Collection 01
Origins & Early Black America
Establish the presence and experiences of Black people in colonial and early America — before the United States existed. Includes primary sources on the first Africans in colonial America, free Black communities, and the FBA claim to American identity from the beginning.
Collection 02
The American Slave Experience
Let historical Black Americans speak through their own testimony. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, and the 2,300 voices of the WPA Slave Narratives — the most important primary sources in American history.
Collection 03
Civil War, Freedmen & Reconstruction
The Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau records, and the histories of the most democratic — and most deliberately destroyed — period in American history.
Collection 04
Jim Crow, Lynching & Segregation
Ida B. Wells's investigative journalism, the legal architecture of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Great Migration, and the scholarship documenting how Reconstruction's gains were systematically destroyed through violence and law.
Collection 05
Black Wealth, Business & Institutions
Black Wall Street, Tuskegee Institute, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Council of Negro Women — the FBA tradition of building institutions, accumulating wealth, and creating the infrastructure of community life.
Collection 06
Patents, Science & American Industry
Lewis Latimer's carbon filament, Granville Woods's railway telegraph, Patricia Bath's Laserphaco Probe, the Hidden Figures mathematicians — FBA inventors and scientists whose contributions built American industry and were systematically denied credit.
Collection 07
The Civil Rights Revolution
Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer's DNC testimony, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act — the movement's literature, strategy, and legislation in the words of those who made it.
Collection 08
The Creation of Black America
Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou — the literary and cultural record of FBA life as a constituent and defining part of American civilization.
Collection 09
How Government Shaped FBA Outcomes
The Homestead Act, the GI Bill, FHA redlining, the Kerner Report, The Color of Law, The New Jim Crow — the policy record documenting how government action created and maintained the racial wealth gap.
Collection 10
Reparations, Lineage & the Path Forward
H.R. 40, the California Reparations Task Force Report, Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations, lineage documentation — the primary documents and scholarship of the contemporary reparations debate, presented with competing arguments rather than a single conclusion.
