RU COLLECTIONS:
History Commons: On August 30, 2024, the Accessible Archives legacy platform was retired and African American Accessible Archives modules moved to the History Commons platform. Modules that are moving include: African American Newspapers in the South: Newspapers originally published by and for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Southern United States. African American Newspapers, Parts I-XII, Part XII Supplement: Newspapers originally published by and for African Americans throughout the 19th century. American County Histories: New Jersey: 19th century books on New Jersey county history, many of which include biographical and genealogical information.
Proquest Historical Newspapers (Combined Search): The collections include the Chicago Defender, the Courier Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New Jersey Collection. This search allows you to search within all the newspaper collections simultaneously. Each issue has been fully digitized and indexed, including all articles, illustrations, and advertisements. (dates 18-20th C, depends on publication)
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers: digitized newspapers from all the United States, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Newspapers have been fully digitized and indexed from cover to cover. The collection includes newspapers published between 1798 and 1963; date ranges vary for each newspaper. A variety of search options are available, including by state, ethnicity, language, newspaper title, or date of publication. New Jersey newspapers in this collection were digitized by The New Jersey Digital Newspaper Project (NJDNP), a collaboration of Rutgers University Libraries, the New Jersey State Archives and the New Jersey State Library.
OTHER NJ LIBRARIES:
ARCHIVES:
Scarlet and Black Digital Archive Project: The Scarlet and Black Digital Archive features primary sources documenting African American history at Rutgers University and in our surrounding communities. Materials include digitized and linked NJ Slavery Records and maps (from RU Special Collections), Black Voices Oral histories
Digital Collection of Peter Still Papers ( website of Rutgers librarian Francesca Giannetti), including transcriptions. Peter Still, who was born a slave in 1801, was able to buy his own freedom after forty years of enslavement. The collection consists of his manuscript letters and notebooks, which chronicle his efforts to purchase the freedom of his wife and family in Alabama. Peter Still was the older brother of William Still, a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Digital materials are available online in Rutgers Digital Library but more easily accessible at the
ORAL HISTORY:
Black Voices at Rutgers Black Voices is an index of African American interviewees who have participated in various oral history projects in Rutgers oral history projects. It provides an easy way to search interview descriptions to find interviews with Black interviewees.
Jazz Oral History ProjectThis audio collection consists of 120 oral histories of seminal pre-Swing Era and Swing Era jazz musicians recorded between 1972 and 1983. The project was initially administered by the New York - based non-profit service organization Jazz Interactions, and then by the Smithsonian's newly-established jazz program. Administration and archiving of JOHP was turned over to the Institute of Jazz Studies in 1979. The Institute conducted further interviews as well as editing and correcting transcripts of prior interviews. more
Krueger-Scott Oral History Collection Krueger-Scott is the largest collection of oral history interviews conducted with African-American residents of Newark who came to the city during the Great Migration, as well as those whose local roots stretch back generations. The faculty, staff and graduate students at Rutgers University-Newark who have worked on the collection in collaboration with local cultural institutions are proud to have helped preserve, archive, and make public these remarkable oral narratives that describe an as yet unwritten history of twentieth century African-American life.
Rutgers-Newark in the 1960s and 1970s Oral History Collection The collection consists of cassette recordings of oral history interviews conducted by librarian emeritus Gilbert Cohen. These interviews document the city of Newark and Rutgers University-Newark in the 1960s and 1970s. Sixty people associated with the Rutgers-Newark campus were interviewed including students, faculty, administration, and staff representing a wide spectrum of political beliefs and levels of activism."
Queer Newark Oral History Project (QNOHP) founded in the summer of 2011 by Darnell Moore, an activist and writer and the first chair of the City of Newark’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Concerns, Beryl Satter, a history professor at Rutgers University-Newark, and Christina Strasburger, the administrator of the Departments of History and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Bringing together Newark’s LGBTQ activists, high school students, artists, church leaders, professors, administrators and university staff, Moore and Satter convened a series of focused discussions with the goal of developing an initiative to collect and preserve the history of LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming communities in Newark.
