Tulane's Amistad Research Center

Twenty million documents — the American Missionary Association's abolitionist correspondence, the NAACP's legal strategy files, the private papers of civil rights organizers — occupy a building on Tulane University's uptown campus. The Amistad Research Center, named for the 1839 slave ship revolt, is the largest independent archive of African American history and culture in the United States. It has been here since 1969. The collection spans five centuries. Researchers arrive from around the world to work with original sources that trace the long counter-narrative: who organized, who argued in court, who kept records when official histories erased them. The archive holds what survived — contracts, letters, photographs, organizational files — and makes it accessible. Tulane itself was founded as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834, became a comprehensive public university in 1847, and was privatized in 1884 under the endowments of Paul Tulane and Josephine Louise Newcomb. Paul Tulane's endowment specified that the institution could only admit white students; Louisiana law in 1884 reinforced the restriction. The university enrolled its first African American students in 1963. The archive documenting resistance to that exclusion now occupies space on the campus that enforced it. The Amistad Research Center is open to the public by appointment at Tilton Hall. Check amistadresearchcenter.org before you go. The reason to visit is direct: this is where the primary sources are — the evidence of who fought, and what they preserved for the record.