Increasingly
you will find good material here, though you’ll have to wade through a lot of
dross. It is particularly good for hard-to-get contextual and primary material
and for bibliography. (For example: if you wondered how Frederick Douglass
actually escaped north, you can find a magazine article in which he described
his escape archived on the web.) Any search engine will give results, and
there are established lists of black history and culture sites.
General literature sites are also
of use: e.g. the University of Virginia electronic texts archive (where, for
example, you can find the text of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, one of the
first novels published in America by a black American – go to: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~YP/yp_home.html).
The Virginia American Studies site has much more relating
to black Americans, including an excellent hypertext edition of the famous
‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’ issue of Survey Graphic magazine http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/
There is good material (for example dozens of slave
narratives taken down orally in the 1930s, and images of the ‘Jim Crow’ South)
among the huge historical resources in the Library of Congress ‘American
Memory’ project: http://memory.loc.gov;
especially the ‘African-American Mosaic’ collection: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/intro.html
Some other sites that may be useful include:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/stone/webguide/
excellent University of North Carolina links page on black culture, history,
literature – specific listings for topics like Slave Narratives, the Great
Migration, film, music, etc.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/index.html
‘Documenting the American South’ site – a wealth of materials
http://www.eng.hss.cmu.edu
a variety of African-American links.
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/exploring/harlem/artsedge.html
Harlem Renaissance site, includes good interactive map, material of writers,
arts, salons and film clips with Robeson, Bessie Smith, dance.
http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html
Schomburg Centre – lively Harlem Renaissance displays and other resources
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm
online etexts listing, by author