African American History

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.

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.

Across Texas, African Americans played a unique role in the early establishment of the state. While 2019 marks the anniversary of the first documented Africans enslaved in America there exists a void in identifying, interpreting and understanding the deeper role African Americans made beyond slavery.

The mission of HMAAC is to collect, conserve, explore, interpret, and exhibit the material and intellectual culture of Africans and African Americans in Houston, the state of Texas, the southwest and the African Diaspora for current and future generations. In fulfilling its mission, HMAAC seeks to invite and engage visitors of every race and background and to inspire children of all ages through discovery-driven learning. HMAAC is to be a museum for all people.

The African American Museum is the only one of its kind in the Southwestern Region devoted to the preservation and display of African American artistic, cultural and historical materials. It has one of the largest African American Folk Art collections in the US.

Black Culinary History is 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.

The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research supports research on the history and culture of people of African descent the world over and provides a forum for collaboration and the ongoing exchange of ideas. It seeks to stimulate scholarly engagement in African and African American studies both at Harvard and beyond, and to increase public awareness and understanding of this vital field of study. As the preeminent research center in the field, the Hutchins Center sponsors visiting fellows, art exhibitions, publications, research projects, archives, readings, conferences, and new media initiatives that respond to and excite interest in established and emerging channels of inquiry in African and African American research.

Welcome to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture