Black Civil Rights: Primary Source Collections Online
BAD Times student newspaper, 1971-1977
Twenty issues of the The Black Americans for Democracy (BAD) Times newspaper, published out of the University of Arkansas in the 1970s. The paper became well known for their activism and calls for greater integration of student life, university programs, and athletics. (Univ. of Arkansas)
The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project - the Royce-Darden Collection
Click "View the Collection" to actually access recorded songs, but be sure to check out the interviews on this homepage to understand the collection's context. You may also be interested in this story from Public Radio International about how the black gospel recordings of the 1960s and 1970s relate to the civil rights movement. (Baylor Univ.)
Black History Documents from Fold3
Includes primary sources on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, black in the World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. (Fold3)
Black Panthers Digital Collection
Includes documents such as books, pamphlets, periodicals, posters, and ephemera. Part of the American Radicalism collection. (Michigan State Univ.)
Civil Rights: Hollywood Roundtable 1963
1963 film of Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Charleton Heston, and other Hollywood names conversing about the March on Washington (National Archives, via YouTube)
Civil Rights Digital Library(Digital Library of Georgia)
Civil Rights Era Television News(Virginia Center for Digital History)
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
Information about 4,900+ civil rights cases across the US. Dockets, complaints, filings, settlements, decrees, opinions, and links to additional sources in the Westlaw database. Create a free account to save searches and documents.
(Note: Search on campus or use Remote Desktop Connection to access SHSU's subscriptions to Westlaw.)
Esau Jenkins Papers, 1963-2003
"Esau Jenkins (1910-1972) was born and raised on Johns Island, South Carolina. With very little formal education, he became a businessman and civil rights leader. Jenkins founded the Progressive Club in 1948, which encouraged local African Americans to register to vote, through the aid of Citizenship Schools, a topic he was educated in by his attendance at Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee. In 1959, he organized the Citizens' Committee of Charleston County dedicated to the economic, cultural and political improvement of local African Americans." (Avery Research Center)
FBI Civil Rights Files
FBI documents related to the black Civil Rights movement, from the FBI Vault. Includes sources on Malcolm X, Benjamin Lawson Hooks, Fannie Lou Hammer, James Farmer, Thurgood Marshall, the Mississippi Burning case, white supremacist groups, NAACP, Nation of Islam, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and much more. (Note: Dates in the list of topcis/files indicate when documents were put online, not when the content was originally created.) (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Freedom House Collection
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. (Northeastern Univ.)
Freedom Summer 1964 Digital Collection
More than 25,000 pages from the Freedom Summer manuscripts, including official records of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the personal papers of movement leaders and activists such as Amzie Moore, Mary King and Howard Zinn, letters and diaries of northern college students who went South to volunteer for the summer; newsletters produced in Freedom Schools; racist propaganda, newspaper clippings, pamphlets and brochures, magazine articles, telephone call logs, candid snapshots, internal memos, press releases and much more. (Wisconsin Historical Society)
Interview Archive from King in the Wilderness
Full-length interviews with individuals who witnessed and made civil rights history. Source: Kunhardt’s documentary on the last years of Martin Luther King, Jr, King in the Wilderness.
Jack Rabin Collection of Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists
Collection of images and documents on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Selma March, and other civil rights events as collected by Jack Rabin, university faculty member and intimate participant of the Civil Rights Movement. (Pennsylvania State Univ.)
KZSU Project South Interviews - Civil Rights in the South in 1965
Transcripts and audio recordings of meetings and interviews with Civil Rights workers in the South recorded by several Stanford students affiliated with the campus radio station KZSU during the summer of 1965. Covers the civil rights movement in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Includes white civil rights workers, black activists, local people, and segregationists, affiliated with NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, CORE, and the KKK.
Malcolm X: A Research Site
Photos, speeches, documents, and references to numerous books and websites. (Abdul Alkalimat, Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
The Malcolm X I Knew: Manuscript version
Handwritten and typewritten notes are also available; see links on page.
