African American Studies: Primary Sources on Civil Rights in America

From Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
Sec. 201. (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

From the University of Southern Mississippi. Use the search tool to find several examples of oral history transcripts as well as other primary sources.

Spanning the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000, this collection contains documents about many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.

An ongoing oral history collection with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans conducted through the Library of Congress

A list of online collections related to the Civil Rights movement across the country organized by the American Folklife Center

his project highlights the newspapers, posters, broadsides, pamphlets, fliers, and other printed ephemera produced by student and community groups, leading civil rights organizations, and individuals, which documented a revolutionary era.

"Civil rights are guarantees of equal social opportunities and equal protection under the law regardless of race, religion, or other personal characteristics. "

US movement especially active during the 1950s and 60s that aimed to end segregation and discrimination against blacks, as well as affirm their constitutional rights and improve their status in society.

The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material related to civil rights, including photographs, documents, and sound recordings.

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

The records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s including pamphlets, newsletters, leaflets, buttons, posters, T-shirts, photographs, and audio and video recordings, personal remembrances and interviews with activists, and an international directory of collections deposited in libraries and archives

From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
"Like African-American leaders before him, Martin Luther King, Jr., was, above all, “fundamentally a clergyman.” His great grandfather, Willis Williams, preached in antebellum Georgia; his grandfather led Ebenezer Baptist Church, a bedrock institution in Atlanta; his father, “Daddy King,” guided that church through trying times and later shared the pulpit with his son, Martin Luther."

From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
"On August 28, 1963, before a crowd of nearly 300,000, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered what is arguably the most celebrated civil rights speech in American history. Forming a half-mile blanket over both sides of the Lincoln Memorial, singing “We Shall Overcome,” crowds flocked in trains and buses from all over the country for the historic March on Washington—'the first and essentially last mass meeting to ever reach the national airwaves.'"

From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
"By the late 1960s, as with other early activists, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolent, incrementalist approach to civil rights fell under the harsh criticism of those in the black power movement. Despite Dr. King’s successes, de facto discrimination remained a bitter reality, even for those in the “old guard.” At the risk of being marginalized, King responded by expanding his scope of issues to include economic—not just racial—discrimination and inequality. His Poor People’s Movement joined in common cause with hard-pressed Americans of all races and backgrounds, from African-American custodians to Hispanic migrant workers."

From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
On the long road from his childhood home in Baltimore, Maryland, Thurgood Marshall vaulted economic and social barriers to become one of the most celebrated lawyers in American history. After graduating with honors from Howard University Law School in 1920, Marshall began a twenty-year tenure with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. With mentor Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall attacked the primary root of racial disparity, America’s education system, by organizing a long-term legal campaign to eradicate segregation in the nation’s schools.

From Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
The plaintiffs contend that segregated public schools are not “equal” and cannot be made “equal,” and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws.

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices

From Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
This case turns upon the constitutionality of an act of the General Assembly of the state of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races….

From Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
There are in the United States some four million Negroes of school age, of whom two million are in school, and of these, four-fifths are taught by forty-eight thousand Negro teachers in separate schools.

From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Although W. E. B. Du Bois was a fierce champion of racial integration, there were periods in his career when he favored economic and political separatism as the best means to African-American dignity and equality. By the late 1920s, he called not only for economic, political, and educational parity, but also a separate Negro “nation within a nation”—a marked departure from statements and remarks made earlier in his life. In fact, Du Bois’s call for “race pride” has been credited by some as the forerunner to the Black Power movement.

Historically known as "The Walter Pantovic Slavery Collection," these artifacts span the African American experience from slavery to the Civil Rights era to the rise of African Americans in popular culture. Walter Pantovic was born in Yugoslavia in 1965 and immigrated to the United States at the age of two. He became interested in African-American history in elementary school and in his adult life began collecting artifacts related to the subject. Highlighted items in his assembled collection include shackles, slave tags, and manillas along with 1960s Civil Rights ephemera and 1970s African-American pop culture memorabilia.

The Ronnie Moore digital collection captures the political and social empowerment of African Americans in the South during the 1960s.

This collection of oral histories, completed from 1991 to 1994, contains narratives of 119 individuals describing the activities and people involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the southern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi.

Black Natchez (1967) charts early attempts to organize and register Black voters and the formation of a self defense group in the Black community. In 1965, filmmaker Ed Pincus and David Neuman spent ten weeks in Natchez, Mississippi, filming the lives of ordinary people with unedited coverage of public and private civil rights organizational meetings, street demonstrations, and contests of power between young militants and the old guard, as well as secret meetings of African American self-defense organizations and interaction among the Black community. Interviewees range from prominent civil rights leaders, including Charles Evers, to more representative residents, and they are asked to express their thoughts and feelings about racial tensions and violence in the city. The film also chronicles the tensions between the NAACP and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, both of which were operating in Natchez.