Head-and-shoulders portrait of Frederick Douglass, 1862. Photo by John White Hurn.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Primary sources give you a front-row seat to past events and unedited access to the people who shaped our history. You gain new perspectives by examining the past through the eyes and ears of someone who was there.
Primary sources may include, but are not limited to:
letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, maps, speeches, interviews, documents produced by government agencies, photographs, audio or video recordings, born-digital items (e.g. emails), research data, and objects or artifacts (such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons).
-- Primary Sources on the Web: Finding, Evaluating, Using. ALA Reference and User Services Association, 2015.
Primary sources can also be challenging to use.
The formats of primary sources may be unique and unfamiliar. They require critical analysis due to their creators’ intents and biases; the variety of contexts in which they have been created, preserved, and made accessible; and the gaps, absences, and silences that may exist in the materials.
Consider reaching out to a Skyline College librarian for help as you get started.
You're welcome to Ask a Librarian for guidance.
Not sure where to start?
Academic class, Roger Williams University, Nashville, 1899. Courtesy Library of Congress (00651765)
Here are collections of high quality primary sources online that you can include, quote and cite in your college papers and projects.
While there are hundreds of source sets, research guides and online exhibits to choose from, we've listed a small selection of the best.
University of Virginia logo
The University of Virginia Libraries has compiled an excellent list of "Free Web Sources" containing high quality primary sources for the study of African American history, mostly from universities and museums.
(Note: Scroll half way down the page to locate "Free Web Sources" box).
Here are just a couple examples of what you'll find there:
Mural of John Lewis, Atlanta, Georgia. Credit: TNS
From the Atlanta Constitution-Journal
From The New York Times
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by Congressman John Lewis takes readers inside the civil rights movement in Walking with the Wind and shares rare insight into the personalities at its heart. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congressman John Lewis was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s. Arrested more than forty times, he was one of its youngest and most courageous leaders. Writing with charm, warmth, and honesty, Lewis moves from the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins as he reflects on the era to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he led more than five hundred marchers on what became known as "Bloody Sunday." Though there have been exceptional books on the movement, Lewis's profound personal story is "destined to become a classic in civil rights literature" (Los Angeles Times).
March: Book One by Congressman John Lewis was an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence took him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president. Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis wrote March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell. March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall. Many years ago, John Lewis and other student activists drew inspiration from the 1958 comic book "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story." Now, his own comics bring those days to life for a new audience, testifying to a movement whose echoes will be heard for generations.
Run by First you MARCH Then you RUN THE STORY OF JOHN LEWIS CONTINUES From the bestselling, award-winning authors John Lewis& Andrew Aydin comes their next groundbreaking graphic novel--Run: Book One--illustrated by rising star Afua Richardson and featuring contributions by;Nate Powell. Told in multiple parts,;is the next chapter of John Lewis' involvement in the civil rights movement and public life after the saga. The books bring to the page the true story of John Lewis and many of his colleagues in the movement after the historic success of the Selma campaign. Opening two days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, John Lewis and his colleagues are arrested and taken to jail in Americus, Georgia, as the largest hooded Klan march in years takes shape on the courthouse steps;Run: Book One takes readers through the behind-the-scenes struggle to exercise the hard-won rights of people of color to register, vote, and secure equal representation in their elected leaders, all the while facing escalating tensions over continued American involvement in Vietnam.
His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope by An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present. John Lewis, who at age 25 marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family's chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it--his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God--and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic 20th- and 21st-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the 18th century." A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.
John Lewis looks out over Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington on June 7, 2020.
Photo credit: Khalid Naji-Allah/Executive Office of the Mayor/AP.
John Lewis was the last living member of the "Big Six," the Civil Rights Movement leaders who organized the 1963 March on Washington. Pictured, March 6, 1963, Roosevelt Hotel, New York. L to R: Lewis, Whitney Young, Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins. Photo credit: AFP / Stringer
Assata by On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides. 
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by The Autobiography of Malcolm X was intended to be a true autobiography, with the name of Alex Haley appearing not at all or as a ghost writer or as a mere contributor or assistant. However, with the assassination of Malcolm X having occurred in Harlem in New York City on February 21, 1965 just before this book could be published, it became necessary to reveal the important role of Alex Haley in creating this book.
Black Boy by Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book "was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American." From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for "obscenity" and "instigating hatred between the races." The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."
Crusade for Justice by "She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the history of the country."--Alfreda M. Duster Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells's private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells's great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.
Dust Tracks on a Road by "Warm, witty, imaginative. . . . This is a rich and winning book."--The New Yorker Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most compelling and influential authors. Hurston's powerful novels of the South--including Jonah's Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God--continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality. First published in 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston's personal story, told in her own words. The Perennial Modern Classics Deluxe edition includes an all-new forward by Maya Angelou, an extended biography by Valerie Boyd, and a special P.S. section featuring the contemporary reviews that greeted the book's original publication.
The Fire Next Time by "Basically the finest essay I've ever read. . . . Baldwin refused to hold anyone's hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." --Ta-Nehisi Coates A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement--and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity."--James Baldwin
Rosa Parks: in her own words by Until recently, Rosa Parks's personal papers were unavailable to the public. In this compelling new book from the Library of Congress, where the Parks Collection is housed, the civil rights icon is revealed for the first time in print through her private manuscripts and handwritten notes. Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words illumines her inner thoughts, her ongoing struggles, and how she came to be the person who stood up by sitting down. At the height of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as Parks was both pilloried and celebrated, she found a catharsis in her writing. Her precise descriptions of her arrest, the segregated South, and her recollections of childhood resistance to white supremacy document a lifetime of battling inequality. Parks expressed her thoughts on paper using whatever was available--meeting agendas, event programs, drugstore bags. The book features one hundred color and black-and-white photographs from the Parks collection, many appearing in print for the first time, along with ephemera from the long life of a private person in the public eye.
Up from Slavery by Delve into the turbulent roots of race relations in the United States with this inspirational account from Booker T. Washington, a one-time slave who became an important advocate for African-American education and founded several well-known institutions of higher learning, including the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Up From Slavery details Washington's life and outlines his sometimes-controversial views on education, social justice, and racial equality.
Ethnic NewsWatch (ProQuest) (Sign in as you would to Canvas)
Ethnic NewsWatch is an interdisciplinary, bilingual database of full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Designed "to tell the other side of the story," it gives students and other researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. Dates: 1990-current.
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