# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ASALH - The Founders of Black History Month - Association for the Study of African American Life and History (est. 1915)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Black Resistance theme publication and posters are available. Order early to support plans for Black History Month, Woman's History Month, and Juneteenth. Three hi-gloss posters on Black Resistance and one Juneteenth poster...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Black History in Two Minutes (or so) is the new way to immerse yourself in Black History. The digital video series features dozens of short, engaging and factually accurate videos about important historical events or people who have shaped American history. Like never before, people of all ages, bac…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://wp.nyu.edu/gallatin-bpparchive2021/wp-content/uploads/sites/21577/2021/05/media1_8OE1MF8d.mp3

The intention for the CT chapter was for it to be started in Bridgeport CT, a city with a sizable black population by Erica and John Huggins, the leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. The course of this was changed when he was killed at (UCLA) campus in January 1969 as a result of the FBI's COINTELPRO program. His funeral changed the course of this planning and sights were set on New Haven for the Panther headquarters instead. This report covers the subsequent infiltration of the CT chapter and the trial of Erica Huggins and Bobby Seale, along with the Free Bobby and Erica movement, which ended up mobilizing local leftist and progressive organizations. Also the interesting dynamics with the Yale student body. The CT chapter was a unique case for the analysis of female leadership and state repression of black women panthers.

Names and roles of relevant chapter 'leaders'/main organizers/principal theoreticians:

Some of the most prominent leaders and organizers of the CT party were Erica Huggins and Warren Kimbro along with Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown. George Same was also a prominent leader for a time when it wasn't known he was an informant hired by federal agents. Doug Miranda became a prominent leader after the trial against Erica Huggins and Bobby Seale. After Seale's indictment in August for his alleged involvement in the Connecticut conspiracy, the Black Panther Party national office sent Miranda to New Haven to develop and lead the chapter and National headquarters chose him for the crucial role of organizing support for Seale and Huggins. In terms of membership, when they first started there were about a dozen members but by April 1970 according to the FBI, the chapter had about thirty "hard core" committed Black Panther members in New Haven.

On January 23, 1969, Ericka Huggins and her three-week-old daughter, Mai, went to John's burial, in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut. There she met Warren Kimbrow and eventually the two of them coupled. In the preceding months, the Panthers had begun organizing a chapter of the Party in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but their plans changed after John Huggins Funeral. At some point they were running the chapter out of Kimbrow's house on Orchard Street in New Haven. They offered political education classes out of the home and also started a breakfast program.

Some of their early advocacy included public speeches , educational political classes, and advocacy about New Haven's atrocious housing policy, which they deemed "murderous". They also had a health clinic running. On October 8, the New Haven Black Panthers launched the John Huggins Free Breakfast for Children Program at the Newhallville Teen Lounge on Shelton Avenue. They teamed up with a welfare rights organization called Welfare Moms of New Haven to promote the breakfast program and build support for the Black Panther Party. Soon, they were feeding seventy to eighty kids each morning. On Wednesday nights, the Panthers held a popular ideology class on Columbus Avenue.

To understand what happened in CT we have to start with the rival of George Sams and Alex Rackley on May 17. Alex Rackely was nineteen years old, homeless, desperate, and eager to please. He had joined the Panthers in New York looking for a place to fit in. George Sams, on the other hand, was also a Black Panther member. He was earlier expelled from the Party for stabbing another Panther in Oakland but reinstated at the request of Stokely Carmichael, whom he had once served as a bodyguard. There is a evidence that Sams was likely recruited by the feds in Aug of taught year, in which he was "was arrested in a gun incident that embarrassed the fledgling Panther chapter in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he was soon extradited to the United States for trial, where he turned state's evidence". Within days the Justice Department created a special unit with the "purpose of instituting federal prosecution against the Black Panther Party".

Sams met Alex Rackley in Harlem and "disciplined" him for looking like a "pickaninny," beating him and ordering him to run around the block. Shortly thereafter, Sams drove Rackley to New Haven. When Sams arrived in New Haven, he claimed that he had been sent by the national headquarters to weed out spies. Violent, heavily armed, and scary, he immediately took control of the developing New Haven Chapter. He charged Rackley with being a spy and set up an interrogation process in which Warren Kimbro and young new Panther recruit Lonnie McLucas and Sams tied Rackley to a chair and tortured him. The two beat Rackley with a club, twisted coat hangers around his neck, and poured boiling water over him. Sams ordered Ericka Huggins to record the "proceedings" on audio, and the recording captures Rackley desperately screeching for mercy. Still Rackley was not dead yet, and on May 20, under the pretense of letting Rackley go free, they drove him to a swamp in the suburbs.

