Describes resources in Library of Congress collections related to African American history in a variety of formats, including visual materials.
Available online via HathiTrust External

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Sean Dennis Cashman surveys the history of civil rights in twentieth-century America. The book charts the principal course of civil rights against the dramatic backdrop of two world wars, the Great Depression, the affluent society of the postwar world, the cultural and social agitation of the 1960s, and the emergence of the new conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s. Cashman describes the profound upheaval that African-Americans experienced as they moved from the outright racism of the South through the Great Migration northward from 1915, and sets the contribution of African-American leaders within their historical context: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others. The work also describes the shift in emphasis in the movement from legal cases brought before the courts to mass protest movements and, later, the change in direction from civil rights to Black Power and, later, Pan-Africanism.

Between 1935 and 1942, photographers for the New Deal's Resettlement Administration-Farm Security Administration (FSA) captured in powerfully moving images the travail of the Great Depression and the ways of a people confronting radical social change. Those who speak of the special achievement of FSA photography usually have in mind such white icons as Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother or Walker Evans's Alabama sharecroppers. But some six thousand printed images, a tenth of FSA's total, included black figures or their dwellings. Nicholas Natanson reveals both the innovative treatment of African Americans in FSA photographs and the agency's highly problematic use of these images once they had been created. This study employs a variety of methodological tools to explore the political and administrative forces that worked against documentary coverage of particularly sensitive racial issues. Moreover, Natanson shows that those who drew on the FSA photo files for newspapers, magazines, books, and exhibitions often entirely omitted images of black people and their environment or used devices such as cropping and captioning to diminish the true range of the FSA photographers' vision.

An audio documentary about the African-Americans who migrated from the rural South to the urban North between 1915 and 1951. These Americans reminisce and tell their own stories. Produced by David Tarnow for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and narrated by the museum's director, Spencer Crew.

Explores the methods used by Africans and their American-born descendants not only to resist their enslavement but also to demand their emancipation and full participation in American society. Library of Congress resources included thousands of books, manuscripts, maps, images and music pieces, from which were chosen the items on view in the exhibition.

This text is rich in names of places that you can look for, and provides a great introduction to the overall migration story.