African American History: HPL Guide

Recognizing the value of funeral programs, particularly to the African American community, the funeral program initiative was created to collect and index African American funeral programs of persons who live in or have ties to Houston and the surrounding communities, and Texas. The African American Library at the Gregory School hopes this collection provides a rich source of local history, personal history of individuals and a collective history of African Americans in Texas.

Personal and professional papers of African American Houstonians.  These include businesses, social clubs, families, individuals, religious, service and cultural organizations. 

This collection captures rich, under-documented experiences from individuals who contribute to African American culture and offers a first-hand view that is Houston's African American experience.

Many items in our photograph collections are available online through the HPL Digital Archives. Contact us at hpl.gregoryphoto@houstontx.gov for information on photo use, ordering photos, or any items not posted online.

The majority of our newspapers are on microfilm. These consist of local African American newspapers, such as The Informer, The Houston Defender, and The Houston Forward Times. 
Our collection of scholarly journals includes primary sources such as The Journal of Negro History from 1916 and The Negro History Bulletin from 1939.

Books about the African American experience in Houston and the United States and those that support the library’s archival collections. To search the Houston Public Library catalog for our book holdings select African American Library at the Gregory School as the Location on the Advanced Search page. All materials are non-circulating and for library use only.

We actively maintain Vertical Files of printed resources on an extensive variety of local and regional topics.  This ready reference file is a continually growing collection of clippings from newspapers, journals, and magazines relating to the history of African Americans in Houston and Texas.

Our collection contains yearbooks from historically African American schools in Houston. The collection includes high school and college yearbooks.

Journey through African American culture and heritage in Texas — an experience that includes hardships and triumphs, valor and determination, influence and change.

The Galveston and Texas History Center collects, preserves and organizes archival materials that document the history of Galveston and Texas, focusing on Galveston from the city’s incorporation in 1839 through the present. The collection also includes Texas from the Spanish period to the end of the Civil War.

People of African descent have been inextricably linked to the history of the land now known as Texas since the earliest days of colonization.

Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. While most research on American race relations has utilized a binary analytical lens - examining either "black" vs. "white" or "Anglo" vs. "Mexican" - the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project collects, interprets, and disseminates new oral history interviews with members of all three groups.

Founded in 1995 by Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin. TAAP Archive provides a broad overview of African American photography in the urban and rural areas of Texas, spanning the period from the 1870s to the present and representing a variety of processes and makers. The Archive is unique in its comprehensiveness and consists of over 60,000 photographic negatives and prints and more than 20 oral histories collected from African American photographers. Most of the items in the Archive have been donated by the photographers and their families, while others have been acquired from private collections.

A joint exhibit from the State Preservation Board and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

This online feature has more than 850 entries on African Americans in Texas, many of which appeared in the earlier versions of the Handbook, and approximately 300 new articles about all aspects of African American life and history in Texas. This Handbook is initiated to capture, to create greater awareness, and to increase research on the roles and contributions that Afro-Texans (individuals, groups, and organizations) have made to their neighborhoods, cities, state, and often the nation and beyond.

A gateway to rare, historical, and primary source materials from or about Texas.

Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead, Life after Slavery: Investigations of an African American Farmstead

Remembering Black Dallas Inc was established with a mission to preserve and promote the African American life, history, artifacts, and culture of Dallas and its surrounding cities. Today, the organization engages in many activities including educational talks, community preservation, genealogical and historical research, and local and national tours.

The Slave Quarters building at the Neill-Cochran House Museum is the only intact and publicly accessible slave dwelling located within the boundaries of Austin's original townsite. As stewards of the Slave Quarters, the NCHM has a responsibility to preserve and share the building's history. Through the Slave Quarters, all who live in and visit Austin have the opportunity to walk in the steps of the people, enslaved and free, who built this city. No matter our backgrounds, we can observe and experience the past through their eyes in an immersive and tangible way impossible to replicate anywhere else in the city.

The Conservation Society of San Antonio, in partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, presents a three-video series on the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Led by African American students engaging in direct action, this movement sought to end racial segregation at public eating places across the South. These videos tell the story of the Texas protests and how San Antonio achieved the first peaceful, voluntary integration of the national sit-in movement.

A place for reverent examination of our culinary past—while supporting the work that will build our culinary future.

Explore the history, arts and culture of Black experience in the United States

BlackPast is dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and of people of African ancestry around the world. We aim to promote greater understanding through this knowledge to generate constructive change in our society.

By emphasizing that black history can be mundane, not only triumphant or tragic, Black Quotidian offers a thematically diverse foundation from which to research and teach African-American history.

From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national levels. A cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century, these “Colored Conventions” brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.

A discovery hub that centers the lives of named enslaved and free[d] individuals who are made searchable and discoverable through a large and growing number of datasets and digital projects. Researchers can learn from linking data, visualizing larger relations and movements, and connecting the fragments of information about people’s lives from one dataset to the next.

Established by Glenn H. and Debbie Hutchins to expand research and community initiatives in public policy, education, the environment, and public health throughout the United States.

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. As of today, we have recovered 4943 ads.

Our mission is to identify and assist property owners, government agencies & organizations to preserve extant slave dwellings. Our goal is to bring historians, students, faculty, writers, legislators, organizations, corporations, artists and the general public together to educate, collaborate and organize resources to save the important collectibles of our American history.