Reportedly, Sams handed Kimbro his .45 and said "Ice him. Orders from National." He acted under the pretense of having national orders. Kimbro shot Rackley in the back of the head, killing him. Sams then took the gun back and handed it to McLucas, telling him to finish Rackley off. McLucas shot Rackley in the chest.

Police basically knew about his torture, but made zero attemptas to save Rackley's life, indicating that he was NOT an informant. Police, however, did nothing to stop Rackley's torture or murder, later claiming that they did not know he was being tortured and that they had tried to follow the car that carried Rackley to his death, but it had eluded them. Police arrsted Ericka, Warren Kimbro, and Lonnie McLucas, Francis Carter, and four other young female Panthers on murder charges, kidnapping, and conspriacy.

For some reason, Sams tried to indite Bobby Seale, chairman of the BPP, who was arrested in Berkeley California on on capital charges of conspiracy to commit murder for allegedly ordering the killing of Alex Rackley even though he wasn't in the state at the time. The state made a deal with Kimbro, offering him a light sentence and a return to his middle-class life in exchange for turning state's evidence and pinning the murder on Panther higher-ups. Kimbro and Sams each served four years and were released. Lonnie McLucas maintained the innocence of the Party leaders and was slated to face trial.

The FBI paid close attention to the New Haven Panthers, tapping their phones and infiltrating their ranks with several undercover informants. In March, FBI Director Hoover fiercely reprimanded the New Haven field office for not producing hard-hitting counterintelligence measures for dealing with the Panthers there: "To date you have submitted no concrete recommendations under this program concerning the Black Panther Party, despite the fact this extremely dangerous organization is active in four cities in your Division." This use of extensive wiretap in the New Haven headquarters was illegal in state and federal law. Eventually in the early 1980s the city settled a massive lawsuit with the victims of the wiretaps, including several members of the Black Panther Party.

The Black Panther 5, Dec 6 issue is titled: The Yale Corporation and the Pre-Planned Murder of Chairman Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins. It starts off denouncing, and titling Yale University as an institution of corporate capitalism governed by three evils: government, finance, and business, stating that Yale owns 75% of New Haven property. It serves "as a training ground for the elite in all fields and areas of government and business. It is institutions such as Yale that breeds the beast of oppression." It also claimed that Yale is responsible for curating a system of classism and racism in CT, and that the state of CT "has taken on a task that is guaranteed to get Yale and possibly the state destroyed. Their task is to capture, and execute Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, Landon Williams, and Rory Hithe, it is the task of the people to liberate these political prisoners of war as soon as possible and by any means necessary. The lives of these revolutionaries are priceless."

Free Bobby and Erica! Campaign:

One could argue that it only gained legitimacy because of Seale's involvement and George Sams indictment of Bobby Seale who had nothing to do with anything. But Seale's involvement in the California state prior, and the ATTEMPTS TO incarcerate him like on March 20, 1969, for conspiracy to incite riots along with the other "Chicago Eight" got a lot of mobilization around him and made it obvious that it was state repression. The government's strained efforts to pin the murder on him became a rallying point for the "Free Bobby and Erica" campaign which was led by Doug Miranda who was sent by national headquarters. Once in New Haven, Miranda demonstrated his intellectual acuity to Yale students, trouncing a representative of Students for a Democratic Society in a public debate on Marxism. Miranda ably raised funds to support the New Haven chapter by securing regular donations from wealthy students, an activity that the FBI closely monitored through wiretaps.

At a news conference on October 1, Miranda announced the formation of the Coalition to Defend the Panthers as a central part of their effort to create a defense outside the courtroom. The coalition would focus on fund-raising for the legal defense and would challenge the vilification of the Panthers in the mainstream press. It seems like this campaign to free Erica and Seale doubled as an attempt to gather broad coalitions of liberals and + progressives and gradually sympathize them to the BPP cause. "The main line of the Coalition in its educational work will be that the Panther case has received such prejudicial coverage in the press that a 'fair trial' is impossible, and that therefore the Panthers should be freed immediately."

