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Collections Overviews - American Studies

African-American Studies

Scope

This overview focuses on the Library's holdings of materials by and about African-Americans. The study of African-Americans (persons of African heritage in the United States) is not just a subset of American studies, but also requires the use of resources relating to the history and literature of Africa and other countries where black people have lived. The collections at the Library are organized in such a way that the African and Middle Eastern Division is responsible for resources relating to the African continent, and the Hispanic Division holds primary responsiibility for Afro-Caribbean resources. The resources represented at the Library include all formats: manuscripts, newspapers, serials, microform, motion pictures, and other genres.

Size

The absence of a special African-American collection impedes an accurate estimation of its size. Although no special count has been made of all the subject areas covered by African-American studies, we may roughly estimate the size of the collection at approximately 50,000 books and periodicals, based on a combined count of the African-American history and literature classes, and classes dealing with slavery and the slave trade, the Civil War, and civil rights.

General Research Strengths

Because of the vast resources obtained through copyright deposit, the Library's general collection, which contributes much to its African-American resources, is unparalleled. Because African-American studies is an interdisciplinary field, materials are scattered throughout the classified collections, and are also well represented in the Library's large collections of U.S. government and official publications.

The strengths of African-American resources in the general collections are multiplied by the huge number of related resources available in the Library's special collections. These materials include manuscripts, microforms, folk archives, newspapers, periodicals and legal literature, music, recorded sound, motion picutres, prints and and photographs, and maps and atlases.

Areas of Distinction

Subject areas where resources are especially strong include slavery, the slave trade, slave narratives, abolition and antislavery publications, the Civil War and its literature, lynching, riots, and civil disturbances.

In its Manuscript Division, the Library has virtually unparalleled collections of the papers of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Urban League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the papers of A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the papers of CORE, SNCC, and the Martin Luther King FBI files, just to mention some of the most notable.

Also of particular importance are the Slave Narrative Collection available in both the Microform Reading Room and in the Manuscript Division, the Daniel A. P. Murray pamphlet and black authors collections. The collection of broadsides in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division includes items related to African-American studies. The recorded sound and music collections of the Library contain outstanding material for the study of black music, and the folklore and folklife collections are outstanding in their own right.

Other important collections include materials on the Civil War, such as regimental histories, military histories, and publications of both the Confederate and Union armies.

U. S. government resources include Congressional hearings, the Congressional Record, the serial set, and publications of government agencies.

Weaknesses/Exclusions

Many books listed in the Library's computer and other catalogs have been unavailable (missing) for years and replacements have not been (in some cases cannot be) acquired. Pamphlets and other publications of black organizations have not been acquired consistently or systematically (these are difficult both to identify, and to acquire).

African-American photographs are not represented as adequately as history would warrant. However, the Library's record here is better than at other American institutions, and the Library is actively pursuing the acquisition of collections in this area. The Library of Congress photograph collection is primarily important for materials in the Farm Security Administration collection which document African-American life and history, its NAACP collection, W. E. B. Dubois albums, and the Frances Benjamin Johnson photographs of black institutions.

Although its collections of the personal papers of historical African-American leaders, educators, and politicians are good, the Manuscript Division does not own the papers of any of the prominent contemporary African-American creative writers, artists, and scientists, nor does it maintain a collection of the Harlem Renaissance writers, except those available for purchase (in microfilm) from other institutions. Early writings of important 18th- and 19th-century writers have only recently been added to the collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The Library does not have an African-American oral history collection, and lacks many sound recordings of speeches and conferences.