History - Desegregation and Civil Rights

This site guides researchers to collections in several Library divisions that specifically focus on the movement as well as the broader topic of African American history and culture. The Civil Rights History Project Collection (AFC 2010/039) contains more than 1200 items consisting of born-digital video files, digitized videocassettes, digital photographs and full-text transcripts for all interviews. The interviews are also accessible through the Library's YouTube site and the NMAAHC website.

Find out more about the history of Civil Rights Movement, including videos, photographs, speeches.

The story behind a courageous band of civil rights activists called Freedom Riders who in 1961 challenged segregation in the American South.

In 1985, Coretta Scott King asked Stanford historian Clayborne Carson to edit and publish The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Since then, the King Papers Project has engaged in a broad range of activities illuminating the Nobel Peace laureate's life and the movements he inspired.

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, "Jim Crow" came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.