National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: Volume Iii, 1917 1968: Migrations
Collection of 11 primary resources exploring the migrations made by African Americans in the 20th Century and the effects they had. Includes text links, notes and questions for discussion.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Citizens: African American Identity: 1865 1917
Discusses the efforts of African Americans to be recognized as equal citizens after the Civil War, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Includes links to supplemental information.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Poetry, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
This study of black protest poems from the early part of the twentieth century through the late sixties can provide insight into the issues African Americans faced during that time and the ways they responded to them. Works from seven...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: The Promised Land?
A short story and a painting illustrating African American perceptions of Northern cities. Rudolph Fisher's short story "The City of Refuge" and William H. Johnson's painting Moon over Harlem offer insight into life within the black...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: Old Timers, Newcomers
An editorial cartoon and a newspaper article illustrating the tensions between members of established African American communities in the North and Southern migrants. Links to both resources are provided within this site.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Associations (I), Making of African American Identity: V. 2
Newspaper articles that illustrate how benevolent and charitable societies fostered racial solidarity among African Americans in late-nineteenth-century America are provided. Links to these articles can be found on the second page.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: w.e.b. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk
A chapter that explores how white perceptions influence African American identity. Although granted freedom, citizenship, and suffrage by the Civil War amendments, W. E. B. Du Bois explains how the emancipated black person had yet to be...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Family, Making of African American Identity: V. 2
A short story and photographs that illustrate the role family played in shaping African American identity in nineteenth-century America. A link to "The Stones of the Village" by Alice Dunbar-Nelson supports this concept.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Self Image, Making of African American Identity: V. 2
An editorial and four poems that explore African American strivings for self-esteem in the late-nineteenth century. All documents referenced within this resource attempt to shine a light on African American self-image and identity.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Education, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Nineteenth-century accounts and twentieth-century recollections by former slaves of the absence of and obstacles to education for African Americans. Links to narratives of freed and newly freed slaves are provided.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Citizenship, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Public addresses, letters, and narratives about the absence of and the need for citizenship rights for African Americans. Links to resources used to lobby for equal rights are provided at the top of the page.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: Emigration
Proposals for and arguments against the emigration of blacks to Haiti and to Africa during the mid-nineteenth century. The struggle of African Americans, such as Martin Delany, to determine the appropriate course of action with this...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community and Memory, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
A story that defines community as a connection between the past and the present. This resource links to Henry Dumas's short story, "Ark of Bones" and reviews its social commentary as it applies to African American community.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Freedom: Charles W. Chesnutt: African American Identity
Short story that explores the cultural and linguistic resources that sustained African Americans in the first years of freedom. This resource focuses on Charles Chesnutt and the influence he achieved by writing about race for a white...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Voting: Making of African American Identity: V. 3
The efforts to secure African American voting rights in Mississippi are described within this resource. Anne Moody's, "Coming of Age in Mississippi", a four-part memoir recounts her childhood and young adulthood in racist rural Mississippi.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community & Self Help, Making of African American Identity:v. 3
An interview illustrating some of the ways community functioned in the lives of African Americans. It explores how external pressures of racism brought African Americans together to form fraternal organizations and entire towns.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Race as Community, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
Articles illustrating how African Americans defined community according to perceptions of race. Links are provided to these works by George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, E. Franklin Frazier.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making It, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
Excerpts from a novel and an interview that illustrate where the success of the civil rights movement left some middle class African Americans. They explore the obstacles the civil rights movement had to overcome and the movement's...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Petitions, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Three late-eighteenth-century petitions to state legislatures and one to Congress by enslaved or free African Americans seeking civil liberties. These four petitions, called "memorials", present a range of origins, goals, and outcomes.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Reconstruction: African American Identity: 1865 1917
An interview, government reports, two paintings, and a work song that explore the constraints placed upon African American freedom in the late-nineteenth century as a result of reconstruction.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Leadership, Making of African American Identity: V. 2
Essay in which W. E. B. Du Bois discusses the need for a black elite. This essay, "The Talented Tenth" is provided, illustrating his efforts to improve the social standing of African Americans.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: 1913: Fifty Years, Making of African American Identity: V. 2
A poem, an address, and a blues song that express black life in the first fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The texts examine whether the true meaning of the proclamation carried forward to the lives African Americans.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: New Consciousness
Alain Locke's essay, "Enter the New Negro," is provided within this site and describes a new African American sense of self, inspired by migration to the urban North.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Making of African American Identity: Painting the Migration
Paintings by Jacob Lawrence titled, "The Migration of the Negro", a series of sixty paintings, illustrates the migration of African Americans to the North in the twentieth century. A link to this artwork can be found within this summary.