Music and Racial Justice

The Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi acquires and preserves blues and blues-related materials in a variety of formats for scholars of the blues, African American studies, and southern culture. With over 60,000 sound recordings, in most audio formats; over 20,000 photographs; more than 1,000 videos; over 34,000 books, periodicals and newsletters; and numerous manuscripts and ephemera, the Blues Archive houses one of the largest collections of blues recordings, publications, and memorabilia in the world. Important collections include B. B. King's personal record collection, the Jim O'Neal and Amy van Singel / Living Blues Collection, the Trumpet Records Collection, the Sheldon Harris Collection, the John Richbourg Collection, and the Percy Mayfield collection.

“Blues dance” is a new name describing a family of dances done to blues music and created within African American communities. Today blues dancing is popular throughout the country and beyond the communities from which it originated.
This exhibit explores the history, characteristics and styles of blues dancing and presents artwork and personal stories by dancers.

The mission of the Cornell Hip Hop Collection (CHHC) is to collect and make accessible the historical artifacts of Hip Hop culture and to ensure their preservation for future generations. It is open to the public.

FIU's Green Library hosts the world's best Cuban music collection. The entire collection has approximately 150,000 items that span the history of popular Cuban and other Latin Music. Valued at over one million dollars, the collection features 45,000 LPS; 15,000 78 rpms; 4,500 cassettes containing radio interviews with composers, radio programs, music, and other materials; 5,000 pieces of sheet music; 3,000 books; and thousands of CDs, photographs, videocassettes and paper files. Among the collection's rarest items are recordings made in pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Curated exhibit at the University of Kentucky exploring Indigenous music in the Americas

Rap Research Lab is a community-based creative technology studio that uses a Hiphop framework to develop new ways for people to engage with data and culture.

Across the Americas there are many different Native cultures, each with unique musical traditions. The National Museum of the American Indian and other branches of the Smithsonian include music and sound–related objects from many of these cultures in their collections.

The Spirituals Database offers searchable access to recorded track information for concert Negro Spiritual settings performed by solo Classical vocalists. The resource contains a selection from a century of historic and contemporary concert spiritual recordings produced on compact discs, long-playing (33 1/3 rpm) albums, 78 rpm records, 45 rpm discs, audio cassettes and streamed audio files, as well as demonstration recordings from musical score collections.