BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

This bibliography had its origin in two modest local checklists published on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 1975 and 1979. Black Periodicals and Newspapers listed the titles held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the University and was aimed at students and faculty who had found it difficult to use these institutions' voluminous holdings. Spurred by students' increased interest in "minority" or non-white cultures, the Library of the State Historical Society also produced Asian American Periodicals and Newspapers and Hispanic Americans in the United States: A Union List of Periodicals and Newspapers, both in 1979. Given the small size of the Society's holdings, around one hundred titles each, these titles could provide a much more detailed form of entry, an experiment that was incorporated into all later work. The next publication, Women's Periodicals and Newspapers (G. K. Hall, 1982) contained nearly 1500 titles eventually, and was supported by grants from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction under Title IX. Again, the work was broad in scope and the entries detailed.

The Society's collection of Native American series was also sizeable and included known rarities like The Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper, published in Georgia in 1828. Various bibliographies generated on campus and elsewhere created demand for a similar work for this group of materials. Native American Newspapers and Periodicals (Greenwood, 1984) was funded by the Department of Public Instruction, along with a series of workshops and an index to the Wisconsin Native American press. A guide to nearly 1200 titles, this was the first of the bibliographies to include titles held by the libraries outside Madison. This development meant that procedures had to be developed to train librarians and others to do detailed examination of each issue of every title.

The present work is a guide to more than 6500 titles by and about African-Americans identified and located by the Project between 1989 and 1998. Information included in this work was gained through direct examination of each issue of every title. This is the only proven menthod of accurately representing a title and recording its editors, publishers, and other information. Maureen Hady, the Project's Associate Editor, designed the code sheets and customized the software we have used, in addition to personally completing code sheets for thousands of titles. Additional code sheets were completed by the Project Director, numerous research assistants, and gracious librarians and archivists around the country whose institutions we did not have a chance to visit.

The bibliography covers literary, political, and historical journals as well as general newspapers and feature magazines. It includes titles that have long ceased publication as well as those which still appear. This work is the most extensive yet compiled, and its titles represent many phases of African-American thought and action, from religious, abolitionist, and educational press of the antebellum era to the publications of nationalists, Hip Hop musicians, and business and professional groups that appear today.

During the Project's ten-year existence, staff members did fieldwork in hundreds of libraries and archives in more than thirty states, ranging from large and well-known national institutions like the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center of Howard University to the smaller and lesser-known such as the Carnegie Branch of the Chatham-Effingham-Liberty Regional Library in Savannah, Georgia, and the Reverdy C. Ranson Memorial Library of Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio. As is evident from the entries in this volume, many smaller institutions do not participate in OCLC, the national online library database, and a number do not catalog their periodicals, instead relying on an alphabetical or other shelving arrangement. The extraction of this information is one of the most significant accomplishments of the Project.

We know that this bibliography does not include every title that has been published and which survived, and in some cases we even know where the titles are held but have been unable to elicit a response that would permit their inclusion. A great number of publications, many religious in nature, are held by individuals; until they are persuaded to donate them to an institution they are not publicly accessible and thus not appropriate for this work. For some categories of publication, such as high school newspapers, there clearly exist a great many more than we have been able to include. If our scant lists help to identify, locate, and preserve additional titles for future scholarship, another of the Project's goals will have been met.

For current titles we have attempted to include the latest contact information. In the fall of 1997 Project staff sent a mailing to every current title including a copy of its entry. This generated a large number of corrections and additions, as well as some new titles. We also asked the editors to include additional copies of their publication so that a file of originals could be assembled for exhibit purposes. While not comprehensive, these files enable the Society to demonstrate the variety of African-American press in a fashion that microfilm and other library practices do not.

Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.