History 128: The Civil Rights Movement

The Oxford African American Studies Center is a comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture.

The slideshow on the homepage has half a dozen or so slides that comprise the themes of the exhibit, such as "The New Negro Movement", "The Civil Rights Era", and a "Renewal of the Struggle".

Online Exhibitions from the Library of Congress tracing this organization from 1900-2000.

From the Digital Library of Georgia
"The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) is the most ambitious and comprehensive initiative to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web."

The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive is an Internet-accessible, fully searchable database of digitized versions of rare and unique library and archival resources on race relations in Mississippi.

From the The Archive of The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

University of Virginia Library. Virginia Center for Digital History. “An archive containing film footage from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia. Included are clips of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as segments documenting school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens.”

Black Power was the guiding philosophy of SNCC in its later years. It began to develop and take hold sometime after 1964, and came to prominence in 1966 when Stokely Charmicael became head of the organization.

This digital collection presents primary sources from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society that provide a window onto Milwaukee’s civil rights history.

From America Public Media

The University of Rochester Libraries has created this fine online project to bring together organizational papers, images, oral histories, and ephemera related to Rochester's black freedom experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Visitors can click on the "Oral Histories" area to look over and listen to snippets from some of the interviews conducted in 2008, including talks with police officers, businessman, and local religious leaders. This section also contains several introductory essays that prov

“Land of (Unequal) Opportunity: Documenting the Civil Rights Struggle in Arkansas” is an attempt to compile in one on-line resource a variety of records and photographs that document the history of civil rights in the state. A central focus of the project is to insure that both documents and illustrations were included, in the belief that photographs, cartoons, drawings, etc., are also important research tools.

This web site spotlights their activities out of nine cities and towns in Georgia, from the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, to the anti-poverty and anti-war campaigns of the early 1970s.

Crossroads to Freedom connects the world with Memphis history through an archive of documents, newspapers, images and oral histories. Our goal is to empower Memphians to tell the stories of our city and region as a vital aspect of participation in the future of our community.

External Web Sites (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress). MORE websites!

From Columbia University.
Has image, video, audio and document archives, plus much more.

This online database/catalog provides access to audio and video excerpts, and over 10,000 pages of transcriptions, all of which are full-text searchable and can be sorted by county, by subject or by decade. At present 122 interviews are represented in this database.

From Northeastern University Libraries. The Freedom House was a community organization that helped stabilize the racially mixed Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. This collection, featuring images from 1950-1975, highlight the group's efforts to integrate the neighborhood and desegregate the local schools. People appearing in the images include Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Edward Kennedy, and Kitty Dukakis.

Northern women of different races and faiths traveled to Mississippi to develop relationships with their southern peers and to create bridges of understanding across regional, racial, and class lines. By opening communications across societal boundaries, Wednesday’s Women sought to end violence and to cushion the transition towards racial integration.

The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is based at the University of Washington.

Print: Jan. 1969-Dec. 1985
On microfilm Tisch Microforms MFR117
Boston Public Library has it back to 1915 (Microtext Room E185.5.A43)

A guide by Elizabeth Clarke from Marist College, James A. Cannavino Library

An index to the publications which amplify the Cry for Social Change and Social Justice
Print: 1969-2001 Tisch Reference Indexes [GEN] AI3 .A27
Indexes The Black Panther newspaper and other radical periodicals that might have articles on them.
Doesn't necessarily cover the same titles as the electronic index above.

Covering Civil Rights in the South 1965-68. "From the start, The Southern Courier recruited and maintained a bi-racial staff committed to reporting and disseminating the news in a professional and objective manner."

Includes full-text and full-image articles dating back to the first issue of the NYT in 1851; the collection includes digital reproductions of every page from every issue--cover to cover--in downloadable PDF(r) files.

The Nation Digital Archive provides full access to the complete backfile of the oldest continuously published weekly journal in America; it includes every article, editorial, poem, puzzle, and review since publication began on July 6th, 1865.

1915 to the present
A selective list of government publications, books, pamphlets, reports of public and private agencies, and periodical articles relating to economic and social conditions, public policy and administration, and international relations.

Issues available from 1910 to the present. Search all issues!

Audio & Text of Stokely Carmichael's speech delivered October 1966, Berkeley, CA

Text of April 3, 1964, Cleveland, Ohio speech

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is a collection of documents and information about civil rights cases in selected case categories across the United States. Currently, the categories include: Child Welfare, Criminal Justice (Other), Disability Rights-Pub. Accom., Education, Election/Voting Rights, Equal Employment, Fair Housing/Lending/Insurance, Immigration, Indigent Defense, Intellectual Disability (Facility), Jail Conditions, Juvenile Institution, Mental Health (Facility), Nursing Ho

1789 -
An electronic guide to federal, state, local and international public documents, spanning over 200 years of publication, in a single searchable database. For Tufts users only.

Digitized reports, documents and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and executive branch/agency publications.

Part of ProQuest Congressional.

A digital library of pre-18th to 20th century documents relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government, with annotations, indexes, and links to supporting materials.

University of Maryland School of Law. Thurgood Marshall Law Library

This module provides a comprehensive view of the NAACP's evolution, policies, and achievements from 1909-1970. Included are thousands of pages of minutes of directors' meetings, monthly reports from officers to the board of directors, proceedings of the annual business meetings, significant records of the association's annual conferences, plus voluminous special reports on a wide range of issues. The Annual Conferences served both as a major catalyst for attracting publicity and as an important avenue for grass roots participation (through branch delegations) in the affairs of the national organization. The conferences were held in a different city each year. The speeches and the resolutions passed at the annual conferences are excellent ways to study the major concerns of the NAACP on a yearly basis.

Major campaigns for equal access to education, voting, employment, housing and the military are covered in this module. The education files in this second module document the NAACP's systematic assault on segregated education that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Files from 1955 –1965 focus on the NAACP's efforts to implement the Brown decision as well as to combat de facto segregation outside of the South. Voting rights was one of the NAACP's earliest major campaigns. The voting rights document in extensive detail the NAACP's campaign against the white primary, discriminatory registration practices, the grandfather clause, and the triumphs of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The focus of this module is on the NAACP's efforts to combat lynching, mob violence, discrimination in the criminal justice system, and white resistance to civil rights efforts. These files are supplemented by materials on segregation and discrimination complaints regarding public accommodations and recreational facilities sent to and investigated by the NAACP, and records on discrimination in employment. A particularly rich set of records in this module is the NAACP file on one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the 20th century--the case of the Scottsboro Boys. The NAACP's campaign against lynching and mob violence was ideally suited to accomplish the NAACP's early goals of breaching the wall of silence regarding racial discrimination and racial violence, and bringing African Americans into full civic participation. The records pertaining to this campaign shed light on the Great Migration of the early 20th century and the movement of African Americans to urban areas, and NAACP's efforts to respond to urban mob violence, especially during the violence of 1919 as well as later riots. The NAACP's efforts to win passage of a federal law against lynching are also well-documented in this module.

20 microfilm reels. Tisch Microforms MFR282
Guide: Tisch Ref E 184.6 .N384 1982

25 microfilm reels. Tisch Microforms MFR290
Guide: Tisch Ref E 185.97.K5 M35 1984

Report the investigation of the Winston Salem, North Carolina, chapter of the Black Panther Party

The FBI investigated Malcom X to verify communist influence.

The FBI investigated Stokely Carmichael to verify communist influence.

Includes other individuals involved in the Civil Rights movement.