Content...

Organizations

NAACP Online
http://www.naacp.org/
The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is the oldest civil rights organization in the United States.  This site has the history of the organization and a fact sheet, which includes the names of the founders.  There is also information on the organization's programs and news including issue alerts and archived press releases.

ACLU Online
http://www.aclu.org/
The Freedom Network Issues of The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the nation's foremost advocate of individual rights, includes a link to information on Racial Equality.  This site has a list of landmark ACLU cases affecting racial equality, resources, ACLU briefing papers and current highlights.

History   [top]

We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement National Register Travel Itinerary
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/index.htm
This site is well worth a trip. Forty-one historic properties related to the modern civil rights movement make up this new National Register Travel Itinerary provided by the National Park Service.   Visitors can use the site to not only tour the churches, schools, houses, and buildings associated with the movement, but to find information on each property including pictures, addresses, and background information about the role each property played historically.  There is also supplemental information about the civil rights movement and key figures: The Need to Change, The Players, The Strategy, The Cost, and The Prize.  There are additional links and a bibliography and much much more.

SPLCENTER.ORG
http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/goframe.pl?refname=/centerinfo/lci-2.html
This is the Law Center Information site’s story of the Civil Rights Memorial

Aboard the Underground Railroad
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/
This site, also part of the National Register Travel Itinerary, traces the history of the Underground Railroad including the early antislavery movement. There is a map displaying the routes of the Underground Railroad. The List of Sites provides links, by state, to a history of each of the surviving historic places along the Railroad.

The Underground Railroad
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/99/railroad/j1.html
This National Geographic Society Web site contains an interactive account of a runaway slave's journey on the Underground Railroad.  The site also contains Routes to Freedom, a map of escape routes; a Time Line that covers slavery in the New Word from 1501 to 1865 when slavery in the US is abolished; and Faces of Freedom, a section containing portraits and short descriptions of abolitionists.  In addition there are Classroom Ideas by grade level with class activities and Internet resources plus a discussion forum and a list of resources and Web sites for further study.

AFRO-American Almanac
http://www.toptags.com/aama/
Created by Dr. Jack Powell and Donald E. Jones II, this site explores African-American history from the beginning of the slave trade, through the Civil Rights movement, to the present. This easy-to-navigate site has many resources related to African-American history and identity.
These include traditional folk tales, commentary and speeches, the text of 26 related books, historical documents, brief biographies, and brief accounts of key historical events. Additional features include trivia games and a collection of related links.  A good site for information.

From Revolution to Reconstruction
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/
"From Revolution to Reconstruction, and What Happened Afterwards" is an ongoing hypertext history of the United States from a number of US Information Agency publications. The information is divided into eight chapters.  The first three chapters, Look at History 1963, 1990, and 1994, each include a section on Sectional conflict.  What makes this a great resource is that the facts have been enriched with hypertext-links to relevant documents, original essays, other Internet sites, and to other Outlines.   Under Sectional Conflict in one outline there are links to the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, the Confessions of Nat Turner and excerpts from "A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States."  There is a lot of information here.

African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/aohome.html
This site, part of the excellent US Library of Congress's American Memory site, traces the African-American experience through nine chronological periods that document the long and difficult path from slavery to Reconstruction to the fight for civil and social equality in the twentieth century.  The emphasis is on historical material, through the Library's extensive African-American collection.  Click on "African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship" to start the trip.

Africans in America--PBS Online
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
This web site is PBS's companion to "Africans in America", a six-hour public television series. Africans in America: American's Journey Through Slavery is presented in four parts providing background information leading up to and including the Civil War. For each era, you'll find a historical Narrative, a Resource Bank of images, documents, stories, biographies, commentaries, and a Teachers' Guide for using the content of the Web site and television series in U.S. history courses.  The four parts are: The Terrible Transformation (1450-1750); Revolution (1750-1805); Brotherly Love (1791-1831); and Judgment Day (1831-1865).  There are also related Web resources and an outline of each TV show.

African American Journey
http://www2.worldbook.com/students/feature_index.asp#aahistory
Under African American History, there are links to The African American Journey, African American Literature-Voices of Slavery and Freedom, and Heart and Soul-A Celebration of African American Music.

Juneteenth
http://www.juneteenth.com/
Juneteenth is considered the oldest commemoration of the end of slavery. This site gives the history of the holiday from its origins in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to the present and provides a list of related organizations.

