AP African American Studies Resource Archive | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

A map of Philadelphia, PA, and Camden, NJ, color coded in green, blue, yellow, and red.

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Map of Philadelphia and Camden

1937

View an example of the maps which would give rise to the term "redlining."

Primary Source

An engraving showing a hall with benches, a speaker at a rostrum in front and several Black men and women in formal wear looking for seats.

Emigration, Anti-Emigration, and Transatlantic Abolitionism

with Nemata Blyden

Learn more about the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision, and the Civil War on emigration.

Video

A typed title page of a book.

Establishing the Freedmen's Bureau

1865

Read the legislation creating the "bureau of refugees, freedmen, and abandoned lands" amid the US Civil War.

Primary Source

Justices of the Supreme Court, all white men, in black robes, five seated, and four standing.

Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Ruling

1896

Read the opinion of the court leading to the legal doctrine of separate but equal.

Primary Source

Masthead of the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper.

Clarissa Reed Searches for Her Family

1883

Read a formerly enslaved woman’s plea for information about her lost parents and siblings.

Primary Source

Cover page for "Le Code Noir ou Edit Du Roy," featuring a royal seal at the top of the page and a round stamp from the Bibliotheque National.

Louisiana Code Noir

1724

Read a revision to the Code Noir, developed following slave codes in English colonies.

Primary Source

Cover of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, featuring a Black woman wearing a brown hat (extending down her neckline) and large gold hoop earrings encircled in a black circle with a peach background.

“Restricted West Indian Immigration and the American Negro”

1924

Read this piece on the impact of the Immigration Act of 1924 on Afro-Caribbean migration to the US.

Primary Source

Black and white photograph of a large group of people, mostly women, posed around the exterior of a large Italianate style mansion. The figures are arranged on the building's multi-level balconies, stairs, and around a rectangular pool on the ground level. The photograph is mounted on a piece of gray cardboard that has sustained loss at the top right and bottom right corners. In the bottom right corner is black script that is partially missing.

Convention of Madam C. J. Walker Agents

1924

View an example of the extent and success of Madam C. J. Walker’s business empire through this photograph.

Primary Source

A map of the then-forty-eight states, each with a number of lynchings from 1889 to 1921 (in red) and the number of representatives who voted against the federal anti-lynching bill (in black).

“Visualizing the Red Summer” Map

2015–2025

Explore the history of racial violence culminating in the Red Summer of 1919.

Thematic Map

Two Black women wearing light-colored coats look into a glass vitrine case with the title "Arthur A Schomburg, 1874–1938." Atop the case is a matted photograph of Arturo [Arthur] Schomburg.

“The Negro Digs Up His Past”

1925

Read this essay by Afro-Latino historian and collector Arturo Schomburg.

Primary Source

Cover of A Red Record, with the title written in red on a yellowed piece of paper.

“A Red Record”

1895

Read an excerpt from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s analysis of lynchings in the US at the end of the nineteenth century.

Primary Source

Marcus Garvey, a Black man, wearing a dark jacket and vest, white shirt, and dark tie. He is also wearing a button on his lapel.

“Address to the Second UNIA Convention”

1921

Read Marcus Garvey’s address rejecting the colonization of Africa and advocating Black nationalism.

Primary Source