Amistad Research Center

Amistad Research Room by AmistadResearch, January 2015

The Amistad Research Center is located at Tulane University in New Orleans. According to its website: “The history of slavery, race relations, African American community development, and the civil rights movement have received new and thought-provoking interpretations as the result of scholarly and community research using Amistad’s resources. The holdings include the papers of artists, educators, authors, business leaders, clergy, lawyers, factory workers, farmers, and musicians.”

Its holdings are organized in these collections: Manuscripts & Library Collections; Fine Art Collection; Digital Projects; and Audiovisual at Amistad. Click here for details about its collections. Click here for information about conducting research at Amistad.

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The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study

A digital version of DuBois’s 1899 study is available at GoogleBooks and InternetArchive. The links are below. The cover for the 1995 edition is pictured above.

An article in a University of Pennsylvania publication reported:
“In 1896, Du Bois was appointed an assistant instructor at Penn and began his investigation of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia — research that he would turn into his groundbreaking work, ‘The Philadelphia Negro.'”

It continued:
“Du Bois’ completed tome, ‘The Philadelphia Negro,’ is intense, exhaustive, and meticulous, filled with methodically detailed facts, figures, charts, graphs, lists, diagrams, and maps, including a large, color-coded map—that was pull-out and printed in color in early editions—showing the social condition and distribution of African Americans throughout the Seventh Ward.

“He corroborated his work using colonial records, manuscripts, biographies and autobiographies, legal documents, census data, newspaper articles, correspondence, meeting minutes, publications, obituaries, private libraries, annuls, and in-person interviews and observations.”

Read the complete article:
Greg Johnson. The times and life of W.E.B. DuBois at Penn, Penn Today, February 22, 2019

The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) (GoogleBooks)
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) (Internet Archive)

A short documentary is available on YouTube:
A Legacy of Courage: W.E.B. Du Bois and The Philadelphia Negro (19:16), DuBoisTheWard, June 19, 2012

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“Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies”

This exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, ends soon but the 32-page full-color exhibition guide is online. It’s free. Download it while you can.

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“Last Seen: Finding Families After Slavery”

“It is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people held in the Upper South were separated from a parent or child through sale, and a third of all slave marriages were destroyed by forced migration.”
This quote from Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade (page 28) refers to Robert H. Gudmestad’s A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade published by Louisiana State University Press in 2003).

“Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery is recovering stories of families separated in the domestic slave trade. Formerly enslaved people placed these ads hoping to reconnect with family and loved ones for decades following emancipation. The ads serve as testaments to their enduring hope and determination to regain what was taken from them.”

Its mission is to “identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. These newspaper ads began appearing in the 1830s (our earliest ad appeared in The Liberator in 1832) and greatly increased in frequency in the years immediately following emancipation (1865) and continued well into the 20th century. (The collection includes an ad that appeared in The Richmond Planet in 1922.)”
Note: The paragraph above is excerpted from “About the Project.”

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Map Showing the Travels of Dred Scott from 1831 to His Death in 1858

“Famous Trials” is a website developed by Professor Douglas O. Linder. It is an educational and non-commercial website maintained at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. Click on the map to view additional resources related to Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford.

Dred Scott was born enslaved in Southampton County, Virginia about 1800. In 1846 he filed a freedom suit in Missouri claiming that having lived for several years in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory where slavery was illegal, he was entitled to his freedom. The case wended its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled against him in 1857. The court decision in Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford established that people of African descent could not claim citizenship and as non-citizens they could not bring suit in a federal court. A timeline of events is available on the website.

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