The Amistad Research Center (ARC) is an independent archives and manuscripts repository in the United States that specializes in the history of African Americans and ethnic minorities.

[1][2] It is one of the first institutions of its kind in the United States to collect African American ethnic historical records and to document the modern Civil Rights Movement.

[7] As the AMA division's awareness of the problems of discrimination and segregation of African-Americans became evident, a two-day seminar on "racialism" was held at the Broadway Tabernacle Church in New York City in October 1941.

[11] Johnson's initial intent for Amistad Research Center was that it would supply primary resources for scholars interested in any aspect of African American history.

[15] The ARC has approximately 800 manuscript collections that document cultural movements, civil rights, race relations, education, politics, and art.

The moving image and sound recordings holdings include nearly 8,000 items on video and audiotape, motion picture film, phonographic and optical discs.

DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Homer Plessy, Frederick Douglass and Claude McKay.

The ARC contains a diverse collection of approximately 45,000 books including rare and first editions, more than 2,000 runs of periodicals dating from 1826, 1.5 million newspaper articles, and 30,000 pamphlets.

Of significance to the Amistad Case, the ARC's collections include Lewis Tappan's bound volume of contemporary pamphlets on the legal proceedings with his handwritten notes.

Other highlights include 18th century slave ordinances in French Louisiana, an edition of Black Majesty by John W. Handercock with an unpublished handwritten poem titled "Black Majesty" by Countee Cullen on the title page verso, and Lewis Tappan's annotated copy of the 1839 edition of American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses by Theodore Dwight Weld.

Many of the artworks were a part of the collection formed by the William E. Harmon Foundation and include examples from the growing African American visual arts movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Among the prominent works in the collection are the 41 paintings in the Toussaint L'Ouverture series,[20] completed in 1938 by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), a celebrated American artist of the 20th century.