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Martin Luther King Speaks Out Against Injustice
These two letters from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed four years apart, provide insight into the evolution of King's struggle against injustice. In the excerpt from "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written following King's arrest at a peaceful [...]
African-American Women Threaten a Bus Boycott in Montgomery
This letter from the Women's Political Council to the Mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, threatens a bus boycott by the city's African Americans if demands for fair treatment are not met.
Prospectus for a Summer Freedom School Program in Mississippi (Excerpt)
This plan, written by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member Charles Cobb, proposed that SNCC include Freedom Schools as part of the massive organizing effort it was planning for the summer of 1964. SNCC was creating Freedom Summer [...]
SNCC Outlines a "Citizenship Curriculum" for Mississippi
This curriculum was created by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for their Freedom Schools, part of the Freedom Summer organizing effort that brought hundreds of college students from around the country to Mississippi [...]
An Alabama Literacy Test Keeps Black Voters Off the Rolls
Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many southern (and some western) states had devised "literacy tests" and other voting requirements whose primary purpose was to deny African Americans the vote. The tests consisted of written [...]
"The FBI Wants Information About Three Missing Civil Rights Workers"
The three murdered civil rights workers from the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project are pictured on this FBI "missing" poster. On June 21st, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were abducted and killed by Klansmen in an effort [...]
Rosa Parks Takes a Stand Against Segregation
Rosa Parks gained international fame in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat in the "whites-only" section on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks, an employee of the Montgomery Fair department store and secretary for the NAACP, later said [...]
Security Handbook for Freedom Summer Workers
A copy of the Security Handbook given to participants in the "Freedom Summer" campaign in Mississippi in 1964 highlights the dangers that young civil rights workers were exposed to. Tragically, the precautions suggested by the handbook proved [...]
Illustration of bus where Rosa Parks sat, December 1, 1955
The diagram below shows where Rosa Parks sat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. At the time, the first ten seats on Montgomery buses were reserved for white passengers only. Parks was sitting in the eleventh row. When the bus [...]
1960s Protesters Link to Earlier Black Freedom Struggles
In 1960, four African-American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began "sitting in" at the local Woolworth store’s lunch counter, which, like virtually all such lunch counters at the time, did not serve black customers. The [...]