National African American History Month 2003

• How to find books in our collection about African Americans,
• A list of titles not in our collection but of interest,
• How to find information on area events,
• And online reference sources for the study of African American history.

This year’s theme is the centennial of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by W.E.B. Du Bois. We look forward to seeing and hearing from you.

W.E.B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, 1868–1963, was an early exponent of full equality for African Americans and a cofounder (1905) of the Niagara Movement, which became (1909) the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Unlike Booker T. Washington, who believed that unskilled blacks should focus on economic self-betterment, Du Bois demanded that African-Americans should achieve not only economic equality but full civil and political equality as well. In 1910 he became editor of the influential NAACP magazine, Crisis, a position he held until 1934, when he resigned over the question of voluntary segregation and returned to Atlanta Univ. (1934–44). In 1961 he became a member of the U.S. Communist party. In the last two years of his life Du Bois lived in Ghana. Source: "Du Bois, W. E. B.." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. © 1994, 2000, 2001, 2002 on Infoplease.com. © 2002 Family Education Network. 10 Feb. 2003 .

Origin
National African American History Month, also known as Black History Month, was created by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Born to parents who were former slaves, he spent his childhood working in the Kentucky coal mines and enrolled in high school at age twenty. He graduated within two years and later went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. The scholar was disturbed to find in his studies that history books largely ignored the black American population—and when blacks did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of black people throughout American history. Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly impacted the American black population, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Source: Black History." Infoplease.com. © 2002 Family Education Network. 10 Feb. 2003 .

Online Sources
You may want to check out the following sites for information on African American history:

• CNN, “Black History Month: Soul of a Culture”
  Through interactives, games, timelines, and quizzes, this site explores culture, innovation, literature, and music of African Americans.
• The Encyclopædia Britannica, “Guide to Black History”
  The highlight of this site is its thorough timeline.
• Gale, “Free Resources--Black History Month”
  A leading publisher of reference material, Gale has made some of their resources available for free.
• History Channel, “Celebrate Black History Month”
  This site offers biographical information on many well-known African Americans.
• Infoplease, “Black History Month”
  Infoplease’s extensive site has biographies and timelines as well as African American-themed crossword puzzles and quizzes.
• Library of Congress, “The AFRICAN-AMERICAN MOSAIC: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture” and “African American Odyssey”
  These projects of the Library of Congress offer digitized primary source materials.
• MSN, “Celebrating Black History Month”
  MSN’s site has a timeline as well as a photo gallery of Women who changed America.
• New York Public Library, “Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture”
  The Schomburg Center is renowned for its dedication to scholarship and digital collections such as “African American Writers of the 19th Century” and “The African Presence in the Americas.”
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Documenting the American South”
  This site offers approximately 200 full-text slave narratives.
• U.S. Census Bureau, “The Black Population in the United States”
  and “Facts for Features”
  The Census Bureau offers current and historical information about African Americans (See: “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States”). The bureau’s press office annually releases a fact sheet about the African American population.
• Yahoo, “Yahooligans > Black History Month”
  This site is part of Yahoo’s web guide for kids. It serves as a gateway to sites about African American history, Black history month, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.