Library Guides: Louisiana Information Sources: A Guide: Black History

Intro

There are numerous publications and resources about the history of the Black African diaspora in Louisiana.

Below is a selection of research guides, projects, and databases specifically designed to support Black history research.

Finding the Forgotten
A guide to digitized resources focused mainly on researching Black people in the New Orleans area during the nineteenth century. Some resources also include twentieth- and eighteenth-century materials.
Keywords for Black Louisiana
This digital project uses the scholarship of Black feminist scholars, historians, and public intellectuals to center Black and Indigenous life in French and Spanish colonial archives dating from 1714 to 1803.

DIGITAL ACCESS

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
A subset of the America's Historical Newspapers Collection from Readex, which includes African American newspapers from around the United States.

Includes the following New Orleans/ Louisiana titles and date ranges:

America's Historical Newspapers
Contains text-searchable digitizations of U.S. newspapers published between 1690 and 1980.

Includes the following New Orleans/ Louisiana titles and date ranges:

African American Periodicals 1825-1995
A collection of more than 170 digitized African American newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Includes the following New Orleans/ Louisiana titles and date ranges:

African American Louisiana Newspapers - Chronicling America
The Library of Congress's Chronicling America site provides digital access to select issues of The Black Republican (1865-186?), The Concordia Eagle (1873-1890), The Crusader (1889-189?), The Echo, L'union (1862-1864), Le Dimanche (1861), The Louisianian (1870-1871), The Observer (1899-1900), The Republican Courier (1899-1900), the Semi-Weekly Louisianan (1871-1872), Southern Republican (1898-1907), and The Weekly Louisianian (1872-1882).

Newspapers.com
Proquest's Newspapers.com Library Edition is an extensive online database of 4,000+ historical newspapers.

To clip, save, and share articles, sign in and create a free Newspapers.com or Ancestry.com account.

Includes the following New Orleans/ Louisiana titles and date ranges:

TULANE MICROFILM

LOUISIANA BLACK PRESS RESEARCH TOOLS

Excel List of Louisiana African-American Newspapers and Periodicals
This excel list allows you to view and sort the Louisiana newspapers included in James P. Danky's African-American Newspapers and Periodicals (1999). Use the index numbers to find more information on each title in Danky's bibliography.

Louisiana Weekly
Emphasizes topics of interest to the African American community, especially in the New Orleans area and south Louisiana since 1925. Online archive 2011-present.
New Orleans Tribune
The modern New Orleans Tribune, founded in 1985, continues the legacy of its historic predecessor, among the first Black daily newspapers in the United States.
The Weekly Press (Baton Rouge)
This Black-led newspaper describes itself as "the number one minority newspaper in The Greater Baton Rouge area." It has been published for more than 40 years.
Verite News
Verite is a diverse, Black-led nonprofit news organization that launched in 2022. Its mission is "to confront the structural issues that are tearing apart the social fabric of our society, revealing and documenting the causes and impacts and engaging the community in seeking solutions."
New Orleans Data News Weekly
Over 50 years ago, Joseph “Scoop” Jones started a weekly journal that chronicled the lives of Black New Orleanians. Scoop told stories that were traditionally ignored in the mainstream news journals and papers; He focused on news and information that was quintessential to New Orleans’ African-American community. Through its crucial, breaking, and community-based story—especially during the Civil Rights Movement—Data News Weekly was dubbed “The People’s Paper”.