There was heavy police brutality against students and protests. David Hilliard was also arrested for passing a note to Seale's lawyer in a trial, which seemed to prove that this was a case of irrational repression of the Panthers, seeing as Hilliard was one of the few who were not incarcerated at the time. Their formed coalition comprised fifteen organizations, including national left and progressive organizations such as SDS and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; black community organizations from New Haven such as the Hill Parents Association; Yale organizations such as the Yale Divinity School Association and the Yale Black Law Students organization; and New Haven's leading leftist organization, the American Independent Movement.

Relationship to other local social movement organizations

The Women's Liberation movement, a predominantly white feminist group in New Haven, planned a rally for November 22, 1969, to protest the plight of the five women Panthers incarcerated there. The group argued that, with the women being held without bail and not allowed visitors, their "right to interview lawyers crucial to the preparation of their defense has been denied in direct violation of their constitutional rights."

Demographics and dynamics:

The gender dynamics and patriarchal masculinity was at least in part affected by the issues in CT. 5 panther women were incarcerated without bail or visitors, and 3 of them were pregnant and being denied access to care and proper diet. This prompted Eldridge Cleaver to respond with feminist statement, with particular focus on Erica's struggle in CT. This shift in gender dynamics is explored by Tracy Mathews. Cleaver's statement was one of the earliest formulations and BPP pieces on the revolutionary role of black women, and was a contribution to the ongoing discourse of gender dynamics of the part at the time:

"Let it be a lesson and an example to all of the sisters, particularly to all of the brothers, that we must understand that our women are suffering strongly and enthusiastically as we are participating in the struggle. The incarceration and the suffering of Sister Erica [sic] should be a stinging rebuke to all manifestations of male chauvinism within our ranks . . . That we must too recognize that a woman can be just as revolutionary as a man and that she has equal stature... I know from my own experience with incarceration that the demand for liberation of women in Babylon is the issue that is going to explode, and if we're not careful it's going to destroy our ranks, destroy our organization, because women want to be liberated just as all oppressed people want to be liberated"

He describes women with an equal role, not a complementary role, as had been the previous approach to more chauvinistic black nationalist organizations.
The Panthers and Yale Bulldogs:
The CT BPP chapter cultivated a unique relationship with the Yale student body, directly involving them, and urging them to take a stand on the trial. Artie Seale, Bobby Seale's wife, said ""Either you're with us or against us."

In terms of the community impact they had, it seems to me that Doug Miranda was set out on spreading the spirit of student protest and rebellion of the age to Yale's campus, in a deliberate attempt to push the students' awareness further left. He employed an interesting tactic, in a meeting he told a group of Yale students "You ought to get some guns, and go and get Chairman Bobby out of jail." He later explained that he had zero violent expectations of Yale students, but that he was trying to push them to fall back on a strike, when they found that they can't pursue anything greater than that. In the end, the strike, planned for May Day, was approved by the Yale College Student Senate and was the first ever strike in Yale history. Anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of the student body reportedly took part. The most surprising part was Yale's president Kingman Brewster Jr. went with the popular sentiment, making the CT trial out to be a greater implication/example of any black individual's ability to get a fair trial in the US, thus putting the Judicial system in question.

By: Iman Yusuf

Bloom, J.; Martin, W. E. (2016). Bobby and Erica. In Black against empire: the history and politics of the Black Panther Party (pp. 247-266). essay, University of California Press.

Jones, C. E., &amp; Mathews, T. (2005). "No one ever asks what a Man's Place in The Revolution Is: Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party 1966-1971." In The Black Panther Party: reconsidered (pp. 267-304). essay, Black Classic Press.

Williams, Y. (2020, December 29). The New Haven Black Panther Trials. Connecticut Explored. https://www.ctexplored.org/the-new-haven-black-panther-trials/ .

You Can Jail a Revolutionary But You Can't Jail the Revolution: You Can Run a Freedom Fighter Around the Country But You Can't Run Freedom Fighting Around the Country: You Can Murder a Liberator But You Can't Murder Liberation. (1970). In The Black Panther 5 no. 23:1-16 (December 5, 1970) (p. 1). San Francisco, CA: Black Panther Party. Black Panther Productions. Retrieved from Black Thought and Culture database.