"Transcription of a manuscript version of Alex Haley's essay "The Malcolm X I Knew," originally published by Saga magazine in November 1965, the same month in which The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published. ...The manuscript version is substantially longer than the published essay, which we cannot reproduce due to copyright restrictions. ...The manuscript from which these materials are transcribed is housed in the Alex Haley Papers held by Cushing Library, Special Collections, at Texas A&M University." (Amy Earhart, ScholarlyEditing.org, The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing)
The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University: Malcolm Multimedia
Digital media about Malcolm X, featuring video interviews with people who knew Malcolm, government documents, and archival footage. (Columbia Univ.)
March on Washington, 1963 - A Day Like No Other
To commemorate the recent 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, August 28th, 1963, the Library of Congress has selected these images from its extensive Prints and Photographs collections. Images by members of the White House News Photographers Association, color slides for publication in Look magazine, and pictures from a professional Ohio photographer document a "day that changed the course of history." (Library of Congress)
Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers200,000 documents available online. (King Center)
Mississippi Freedom Summer Project 1964: Digital Collection
Documents the history of 1964's "Freedom Summer", when volunteers gathered to be trained to register African-American voters in Mississippi. 3 volunteers were subsequently murdered, drawing attention to racial issues and serving as a catalyst for change. Collection includes hundreds of documents, including FBI reports and articles from Ohio about the civil rights movement at the time. (Miami Univ. of Ohio)
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Records (1915-1968)
"Spanning the years 1915-1968, with most dating from 1940 to 1960, these records document the work and procedures of the organization as it combated racial discrimination in the nation’s courts, establishing in the process a public interest legal practice that was unprecedented in American jurisprudence. The organization’s records cover a host of topics, including segregation in schools, on buses, and in public facilities; discrimination in housing and property ownership; voting rights; police brutality; racial violence; and countless other infringements of civil rights." (Library of Congress)
Negro Traveler's Green Book, 1937-1964
The Negro Travelers’ Green Book was a travel guide series published from 1936 to 1964 by Victor H. Green. It was intended to provide African American motorists and tourists with the information necessary to board, dine, and sightsee comfortably and safely during the era of segregation. The New York Public Library presents digital editions of the 1937-1964 green books. (New York Public Library)
The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia
This site is a companion to a scholarly book from University of California Press; the site contains images, video, and news clippings documenting how American Bandstand, the first national television program directed at teens, discriminated against black youth, and how black teens protested this discrimination. (Univ. of California)
Race, Education, and Prince Edward County, Virginia
Documents school segregation issues of 1950s and 1960s in a Virginia county. (Virginia Commonwealth Univ.)
Race Time Place: Projects on African American History in Virginia
Projects documenting topics such as the Underground Railroad, black hospitals and health care, the Brown decision, and white vs black housing in Virginia. (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities)
Rochester Black Freedom Struggle Online Project
Brings together organizational papers, images, oral histories, and ephemera related to the black freedom experience of Rochester, NY, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Univ. of Rochester)
Rosa Parks Papers(Library of Congress)
A Shaky Truce: Starkville Civil Rights Struggles, 1960-1980
Collection of digitized archival documents and oral history interviews narrates the unique history of Starkville, Mississippi’s civil rights struggles with particular emphasis on the local fight for school desegregation. (Mississippi State Univ.)
SNCC Digital Gateway
"This documentary website tells the story of how young activists in SNCC united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered the Black community and transformed the nation. SNCC organizers...worked collaboratively with historians of the Movement, archivists, and students to weave together grassroots stories, digitized primary source materials held at repositories across the country, and new multi-media productions to bring this history to life for a new generation." (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project, Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke Univ. Libraries)
Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement
presents educational and noncommercial radio programs from the 1950s and 1960s that offer historic testimonies – in interviews, speeches, and on-the-spot news reports – from many movement participants, both well-known and unknown. (American Archive of Public Broadcasting)
Voices of Civil Rights
Collection of primary accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Chicano and Women’s Movements as well as African American. (AARP and Library of Congress)
Who Speaks for the Negro? digital archive
A digital archive of documents and audio recordings related to the 1965 book by Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (Vanderbilt Univ.)
