The Amistad Research Center is a manuscript library for the study of ethnic history, culture and race relations in the United States.  In 1966, the American Missionary Association (A.M.A.) established the Amistad Research Center at Fisk University as the official repository for the archives of the A.M.A. with historian and archivist, Clifton H. Johnson (Ph.D.) as its founding director. In 1969, the center incorporated as a nonprofit manuscripts library, moved to Dillard University in New Orleans in 1970, and to its present home at Tulane Univversity in 1987. As the nation's largest collection of manuscripts relating to the history of African Americans, the Center is recognized as one of America's premier research collections. Continued support from the Board for Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ has helped Amistad to preserve and provide access to original correspondence, diaries, photographs, reports and publications, which document A.M.A. programs and U.C.C. ministries to oppressed groups, including African Americans, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Asian Americans, European immigrants, and Appalachian Whites.

Each year, Amistad staff assists several hundred academic scholars, journalists, novelists and history buffs who are attracted to the diverse and invaluable resources of the Amistad Research Center. The Center presently occupies 11,500 square feet in Tilton Memorial Hall on the campus of Tulane University. Although integrated into Tulane University, the Center retains an independent status through a 24-member Board of Directors and a membership organization of about one thousand individuals and corporations. Amistad's mission is to collect, preserve, disseminate and interpret original historical documents and art works by and about African Americans and other minority groups. Amistad seeks to educate, inform, and eventually, to transform Americans and members of the international community in their understanding of each other. Holdings related to the United Church of Christ comprise about one third of Amistad's holdings.

The manuscript holdings of the Amistad Research Center comprise archives, records, papers, and collections. The materials deposited by organizations in the Center are designated as records, except where their bulk and the length of time that they document is so great that the degree of representativeness or inclusiveness of the records justifies their more accurately being called archives. Personal papers of individuals or families have been deposited by the persons or their heirs. Collections, in the strictest sense, include only those manuscript holdings collected by persons on subjects other than their own lives. All manuscript holdings are in terms of the linear shelf space occupied by a standard legal size manuscript box, which measures in inches 15.5 x 10 x 4.74, with the smallest measurement being the side that faces the front of the shelf. Two and one half boxes, therefore, occupy 11.875 inches or ca. one linear foot. Oversized boxes are designated as "OS".