History - Primary Sources: Civil Rights

The march which culminated in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (National Archives, via YouTube)

Includes primary sources on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, black in the World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. (Footnote.com)

1963 film of Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Charleton Heston, and other Hollywood names conversing about the March on Washington (National Archives, via YouTube)

Information about 4,900+ civil rights cases across the US. Dockets, complaints, filings, settlements, decrees, opinions, and links to additional sources in the Westlaw and LexisNexis databases. Create a free account to save searches and documents.

(Note: Search on campus or use Off-Campus Access to access EPCC's subscription to LexisNexis Academic.)

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, 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)

The images in this collection document Freedom House's early activities to create an integrated Roxbury, foster citizen participation in the urban renewal of Roxbury, and implement early oversight of Boston Public Schools desegregation. The photographs include images of well-­known figures, local community activists, Freedom House events, and the Roxbury neighborhood. This project continues Northeastern University Libraries’ dedication to preserving and making accessible the history of Boston’s African American community.

Photos, speeches, documents, and references to numerous books and websites. (Abdul Alkalimat, Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

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)

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)

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)

An official website of the United States government.

A digital archive of documents and audio recordings related to the 1965 book by Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (Vanderbilt Univ.)