The Manuscript Division brings together the manuscript collections, oral histories, photographs, and sheet music and sound recordings to offer an in-depth view of Black history, politics, literature, and culture as only primary source materials can.  Included among our resources are more than 200 fully processed manuscript collections, and an additional 300 collections with inventories; over 700 oral histories, more than 150,000 photographs and other images, and 3,000 pieces of sheet music.  The manuscript collections include the personal papers of such notables as Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Lois Mailou Jones, Charles Drew, Anna J. Cooper, Frederick Douglass, and Paul and Eslanda Robeson; and the records of fraternal, social and professional organizations such as Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the Shriners and Daughters of Isis; the National Technical Association, the Association of Black Sociologists, and the National Medical Association.  The individual manuscripts collection (Omnium gatherum), consisting of nearly 1000 items, is a generally untapped source of ephemera, documenting slavery and freedom, as well as social, cultural and political events in the U.S. from the 18th century to the present.

            Essential to the study and documentation of the civil rights era is the Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, which comprises over 700 transcripts of interviews with national, state and local civil rights activists, who helped shape that pivotal period in U.S. history.  Other collections focus on women, Howard University, the Black Press, and Blacks in the Military during World War II.

            The prints and photographs collection makes available for research, publication and exhibition over 150,000 graphic images, including photographs, broadsides, prints and maps.  These works date from the 1800s and feature daguerreotypes, tintypes, stereograph cards and glass plate negatives.  In addition to photographs of individuals and groups, there are several special photographic collections:  the Mary O’H. Williamson Collection of Colored Celebrities Here and There, 1947-1959; the Rose McClendon Memorial Collection of Photographs of Celebrated Negroes by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1965; the Griffith Davis Collection of Photographs of Liberia, 1948-1952; the Thelma Greene Theater Collection and the Harry Bowman Vaudeville Collection.

            The sheet music collection includes voice and instrumental compositions and arrangements, reflecting Black participation in and contribution to the development of classical, folk, jazz, spirituals and popular music.  The collection represents the works of more than 400 composers dating from the 1850s to the 1940s.