Primary Sources: Civil Rights in America: General - Online Sources

Digitized materials from Michigan State University Libraries' Radicalism Collection focusing on America.

This site, provided by Columbia University, is designed as a "unique multimedia resource for secondary school teachers to enhance their knowledge and ability in teaching African-American history"

"To advance the scholarship, encourage civil discourse and simply shed light on this important topic, the University of Baltimore has established a Web presence for its work on "Baltimore '68." This site should be considered a work in progress: Its only constant will be change, as more is discovered about what happened in the city in April 1968, and a better understanding of that time is reached 40 years later."

"Interviews with people who were there at key moments in black and civil rights history"

"The collection contains over 600 interviews housed on VHS and MiniDV tapes and is still growing (on digital now!).

Digitization began in 2019 and this site launched January 2020. Digitized interviews will be added to the site as they are processed, so continue to check back."

BPL's Digital Collections were created to preserve and make available the local history of Birmingham and the surrounding area. These resources may help students, teachers, genealogists, historians and interested citizens learn more about the history of Birmingham.Description from site (BPL = Birmingham Public Library)

Includes primary sources, lesson plans, discussion questions, essays, etc.

An exhibit containing primary sources and other materials related to Civil RIghts Act of 1964. Coverage begins in 1900 with the "Segregation Era (1900-1939)"

"The San Jose State College Digital Civil Rights Collection documents campus protest movements that took place from the 1960s-1970. San Jose State College (SJSC) campus protest movements reflected the explosion of student unrest on college campuses across the nation. Between the years 1968-1972, student unrest dominated college life. Students at SJSC responded to national and local issues that included civil rights, equal access to housing, student clubs and organizations, athletics, demands for relevant curriculum, and protest against the escalation of the Vietnam War, that included protests against the draft and the presence of the ROTC and DOW Chemical on campus."

" This page is a gateway to a consortium of civil rights and labor history projects directed by Professor James N. Gregory at the University of Washington and supported by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Pacific Northwest.

The thirteen projects bring together maps, films, slide shows, nearly one hundred video oral history interviews, and several thousand photographs, documents, and digitized newspaper articles. Included are lesson plans for teachers. The projects also feature several hundred essays about important issues, events, and people, some researched and written by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Washington. The projects have registered nearly 12 million page views since 2010. "

"University of Mississippi's Civil Rights Archive contains digitized versions of small (generally one box or less) collections related to the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi and the American South. Collections date from Reconstruction to the late 20th century. Major topics represented include the Freedmen's Bureau, school integration, voter registration, labor, and religious activism."

"The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) is a biennial (i.e., every other school year) survey required by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Since 1968, the CRDC has collected data on key education and civil rights issues in our nation's public schools for use by OCR in its enforcement and monitoring efforts regarding equal educational opportunity. The CRDC is also a tool for other Department offices and federal agencies, policymakers and researchers, educators and school officials, and the public to analyze student equity and opportunity."

".... promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. "

"... provides access to archival resources documenting the modern civil rights era in Greensboro, North Carolina, from the 1940s to the early 1980s. "

"On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19) [PDF, 121KB]. The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a national survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), and to record new interviews with people who participated in the Movement. The survey information is available here: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/civilrights/survey/index.php. The interviews are a permanent part of the national library and the national museum and are available here: http://www.loc.gov/collection/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/."

A guide to archival sources on Civil Rights in Maryland. Includes access to selected documents online.

A site designed "... to make sure that there is at least one place where the Movement story is told by those who actually lived it. " It includes documents, interviews, photos, etc.

"In February of 2001, the Spokesman-Review produced a month long series of articles on black history titled "Through Spokane's Eyes Moments in Black History," focusing in particular on the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As part of that series, Rebecca Nappi conducted a series of interviews with individuals with ties to both the civil rights movement and to Spokane."

"Dig DC is your portal to selected digitized and born-digital items from DC Public Library Special Collections. At Dig DC you can find photos, maps, audio and more documenting the history of Washington D.C."

Contains a variety of collections covering Memphis history including: Civil Rights Collection; photograph collection; Benjamin L. Hooks Collection; Restaurant and Menu Collection and more.

"The Underwood Law Library houses Judge Barefoot Sanders’s court chambers papers concerning the Dallas Independent School District desegregation case. The Law Library has also received the litigation files of Mr. Ed Cloutman, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, and those of Mr. Robert Hyer Thomas, the Dallas Independent School District’s lead counsel. In addition to pleadings, motions, and briefs filed with the court, this collection includes Judge Sanders’s private notes and those of Mr. Cloutman and Mr. Thomas concerning the case, contemporaneous newspaper articles, and a wealth of analytical data compiled by the school district in response to Judge Sanders’s guidelines."

Photos and documents on Civil Rights provided by the U.S. National Archives on Flicker created from the Documented Rights Exhibit

A website from the University Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This digital project "provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture." Indexes are provided by author, title, subjects, or geographic area. Users may also browse or search collections. Collections include : "First-Person Narratives of the American South" , "Library of Southern Literature" , "North American Slave Narratives" , "The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865" , "The Church in the Southern Black Community" , "The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940" , and "North Carolinians and the Great War" . The site provides information on citing the documents and lesson plans and activities for classroom use.

"The Eyes on the Prize I Interviews Collection consists of 127 raw interviews conducted with participants in the American Civil Rights movement, covering the years from the mid-1950s through to 1965. The interviews were recorded by Henry Hampton and the Blackside production company as part of the acclaimed documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965."

" Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series which was originally released in two parts: Eyes I in 1985 and Eyes II in 1988. This series, which debuted on PBS stations, is considered to be the definitive documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. “Eyes on the Prize” won more than twenty major awards and attracted over 20 million viewers. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each transcript represented the entire interview conducted by Blackside including sections which appeared in the final program and the outtakes. For more information, on the various formats of each interview, please contact the Film and Media Archive."

Civil rights files from the FBI.

"10,000 hours of audio and video recordings and thousands of documents about social justice movements locally, nationally, and internationally from the 1960s to the present. The Archives features speeches of movement leaders and community activists, protests and demonstrations, cultural currents of rebellion and resistance. "

"10,000 hours of audio and video recordings and thousands of documents about social justice movements locally, nationally, and internationally from the 1960s to the present. The Archives features speeches of movement leaders and community activists, protests and demonstrations, cultural currents of rebellion and resistance. "

"In the summer of 1961, the Freedom Riders, a group of mostly young people, both black and white, risked their lives to challenge the system of segregation in interstate travel in the South. The purpose of the rides was "to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional" (CORE, 2006). In 2001, participants gathered in Jackson, MS to commemorate the fortieth-anniversary of the freedom rides. Of those that attended, forty-two participants were interviewed; those recordings are available in this collection."

"More than 25,000 pages from the Freedom Summer manuscripts -- enough to fill several file cabinets -- are available online. In them you will find 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. The digital collection will continue to grow as more manuscripts are added in coming months."

"The Gilder Lehrman Center's online document collection contains over 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles."
From The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

"This collection contains transcribed 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."

A site at the Thurgood Marshall Law Library which provides access to the historical record of this Federal Agency. Documents can be accessed by title, date, subject, or sudoc number. Coverage begins with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Additional information may also be found at U.S. Commission on Civil Rights web page (http://www.usccr.gov/).

Nearly everyone who experienced school desegregation has a story to tell about crossing racial lines. Together they reflect an era marked by struggle and hope, anger and idealism.American RadioWorks traveled to Louisville, KY and Charlotte, NC to talk with people about their memories of integration. Here are some of their stories.

".... this online exhibit contains digitized documents, images, and other archival materials relating to 1960s student protests in Chapel Hill, N.C. "

"The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists is a compact but highly complex, multi-layered compilation of documents, sound recordings, and visual images. Some of its components, including copies of records of the Montgomery Improvements Association (MIA) and many hours of oral history of the renowned cival liberties lawyer Clifford Durr, complement major holdings in other American archives. Other components of the Rabin Collection are unique. These include an updated filmed interview of Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) in Montgomery; 450 black-and-white photographs created by the Subversive Unit of the Investigative and Identification Division of the Alabama Department of Public Safety in the course of sit-ins, demonstrations, and marches in several Alabama cities during the early to mid-1960s; and surveillance tapes preserving speeches made variously at an anniversary meeting of the MIA in 1963, at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965, and in Bessemer and Birmingham, Alabama, in the course of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy are among many leading lights of the civil rights movement heard on these tapes."

"Read and listen to these compelling first-hand accounts by people who experienced, endured, and survived Jim Crow. " part of The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow site form PBS.

"During his three years working for the Southern Courier, Mr. Peppler took over 11,000 photographs documenting the civil rights movement, social conditions in central Alabama, the nightclub Laicos in Montgomery, and the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. ADAH staff have digitized the entire collection to provide online access."

A digital collection about civil rights in Arkansas.
"While the 1957 Little Rock Central High School integration crisis is well known nationally and even internationally, it is merely one of a myriad of historical events that touches on civil rights."

"The activists interviewed for this project belong to a wide range of occupations, including lawyers, judges, doctors, farmers, journalists, professors, and musicians, among others. The video recordings of their recollections cover a wide variety of topics within the civil rights movement, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists. Actions and events discussed in the interviews include the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), the Albany Movement (1961), the Freedom Rides (1961), the Selma to Montgomery Rights March (1965), the Orangeburg Massacre (1968), sit-ins, voter registration drives in the South, and the murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till in 1955, a horrific event that galvanized many young people into joining the freedom movement."

Primary source sets from the Library of Congress are "Specific artifacts (images, manuscripts, maps, sound files) with analysis tools help students think like historians about a particular historical event or phenomenon."

"During the 1950s and ’60s, profound legal and social changes took place in Kentucky and across America as a result of the civil rights movement. This resource is designed to give a feel for the times, to explain some of the issues that were particularly important in Kentucky, and to inspire young people by showing how people their age have made a difference in society."

"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. During the 1960s, community members waged protests, boycotts, and legislative battles against segregation and discriminatory practices in schools, housing, and social clubs. The efforts of these activists and their opponents are vividly documented in the primary sources found here, including photographs, unedited news film footage, text documents, and oral history interviews. This website also includes educational materials, including a bibliography and timeline, to enhance understanding of the primary sources. The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project seeks to make Milwaukee’s place in the national struggle for racial equality more accessible, engaging, and interactive. "

MDAH Digital Archives include:
electronic records received from government agencies and officials; donated and acquired electronic resources; digital copies of original materials from MDAH collections, including paper documents, photographs, maps, audio, and video

"The Mississippi Freedom Project (MFP) is an award-winning archive of 200+ oral history interviews conducted with veterans of the civil rights movement and notable residents of the Mississippi Delta."

"The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was the state's official counter civil rights agency from 1956–1973. The files in this online collection comprise the scanned originals with court-approved redactions requested by individuals named in the records along with additional information submitted by individuals named in the records who chose to file a rebuttal. The collection also includes the court-specified personal name index and links between rebuttal records and Commission records in which rebuttal submitters are mentioned. The files may be searched by personal name, folder title and number, or rebuttal respondent."

This site from provides samples of "documents in the National Archives [that] give voice to our national struggle for personal rights and freedoms. "

Explore photographs, postcards, maps, manuscript documents, and oral history clips from the Special Collections Division, Metro Archives, and more.

Look for items labeled as "Artifact" to locate primary source materials.

Abstract
"Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus reflects on the effects of his twelve-year tenure in the governor's mansion, state politics, and, of course, desegregation. Faubus paints himself as a populist who helped rescue Arkansas from backwardness with social programs and infrastructure. Merciless mischaracterizations from a lazy and hostile press have sullied his legacy, he claims, ignoring his many accomplishments and obscuring the true story of what happened on the courthouse steps in 1957. This interview will be useful to researchers interested in Arkansas politics in the middle of the twentieth century, the rising influence of the media in politics, and desegregation. "

"This 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." Tulane University Digital Library

"Collection housed in Special Collections and Archives, Queens College Library. Consists of printed ephemera, institutional records, recollections, and other materials documenting social movements on the Queens College campus and in Queens in the 1960s. The collection also includes activism carried out by Queens College students, alumni, faculty, and staff that took place in the larger New York City area or nationally. "

"On July 12, 1967, in the wake of a police beating of arrested cab driver John Smith, residents in the city of Newark rioted. The five-day disturbance left 26 people dead, caused $10 million in damage and forever changed the state's largest city.

Fifty years after the riots, NJ Advance Media spoke to experts, current and former city residents, and leaders about whether or not Newark is recovering from the reputation it has earned since then. The following 7-minute recording and narrative is a compilation of only their voices -- a collection of quotes from the people who know the city's history best, and who together, tell the story of stigma and recovery."

"... is an archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia. The Jim Crow laws segregated African-Americans from white Americans in public places such as schools, and school buses. The archive contains photos, letters, two regional censuses and a flash map of the town of Charlottesville. The Jim Crow laws were not overturned until the important Brown versus Board of Education court ruling in 1954 (but not totally eliminated until the Civil Rights Act of the 1964). "

An online exhibit of documents and other items available from U.S. National Archives. It includes rights of various types including African-Americans, Native Americans, Women, privacy, sexuality, workplace, and rights from the first amendment.

Provides access to collections on civil rights, the sanitation strike, local history and more.

"Many documents at the National Archives illustrate how individuals and groups asserted their rights as Americans. Use this site to explore the topics of slavery, racism, citizenship, women’s independence, immigration, and more." Docs Teach at the National Archives

"This project serves as a permanent resource for continuing conversation, learning and research around Rochester's role in civil rights history. We also hope the site will identify other participants. The Department seeks collections of personal or organizational papers, images, and ephemera related to Rochester's black freedom experience in the 1960s and '70s – especially materials related to the riots and the city's recovery."

"This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students."

"This web-site is comprised of original oral history interviews carried out by students of Dr. McCleary’s Hist 150 and Unst 390 course, spring 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020 as part of James Madison University’s general education program. All of the interviews are available in MP3 form and transcriptions. The general theme of the interviews are about social change in the 20th and 21st centuries as depicted through themes such as the Cold War, gender, immigration, education, and the workplace. In spring 2020, they interviewed people about the most recent social change that we have experienced, the Coronoa virus. After the interviews were posted, students analyzed them to discern patterns of change in themes of their choosing."

"Social History for Every Classroom (formerly HERB) is a database of primary documents, classroom activities, and other teaching tools in U.S. history. SHEC reflects ASHP/CML’s mission of making the past, and the working people and ordinary Americans who shaped it, vivid and meaningful."

"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. It was never to be merely a journal of opinion. Reporters and editors were expected to become part of their communities, black and white alike, and not to engage in "drive-by" journalism or attempts at social change; to use their skills as journalists and not become community organizers or advocates for a single point of view; and to produce a quality newspaper that reached out beyond those who already agreed with the pro-civil rights perspective of its editorial page."

The Southern Oral History Program Interview Database provides detailed descriptions of interviews in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (04007). The interviews in this collection were conducted or collected under the auspices of the Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Digital transcripts and audio for many interviews are available through this database created and maintained by the University Library at UNC Chapel Hill. Analog audio recordings, paper transcripts, and supplementary files are available through the Southern Historical Collection in the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill.

"Collection of oral history recordings documenting the history of civil rights and social justice advocacy in Western Michigan. The collection was created by faculty and students as a project of the LIB 201 (formerly US 201): "Diversity in the U.S." course from 2011-2012."

primary sources from PBS related to the Supreme Court and civil rights

"TeachingAmericanHistory.org is a project of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. The Ashbrook Center is an independent, non-partisan non-profit, the mission of which is to restore and strengthen the capacities of the American people for constitutional self-government. To fulfill this mission, Ashbrook offers educational programs for students, teachers, and citizens."

"Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970, aims to collect, digitize, and present in streaming video format over the World Wide Web television news footage from the period and to make these valuable materials available to scholars, teachers, and students. The current archive contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. In this initial installment we have digitized over 230 films. This rare footage includes full speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens."

"Tuskegee University Archives recently released new recordings from the Tuskegee Civic Association records that feature prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. These speeches, addressing the Tuskegee community, fill in historical gaps to illuminate the relationships between leaders and their constituents.

The collection was digitized from reel-to-reel tape under the care of university archivist Dana Chandler and made available through funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Council of Independent Colleges. The recordings are freely available to listen to on Shared Shelf Commons." ARTstor Blog

Provides access to various publications and legislation.

"The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, created in 1957 by the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, works to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society. The Division enforces federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, disability, religion, familial status and national origin."

"Spanning a wide range of visual media, the USC Digital Library offers digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, as well as audio and video recordings. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of the libraries at the University of Southern California, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences."

Designed to make "research quality digital collections of texts, images, and audio materials" available for scholars.

"Topics include civil rights, politics, agriculture and farming, journalism, religion, veterans, and more. This collection holds over 700 digitized oral histories that document the life and culture of Mississippians."

"The exhibition Voices of Civil Rights documents events during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This exhibition draws from the thousands of personal stories, oral histories, and photographs collected by the "Voices of Civil Rights" project, a collaborative effort of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress, and marks the arrival of these materials in the Library's collection."

"The Voices of Democracy project is designed to promote the study of great speeches and public debates. The emphasis of the project is on the actual words of those who, throughout American history, have defined the country’s guiding principles, debated the great social and political controversies of the nation’s history, and shaped the identity and character of the American people. " It is run by the University of Maryland

"... produced by the Virginia Civil Rights Movement Video Initiative, a non-profit organization incorporated in 2002 to produce videotaped oral histories of leaders of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia. "

"Voices of the Civil Rights Movement includes all of the personal accounts of America’s civil rights movement collected in Comcast’s His Dream, Our Stories project. Those firsthand stories are presented here against the stirring backdrop of key Moments in Civil Rights History, a collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative and the late civil rights activist "