Our current "Top of the Page" feature is both informative and fun. It's all about black basketball. Let us introduce you to Black Fives.

Black Fives
Black Fives, Inc. researches, preserves, promotes, and teaches the history of African American participation in basketball. In particular, its focus is on the many all-black teams that played from the early 1900s through the late-1940s, prior to the racial integration of pro basketball, a period they call the Black Fives Era. You can also read Claude Johnson's very interesting blog and buy a pair of basketball shoes.

BlackPast.Org
This is the place to start for black history on the web. BlackHistory.org is dedicated to providing reference materials to the general public on six centuries of African American history. It includes an online encyclopedia of hundreds of famous and lesser known figures in African America, full text primary documents and major speeches of black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present. There are also links to hundreds of websites that address the history of African Americans including major black museums and archival research centers in the United States and Canada.  In addition to all the other wonderful material, you'll want to check out African American History in the West to get a view of black history that you won't find anywhere else.

The African American Mosaic
The Mosaic is the first resource guide to the Library of Congress's African-American collections. Covering the nearly 500 years of the black experience in the Western hemisphere, the Mosaic surveys the full range, size, and variety of the Library's collections, including books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film, and recorded sound.

Amistad Research Center
Amistad is among the largest of the nation's repositories specializing in the history of African Americans. Papers of African Americans and records of organizations and institutions of the African American community make up about 90 percent of the Center's holdings. The other 10 percent, significant in number and content, contains documentation on Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Asian Americans, European immigrants, and Appalachian whites. Check out the IMLS digital project.

Association of Black Women Historians
An excellent place to start for those who are serious about studying Black women's history, the ABWH site includes links, bibliographies, and other valuable resources.

A Deeper Shade of History
While you can look at interesting facts for any particular week in Black History, you can also search the database by topic. In some cases, there are links to other websites on the subject as well.

African American Nurses
Aetna Insurance sponsors this highly informative site about the history of African American nurses and nursing.

Images and Exhibits

General

African American Mosaic and the African American Odyssey are two exhibits from the Library of Congress collections. All the images here should be in the public domain unless otherwise noted. Excellent download quality.

American Memory: African American History
There are links here to 17 different online archives from around the country of images, manuscripts and documents about African American History. The main American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress also has collections with excellent images of African Americans.

Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) Image Gallery has the Scurlock Studio Collection. Addison Scurlock and his two sons were major African American photographers in Washington D.C., and the Archives Center at the Smithsonian has now didgitized over 2,000 of the photographs from that collection. They are an incredible resource and of excellent quality. Just click on Cross-Searching Center and type the name "Scurlock" into the search box. Each Smithsonian archive follows the fair use rule, "Fair use of copyrighted material includes the use of protected materials for non-commercial educational purposes, such as teaching, scholarship, research, criticism, commentary, and news reporting."

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
In addition to finding information about this valuable section of the New York Public Library, you will find several online exhibits, which change from time to time. In Motion: The African-American Migration Experienceis a particularly good one. The website states that the images "are presented in the hope that they will at one and the same time address some of your viewing, research, education and study needs..." Very good download quality. The main New York Public Library Digital Collection (NYPLDigitalGallery) is also an excellent site. Searching via this site accesses not only the images available on DigitalSchomburg, but a number of images from the Schomburg's Rare Books and Manuscripts collection as well.

Early Years

Civil Rights

The South

The Northeast

The Midwest

The West