African American History Archive
http://historicaltextarchive.com
This is an interesting place to start for pointers to African American History sites and primary documents.  The site is not that well organized, but it is searchable.  There are links to important people, slavery, and state and regional history and much more.  The African American link at the top of the page is for articles and documents and the link for African American half way down the page is for web sites.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin  & American Culture
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/

Freedom’s Journal
http://www.shsw.wisc.edu/library/aanp/freedom/index.html
The first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the US.

North by South
http://www.northbysouth.org/
A site on the great migration of African-Americans from the rural South to Northern cites.

KIDS Report on Civil Rights
http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/tnl/detectives/kids/KIDS-000314.html
This is a list of civil rights sites selected by K-12 students and supported by University of Wisconsin.

People     [top]

Beyond the Playing Field: Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Advocate--NARA
http://www.nara.gov/education/teaching/robinson/robmain.html
The National Archives and Records Administration holds numerous records relating to Jackie Robinson, many of which pertain to his period of civil rights advocacy. There are nine letters/telegrams from Robinson to four US presidents reproduced here along with teaching resources on three topics: civil right history; character education; and civic responsibility.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
Located at Stanford University, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project contains secondary documents written about Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as primary documents written during King's life.  The site contains a biography, articles, papers, and documents including a list of the most requested ones.  Free registration is required to view the papers, and registered users may choose to be informed about future site updates and related events.

Seattle Times Commemorates Martin Luther King
http://www.seattletimes.com/mlk/index.html
The Seattle Times commemorates the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. with a Web site including sections on the man, the movement, the legacy, and the holiday.

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html
This site, from the University of Virginia, is a collection of interviews with former slaves who discuss their lives before and after freedom. “The narratives were transcribed verbatim from the interview transcripts collected by writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s.” The site features photos, sounds clips from original interviews and selected readings on American slavery and slave narratives as well as links to other resources.

"Been Here So Long": Selections from the WPA American Slave Narratives
http://newdeal.feri.org/asn/
This new site from the New Deal Network features a selection of seventeen interviews of former slaves conducted by members of the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In addition to the narratives, organized alphabetically by name, the site features an introductory essay, three lesson plans, and an annotated guide to related online resources.

Documenting the American South: The Southern Experience in 19th Century America
http://metalab.unc.edu/
The main library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has produced a site that provides access to primary materials that offer a Southern perspective on American history and culture.  There are currently five projects including North American Slave Narratives Beginnings to 1920 and The Church in the Southern Black Community Beginnings to 1920. The texts are available in SGML and HTML, but use the HTML format. The site is searchable.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/main.html
This collection, from the New York Public Library, contains some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers.   It provides "access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920."  The site is searchable by key word, title, and subject.

African-American Women
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html
This site, from Duke University, contains scanned pages and texts of African-American women writings.  Currently the site includes the memoirs of "Elizabeth Johnson Harris (1867-1942), an 1857 letter from Vilet Lester, a slave on a North Carolina plantation, and several letters from Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson, slaves on the estate of David Campbell, a governor of Virginia." There are also links to related resources

Civil Rights Oral History Interviews    
http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/xcivilrights.html
Visitors to the site can listen to eight interviews, which range from the experiences of Flip Schulke (a photographer working in the South during the 1960s) to the racial prejudice encountered by Emelda and Manuel Brown as they tried to raise a family in Spokane. The site is searchable.

Class Projects--Teachers Resources    [top]

Education First: Black History Artivities
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/BHM/AfroAm.html
This site, from Pacific Bell, has links to six Web sites that were "created as models to suggest ways to integrate the World Wide Web and videoconferencing into classroom learning."  African-American History was chosen as a topic because of its importance, popularity and the wealth of Internet resources available.  Four of the sites are examples of different ways to use the Internet.

•  The Black History Hotlist http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/BHM/bh_hotlist.html
  is a great list of Internet resources on Black History;
• Black History Past to Present  http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/BHM/bh_hunt_quiz.html
  is an interactive treasure hunt and quiz;
• Sampling African American  http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/BHM/bh_sampler.html
  tries to connect the student to feelings instead of facts about Black History; and
• “Little Rock 9 Integration 0?” http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/BHM/little_rock/
  is a webquest that tries to make a student think about the decisions and choices that were made during one event in Black History.

[Return to the Top] [back to Curriculum and Learning page]

Note: Please keep in mind that the Internet is a fluid medium and sites are constantly being added, moved and deleted.  If you find a dead or redirected link or you would like me to add a new resource please contact me at morsilka@shenet.org . Please give me the name of the task, the title of the link and link address.  Thank you.