U.S. History: Primary Source Collections Online

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)

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.)

Includes primary sources on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, black in the World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. (Fold3)

All 13 volumes are available through JSTOR, you can search for specific volumes or chapters.

The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The initiative promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement through its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement, 2) a civil rights portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Movement by connecting related digital collections on a national scale, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources - such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities--to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process. (Digital Library of Georgia)

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.(Virginia Center for Digital History)

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.)

History, stories, materials, and images by Freedom Movement veterans.

"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 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)

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.)

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)

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.

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.)

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.

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

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)

Digital media about Malcolm X, featuring video interviews with people who knew Malcolm, government documents, and archival footage. (Columbia Univ.)

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)

[UPDATE: As of Sept 2023, website says Coming 2024] 200,000 documents available online. (King Center)

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.(University of Georgia)

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)

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)

The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000. The collection, which contains approximately 7,500 items in the Manuscript Division, as well as 2,500 photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division, documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. (Library of Congress)

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.)

"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)

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)

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)

Voices of Freedom was 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. While much has been written about the dramatic events which occurred in the deep South, the story of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia has largely gone untold. Voices of Freedom focuses on statewide activities from the 1950s through the early 1970s and includes stories about the "Jim Crow" segregation laws that prevailed up until the mid-1960s; stories about the struggles to change the laws and to change public attitudes; and advice from these civil rights veterans to future generations of Virginians/Americans.(Virginia Commonwealth Univ.)

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