African-American History

Alcorn State Selects Ed Dwight to Create Medgar Evers Memorial

Dwight, the first African American trained in the astronaut program, made a mid-life change to become a sculptor.

Coast Guard Academy Honors Its First Black Graduate

In 1966, Merle Smith was the academy's first Black graduate. Today 5 percent of the cadets are Black.

Duke University President Addresses the Issue of Race

Each year Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, addresses the annual meeting of the university faculty. This year, he chose to discuss the issue of race and its impact on the Duke University community.

Emory University Video Series Highlights Lesser Known Events in Civil Rights History

A series of videos entitled "The Hidden History of the Quest for Civil Rights," offers history lessons on lesser known events of the civil rights struggle.

Black Alumni of Southern Methodist University Create a Scholarship

A gathering of 118 Black alumni celebrated their history and pledged to help those who walk in their footsteps.

Book on the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta Wins the Bancroft Prize

Tomiko Brown-Nagin of the University of Virginia Law School is one of three winners of the Bancroft Prize, considered one of the highest honors in academic history.

An Historic Find in a Chicago Attic: The Papers of Harvard’s First Black Graduate

The papers of Richard T. Greener, including his Harvard University diploma, were discovered in an old trunk in a house that was about to be razed.

Huge Digital Archive of African American History Now Available Online

The database established by Johns Hopkins University contains photographs and documents from the "morgue" files of the Afro-American newspaper.

University of Arkansas Provides Online Record of an Early Black Student Group on Campus

The two collections relate to the organization Black Americans for Democracy, a student group at the university during the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Founder of Bethune-Cookman University Inducted Into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame

Mary McLeod Bethune is one of the first three Floridians inducted into the new Hall of Fame at the State Capitol.

“Civil Rights in a Northern City:” Temple University Debuts New Online Archive

The online collection includes more than 1,500 items including newsreel footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that previously has not publicly available.

Columbia University Debuts Website With Digitized Images from Vast Scrapbook Collection

L.S. Alexander Gumby compiled 161 large scrapbooks documenting African American life in Harlem.

Martin Puryear to Design Slavery Memorial at Brown University

The project will recognize the historic ties of Brown University's founders to the slave trade. The memorial will be located near the site of the university's earliest buildings, some of which were built with the help of slave labor.

University of Virginia Unveils New Digitized Oral History Project of the Civil Rights Era

The recorded interviews of scores of attorneys and scholars who were active in the civil rights movement were conducted in the 1980s and are now available online.

After More Than a Century, W.E.B. Du Bois Is Named to a Faculty Post at Penn

Despite a Ph.D. from Harvard and groundbreaking research on sociology and race in the final years of the nineteenth century, W.E.B. Du Bois was not offered a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania.

Vanderbilt Establishes Digital Archive of Slave Records From Spanish Societies in the New World

Researchers captured more than 150,000 images, comprising more than 750,000 ecclesiastical records of African and African descended individuals from Brazil, Cuba, and Spanish Florida.

Cornell University Receives a Donation of 2,000 Photographs of African Americans

The collection includes images of slaves and a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in a jail cell.

Video Shows the Ignorance of College Students on the Subject of Black History

A white comedian donned blackface and interviewed students at Brigham Young University on the subject of Black history.

Myrlie Evers-Williams Named Scholar-in-Residence at Alcorn State University

The civil rights icon will teach, prepared her papers for the university's archives, and develop a research center on social justice and civic engagement.

Brown University Student Discovers a Lost Speech of Malcolm X

An audiotape of the 1961 speech that no one had heard for 50 years was found in the university's archives.

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