSU affiliates only.)
- History Vault: including Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century and NAACP Papers (**Access for GSU affiliates only.)
Print books can be good sources for seeing African-American history as well. See for example:
- John Stauffer, et al., Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (2015)
- Spider Martin, Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin (2015; on order)
- U. B. Phillips, Seeing the New South: Race and Place in the Photographs of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (2013)
- Leslie G. Kelen, et al., This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement (2011)
- Martin A. Berger, Freedom Now!: Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle (2013)
Documentaries and films are also ways to visualize African-American history. These recent documentaries are available in our collection:
- Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (2014)
- The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)
- Let the Fire Burn (2013; the story of the bombing of Philadelphia’s MOVE organization)
- Always for Pleasure (1978; re-released in 2014; collection of director Les Blank’s documentary work, including his work on African-American culture in Louisiana)
And for feature films (fictional), see these, also in our collection:
- Bessie (2015; the story of blues singer Bessie Smith)
- 12 Years a Slave (2014)
- 42 (2013; the story of baseball legend Jackie Robinson)