I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reached the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.

Booker T. Washington, 1901
Up From Slavery from Project Gutenberg.

Documenting the American South (DAS) is a collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. The Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors DAS, and as of November 2003, DAS includes 1,253 books and manuscripts. Two significant DAS projects related to African-American history are their North American Slave Narratives and the Church in the Southern Black Community.

This project spotlights some of the fascinating early African-American writers whose work is collected in the University of North Carolina libraries. The University of North Carolina houses a diverse collection of works by many pioneering African-American writers. David Walker and Anna Julia Cooper confronted the cultural domination, bigotry and stereotypes of the times in their courageous political works. Charles Chesnutt's fiction and the poetry of George Moses Horton, the "Black Bard of North Carolina" are literary reactions to the same harsh society. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a noted educator and writer, and Omar ibn Said, an educated man who spoke and wrote in Arabic prior to being brought to America as a slave, show the depth and breadth of learning among early African-Americans.

On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service. This sparked a wave of other sit-ins in college towns across the South. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced "snick"), was created on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh two months later to coordinate these sit-ins, support their leaders, and publicize their activities. This site covers the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from its birth in 1960 to 1966, when John Lewis was replaced by Stokely Carmichael as chairman, and explores such events as sit-ins, the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer.

In 1984, a professor at Rutgers University stumbled upon a trove of historic data in a courthouse in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Over the next 15 years, Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a noted New Orleans writer and historian, painstakingly uncovered the background of 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries making fortunes for their owners. The Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1699 - 1820 is a user-friendly, searchable, online database freely accessible to the public.

The Fela Project is a multimedia project that explores and commemorates the influence of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the legendary Nigerian Afrobeat musician and Human Rights activist who died of AIDS-related illness in 1997. The project centers on an exhibition of Fela-related artifacts and new works by premier contemporary artists who have been inspired by Fela, and will be accompanied by concerts, symposia, a film series, an interactive web site with streaming video, and a fully illustrated publication with a diverse collection of essays.
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The term "Third World" was created during the mid 50s at the Non-Aligned Conference in Bandung, Indonesia . Countries that had recently celebrated independence from Colonial powers chose a 'third' path different and separate from that of the Capitalist First World and the Pro-Soviet Second World. Many liberation movements in the US during the 60s chose this term to be a common front to fight imperialism and racism. From Saigon to Oakland , from Johannesburg to Jerusalem , from Vieques to Davis --We need Third World Unity. The Third World Forum stands against all forms of oppression and their manifestations such as imperialism, colonialism, racism, zionism, sexism, and heterosexism.