Overview
Black Periodicals: From the Great Migration through Black Power, the final collection for Diversity & Dissent, will include periodicals that depict the various political, literary, and cultural forms that Black Americans used to advance their vision in the ongoing struggle for liberation and dignity. Magazines and newsletters from women’s organizations, religious groups, labor organizations, and more reveal a diversity of ideological orientations, strategic methods, and aesthetic modes among Black voices throughout the mid-twentieth century. This collection will also include select titles from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean that reflect the global dimensions of the Black freedom struggle, and will pay particular attention to publications originating in the early 20th century and interwar era, foregrounding connections between this period and the Civil Rights movement and beyond.
Scope
While the majority of the included periodicals, which will total 75,000 pages upon completion, will be drawn from the era around the Black Power movement of the late 1960s-1970s, the collection will aim to add other featured clusters, such as:
- Newsletters from organizations of Black women, exemplified by such groups as the National Council of Negro Women and the Third World Women’s Alliance, and local women’s service clubs. These types of organizations published newsletters to broadcast their work and mobilize communities for their cause.
- Periodicals representing the advocacy work of Black organizations that sought to educate, inform, and promote specific causes, such as opportunities for Black people in the South or the release of political prisoners. Particular attention will be paid to those periodicals in this category that had women editors or key contributors.
- Periodicals from labor organizations, demonstrating the organizing by Black workers in various industries, such as autoworkers and railroad workers, as well as publications from Black agricultural institutions, published contemporaneously to the beginnings of the U.S. labor movement of the 1930s.
Research and descriptive text for this collection was contributed by Timnet Gedar.
Content contributors
The following libraries, archives, and publishers have agreed to provide source material for scanning. We expect to add many more libraries and archives to this list over the course of the project. Please contact us if your organization has source material that you would like to contribute to the project.
- Michigan State University
- Iowa State University
Funding
All funding needed to publish Black Periodicals will be drawn from the Diversity & Dissent Digitization Fund, which is now fully funded. Visit the Diversity & Dissent page for information about the program and the list of libraries that contributed to the funding pool.
Interested in contributing content?
We are actively approaching a number of libraries for participation, but funding libraries can also contribute some content; ten percent of the collection is being reserved for content provided by those libraries not specifically targeted for inclusion.
Funding libraries are invited to nominate source material from their own collections, from a single document to multiple boxes.
Rights and privacy
Reveal Digital will undertake diligent efforts to contact the rights holders of in-copyright publications included in this collection and seek their written consent. Reveal Digital also will endeavor to protect the privacy of individuals depicted in the pages of the publications in this collection. If you are a writer, editor, or other contributor to a publication made available as part of Black Periodicals and encounter personal information of any kind that should be removed from view, please write to us to request its removal:
Reveal Digital
One Liberty Plaza
165 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10006
+ 1 212-358-6400
support.revealdigital@ithaka.org
Please include an address or any other contact information at which you can be reached, and we will respond as soon as possible.
Feel free to contact us at support.revealdigital@ithaka.org with any further questions about the availability of the newspapers in this collection.
Legal notice
Black Periodicals aims to create a faithful digital reproduction of the collective works as they originally appeared in print and pursuant to 17 U.S.C Section 201(c) of the Copyright Act. Please note that if content items in the Black Periodicals collection reference permissible terms of use, such as a Creative Commons license, users may make use of such items in accordance with the stated terms of such license as further detailed in the JSTOR Terms and Conditions of Use.