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The article announces that the document "From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909" has been added to the online collections of the U.S. Library of Congress, which information available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aapchtml/.

The article presents an essay on the Flint Goodrich Hospital, a health-care center that served African Americans in the New Orleans, Louisiana between 1894 and 1985 despite multiple obstacles, both "intentional" and "unintentional," and the debilitating effects of US apartheid and its aftermath. It reports that Flint-Goodrich highlights the relationship between health care and community and the tragedy of a two-tiered system.

An essay is presented which discusses the African American itinerant bookseller and editor Kathryn Magnolia Johnson's activism from the 1910s through the 1950s, including her efforts to increase membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). An overview of Johnson's efforts to promote reading among African Americans, including to increase their racial pride and to have knowledge of their history, is provided.

Self-emancipated author, activist and philosopher turned art historian, Frederick Douglass spent a lifetime visualizing back to a white dominant schema intent on trading in racist grotesques of socially determinist and politically reductive contortions of black bodies and souls. Across his photographic and fine-art portraits, he endorsed a revisionist aesthetic theory and carved out an alternative iconographic space within which to expose, debunk and demythologize the racist claim that “Negroes look all like.” Douglass's visual aesthetic took as its starting point the formal, political and ideological importance of representing black subjects as psychologically complex individuals rather than as generic types. At the heart of Douglass's theory of portraiture was his conviction that all likenesses of African American subjects must do justice to “the face of the fugitive slave” by conveying the “inner” via the “outer man,” and thereby privilege emotional depth rather than physical surface in order to extrapolate a full gamut of lived realities otherwise annihilated out of existence. Douglass worked extensively with the signifying possibilities of his own physiognomy as a representative test case by which to bear witness to the interior complexities of black subjects missing from, or remaining fugitives at large within, white artists' surface-only renderings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at how an archive collection has been harvested to reveal aspects of the lives of African plantation workers, plantation owners and their children on a Jamaican sugar plantation. This work fed into a university exhibition prepared for Black History Month in October 2006, revealing substantial research potential in this area. This article also addresses how the university archivist and the guest curator from 'colliding worlds' collaborated to humanise the archive collection in the context of Black History, making the information accessible to a wide audience. Also included is a discussion of the differences in professional viewpoints and perceptions, as well as suggestions of how to exploit similar archival collections held elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the information needs, library service issues and programming for the African American art community. A brief background in African American history and art history is presented as well as a discussion of the new art history and its relationship to African American students. It addresses the particular information needs of the African American art community and suggests library service programs, including ways of encouraging diversity among library staff.

The article offers information on the website Free People of Color in Louisiana, developed by Louisiana State University (LSU) Libraries, located at http://lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/fpoc.

Reports on web site and film resources to teach the history of the Jim Crow era. Increase in resources for studying the era; Increase in web sites incorporating African American materials; Details of an initiative at the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina which provides an extensive full-text collection of first-person narratives and materials written by southern authors; Feature films presenting the age of segregation from African American's perspectives.