Newspaper & Mailroom

The AFRO-American Newspapers Partners with Google

Thursday 10. February 2011 - Archives Service Announced to Coincide with Black History Month

The AFRO-American Newspapers, one of the nation’s oldest news organizations dedicated to covering the African American community, has created a comprehensive collection of over a million articles that captures the African American experience in business, civil rights, education, health, law, and sports beginning in the late 19th century. Google partnered with the AFRO and helped to digitize the newspaper’s historic archives and make them searchable on-line and available to anyone, anywhere in the world.
“It took us over 10 years to develop and fine tune the concept to make the AFRO’s Archive site a reality and Google played a key role,” said publisher Jake Oliver. “The site includes original page views of complete editions of the newspaper dating back to the early 1900s and in-depth coverage of important stories such as the events of the arrests and national spectacle surrounding Scottsboro Boys trials, the entertainment coverage of Black movies stars such as Dorothy Dandridge, the Army’s use of the Tuskegee Airmen (Fighting 99th) in World War II, coverage of the Little Rock 9 Integration in 1954 and many other events that helped to shape the black community.”
Researchers, students, historians, teachers, and other groups can use the Archives to trace family roots, develop talking points, craft speeches and gather information on a myriad of topics that affected African Americans.
“The AFRO has one of the most comprehensive collections of African American history in the world,” said Oliver, the great grandson of the newspaper’s founder John H. Murphy, Sr. “The AFRO is an American institution and has a huge repository of information that can be used while blogging, or when someone is on Facebook to post quotes and with Twitter. Now, with our new mobile iPhone application, the AFRO’s Archives can be accessed instantly by students at school, researchers and anyone who has a thirst to learn and understand.”