Featured Collections

Tampa (FL) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated records

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The Links, Incorporated is an international, not-for-profit corporation established in 1946, whose membership consists of more than 16,000 professional women of color. The Tampa Chapter of The Links, Incorporated was chartered in 1987. Collection items include documents and history from each of the 12 chapter presidents, as well as scrapbooks, speeches, newsletters, and photographs.

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The Weekly Challenger photograph collection

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The Weekly Challenger has documented the history of St. Petersburg’s African American community since the newspaper was established by Cleveland Johnson, Jr. in September 1967.

Click here to access the digital archive »

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Image from the Tokley Papers

James and Joanna Tokley papers

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The papers in this collection document the numerous accomplishments of renowned Tampa poet E. James Tokley and former chief executive officer of the Tampa Urban League Joanna Tokley.

Dates: 1920-2010
Extent: 18 boxes

Click here to access the collection’s finding aid »

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Bank of America Black American Music collection

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The Bank of America Black American Music Collection consists of approximately 4000 pieces of published sheet music created, performed, or published by African Americans or that portrays African American themes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.

Dates: 1818 – late 1980s
Extent: 54 linear feet (35 boxes)

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Welcome to the African American Experience in Florida Portal

In 2020,  the USF Libraries embarked on a project to leverage collections that document the African American community. As part of our efforts, we designed a portal that would highlight and share the stories of individuals, families, business, and communities preserved as part of the state’s long history and made available in Special Collections on the Tampa and St. Petersburg campuses.

The portal you are visiting is just the beginning of a long-term project to highlight current and future materials that contribute to conversations about the African American experience in Florida. We look forward to preserving and sharing those stories with you.

Activism

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Community

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Black-Owned Businesses

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The Arts

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Journalism

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General African-American History

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Latest Blog Entries

Customers seated at the Progress Village Diner

Black Culinary Traditions in Tampa

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The menu of African American Tampans was remarkably resilient, preserved in part by the celebration of “soul food” and Black pride, both of which flowered in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Single page entry from the Federal Writers Project

Federal Writers Project records

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The Federal Writers project (FWP) was begun in 1935 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and continued until 1942 when funding was diverted for WWII (Kennedy, 1990; Dolinar, 2016). The project set out to produce a series of guidebooks, one for each state, that captured the customs and lore of…

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AA Sheet Music Cover Image

Expanding Access to the Bank of America Black American Music Collection

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Music by J. Eubie Blake The USF Libraries’ Bank of America Black American Music Collection, commonly referred to as the African American Sheet Music Collection, was acquired in 1988. Approximately 4,000 sheets and scores comprise the collection, which spans nearly two centuries of popular music. The collection features pieces written, produced, published, and performed by…

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