Click image for large view Martin Luther King, Jr. Cleveland Press, May 16, 1967 Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection

February 12, 2009, marks the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP and the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Cleveland Public Library commemorates these historic anniversaries with the publication of In Their Own Words: The Documents of African American History: A Guide to Microform Collections at Cleveland Public Library. (Click here to view the guide.)

Cleveland Public Library has one of the largest collections of resources on African American culture and history in any public library in the United States. In addition to owning nearly every English-language book and periodical title included in The Harvard Guide to African American History, which includes 15,000 titles and covers every area of endeavor, the Library's collection includes more than 5 million pages of primary source African American history documents on microfilm. 

The Papers of the NAACP, 1909-1970, is among the most prominent of these collections. Consisting of more than one million documents, this collection can be used to conduct in-depth research on the evolution of civil rights for African Americans over the course of the 20th century, a path that has led to the White House in this historic anniversary year. [See pages 9 and 10 of the guide (parts 12, 26 & 27) for the location of records pertaining to the Cleveland office.]

Other collections include letters of luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune; the historical records of organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and unique collections such as The Records of the Southern Plantations.

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