Contents: About the Black History Collection | Learn More | The North Carolina Digital Collections | Tech
About the Black History Collection
This collection features items from the State Library of North Carolina’s Digital Collections and online resources NCpedia and ANCHOR focusing on the history and culture of African Americans in North Carolina. Included in these items are articles about civil rights issues, photographs, and biographies.
Black History 2025 Community Calendar
Learn More
Black History Month is celebrated each year to honor and recognize the rich history and accomplishments of African Americans in our nation. In the early 1900s historian Carter G. Woodson completed research on the history of African Americans in the United States. He created a Black History exhibit in Chicago as part of celebration of the 50th anniversary of emancipation and later founded a journal in which he published his articles on Black life and history. In 1926, Woodson announced a Black History week in February. Through this celebration he was hoping to expand research on the life and history of African Americans further than the most well-known figures like Frederick Douglass.
Freedom Park in Raleigh, NC honors the African American experience and struggle for freedom.
Woodson advocated that the celebratory week should be a showcase of the work students and historians were doing throughout the year indicating that research on Black life and history shouldn’t be constrained to a short one-week time frame. The week long celebration was extended to the full month of February. Gerald Ford was the first president to recognize the month in 1976 and every president since has designated February as Black History Month.
The North Carolina Digital Collections
The North Carolina Digital Collections (NCDC) contain over 90,000 historic and recent photographs, state government publications, manuscripts, and other resources on topics related to North Carolina. The Collections are free and full-text searchable, and bring togehter content from the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina.
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
Using the CollectionBuilder-CSV template and the static website generator Jekyll, this project creates an engaging interface to explore driven by metadata.