The title "Online Museum of Black Superheroes" is a bit of a misnomer. This is really a collection of articles and entries on black, or African-American, comic book characters. I say that because it has entries on characters beyond the obvious ones, like Black Panther and the second Mr. Terriffic. This is a great site to show people that not all comic book characters are ethnically homogeneous.
The site itself is not the best laid-out. While many of the entries are fairly thin on analysis, the total list is quite comprehensive. I’d say it’s the Wikipedia of black comic book characters, but Wikipedia’s own list of Black Superheroes refers to the same site for four out of seven links in its Resources links. Truthfully, the real gold in this site is the article section which points to deeper analysis of the subject area.
But then, you may want to look at this with your kids. My suggestion is to go over the articles first. There’s a lot of stuff that is either too academic, or just too boring for young kids.
Many of the articles render, faithfully enough, the personal histories of these characters and include many more adult elements than you might want to show younger kids.
(Ed. note: Jacob asked me to add that this post is dedicated to his father-in-law, Harold Stephen Vaughn, who passed away today after a long illness, and was deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.)