The Rutgers Oral History Archives
The Rutgers Oral History Archives records the personal narratives of:
~ either New Jersey residents and/or Rutgers University alumni, faculty or staff who served on the home front and overseas during World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the nation's most recent conflicts (includes Tuskegee Airmen)
~ People with a story to tell about some aspect of New Jersey's proud history, its towns and cities, its diverse populations, organizations within the Garden State and/or social/cultural movements and events
~ Men and women who helped shape the history of Rutgers University as students, alumni, faculty, staff and in other roles
SLAVERY & COLONIALISM
Account books may have references to enslaved individuals doing work or errands for their owner or being hired out. Occasionally, there may also be references when their owners obtained shoes or clothes for them or paid for medical care.
The Indenture Collection (17th-19th century) comprises deeds and legal documents concerning the purchase and sale of land and property. The records include sales of people held in bondage, as well as sales of property to formerly enslaved people. Access to the collection is through a card catalog in the reading room.
Family and personal papers may include wills, legal documents, correspondence, and other papers concerning the purchase, transfer, and manumission of people held in bondage.
20TH CENTRUY
Paul Robeson Collection, 1916-2006: Paul Robeson was an American actor, athlete, bass-baritone concert singer, writer, and civil rights activist. This collection comprises of material gathered together to document the career of one of Rutgers most famous and influential alumnus. It spans the years 1916 to 1998 and includes newspaper clippings, published articles, books, sound recordings, correspondence, photographs and negatives, bibliographies, and writings
Bernard Bush Collection on KKK in New Jersey; Assembled documentation pertaining to the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey and related background materials. Present are geographical files relating to the Klan in New Jersey, all of its counties and many of its municipalities; files on Klan and pro-Klan organizations, leaders and publications in relation to New Jersey; files concerning the New Jersey Klan in relation to special subjects (such as immigration, Prohibition, elections and Protestant churches); files on target groups
Faith Ringgold Collection: The Faith Ringgold Collection reflects many aspects of its creator's experiences as a teacher, artist, consultant, and curator. It consists primarily of documentation of Ringgold's August 1998 curriculum vitae (CV) and includes a selection of publications by and about the artist plus catalogs and promotional materials from solo, performance, and group exhibitions.
Shirley Chisholm Papers: he papers of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to be elected to Congress, are approximately 4.4 cubic feet in size, comprising 10 manuscript boxes, a photograph box and a newspaper box. The collection spans the period 1969-1994. The papers contain speeches, congressional files, newsletters, newspapers and magazine articles, photographs, campaign miscellany, and audio cassettes.
INSTITUTE FOR JAZZ STUDIES (NEWARK DANA LIBRARY)
Count Bassie Family Papers and Artifacts: The Count Basie family papers and artifacts comprise the extant papers and personal belongings of the Basie family, including Catherine, Diane, and Count Basie. The collection contains personal papers, music, photographic prints and negatives, business records, artwork, and audio and moving image recordings, as well as artifacts. The majority of items in the collection are from the 20th century, particularly the time period between the mid-1950s to the early 1980s.
Francis Paudris Collection on Bud Powell: Francis Paudras (1935-1997) was an artist, amateur pianist, and jazz enthusiast who developed a close friendship with jazz bebop pianist, Bud Powell (1924-1966). In the early 1960s, Paudras invited Powell to live with him in his Paris apartment, where he became Powell’s caretaker and unofficial manager. The Francis Paudras collection on Bud Powell documents Paudras’s friendship with Powell and includes home movies, interviews about Powell, scrapbooks, footage of Powell’s 1966 funeral
Victoria Spivey Papers: This collection represents blues singer Victoria Spivey with song lyrics and photographs of her alongs side various artists, family, and friends. Also included are other collected writings, correspondence, and some business and personal papers.
See more on Archive Space collections related to African American History
Special Collections and University Archives: African American HIstory Resources