Hi Brandon,
This is Christin, one of the librarians at Lamson. The library has many databases that can help you find scholarly articles. Since you mentioned this was for a sociology course, I'll talk about a database called SocINDEX.
You can access this database (and a lot of other ones too) by going to the library main page: library.plymouth.edu. Click on the library databases tab.
Type SocINDEX in the search box and click on the link (you can also find it by going to the S section and scrolling through the list there).
Once you are in the database, type your search terms in the boxes at the top of the screen (I got 27 results using African Americans and hate crimes.) To limit your search results only to scholarly articles, check the box next to Peer Reviewed. I also checked the box next to Full Text to limit to articles that can be accessed quickly. My search screen looked like this:
You can try different search terms if you don't see any articles you like. Different search terms can get you very different results. Once you have some search results, you can read an article by clicking on the link that says Full Text:
I hope this helps, please let us know if you have any questions.
Best,
Christin Chenard