Image: Fenton, David. "Black Panther Party members selling books outside of Panther office, New Haven, Connecticut, 2 May 1970." The Guardian, 5 Aug. 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/05/new-haven-nine-black-panthers-exhibition. Accessed 15 May 2021.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://wp.nyu.edu/gallatin-bpparchive2021/wp-content/uploads/sites/21577/2021/05/media1_8OE1MF8d.mp3 The intention for the CT chapter was for it to be started in Bridgeport CT, a city with a sizable black population by Erica and John Huggins, the leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inside the Vault: Black Patriots of the American Revolution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inside the Vault: Black Patriots of the American Revolution | Originally broadcast on October 29, 2020, this session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection explores unique documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection that record the service of Black soldiers in the Continental Army and reveal their postwar experiences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
National Museum of African American History and Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greetings from the Education Team of the National Museum of African American History and Culture!! The National Museum of African American History a…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning History Through Objects: Slavery in Colonial America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What can objects tell us about the creation, development, and characteristics of slavery in Colonial America? How will this information help us to better understand the dual themes of slavery and f...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
African Americans, one of the largest of the many ethnic groups in the United States. African Americans are mainly of African ancestry, but many have non-Black ancestors as well.

African Americans are largely the descendants of enslaved people who were brought from their African homelands by force to work in the New World. Their rights were severely limited, and they were long denied a rightful share in the economic, social, and political progress of the United States. Nevertheless, African Americans have made basic and lasting contributions to American history and culture.

At the turn of the 21st century, more than half the country's more than 36 million African Americans lived in the South; 10 Southern states had Black populations exceeding 1 million. African Americans were also concentrated in the largest cities, with more than 2 million living in New York City and more than 1 million in Chicago. Detroit, Philadelphia, and Houston each had a Black population between 500,000 and 1 million.

Names and labels

As Americans of African descent reached each new plateau in their struggle for equality, they reevaluated their identity. The slaveholder labels of black and negro (Spanish for "black") were offensive, so they chose the euphemism coloured when they were freed. Capitalized, Negro became acceptable during the migration to the North for factory jobs. Afro-American was adopted by civil rights activists to underline pride in their ancestral homeland, but Black-the symbol of power and revolution-proved more popular. All these terms are still reflected in the names of dozens of organizations. To reestablish "cultural integrity" in the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson proposed African American, which-unlike some "baseless" colour label-proclaims kinship with a historical land base. In the 21st century the terms Black and African American both were widely used.

The early history of Blacks in the Americas

Africans assisted the Spanish and the Portuguese during their early exploration of the Americas. In the 16th century some Black explorers settled in the Mississippi valley and in the areas that became South Carolina and New Mexico. The most celebrated Black explorer of the Americas was Estéban, who traveled through the Southwest in the 1530s.

The uninterrupted history of Blacks in the United States began in 1619, when 20 Africans were landed in the English colony of Virginia. These individuals were not enslaved people but indentured servants -persons bound to an employer for a limited number of years-as were many of the settlers of European descent (whites). By the 1660s large numbers of Africans were being brought to the English colonies. In 1790 Blacks numbered almost 760,000 and made up nearly one-fifth of the population of the United States.

Attempts to hold Black servants beyond the normal term of indenture culminated in the legal establishment of Black chattel slavery in Virginia in 1661 and in all the English colonies by 1750. Black people were easily distinguished by their skin colour (the result of evolutionary pressures favouring the presence in the skin of a dark pigment called melanin in populations in equatorial climates) from the rest of the populace, making them highly visible targets for enslavement. Moreover, the development of the belief that they were an "inferior" race with a "heathen" culture made it easier for whites to rationalize Black slavery. Enslaved Blacks were put to work clearing and cultivating the farmlands of the New World.

Of an estimated 10 million Africans brought to the Americas by the trade of enslaved peoples, about 430,000 came to the territory of what is now the United States. The overwhelming majority were taken from the area of western Africa stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola, where political and social organization as well as art, music, and dance were highly advanced. On or near the African coast had emerged the major kingdoms of Oyo, Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey, and the Congo. In the Sudanese interior had arisen the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai; the Hausa states; and the states of Kanem-Bornu. Such African cities as Djenné and Timbuktu, both now in Mali, were at one time major commercial and educational centres.

With the increasing profitability of slavery and the trade of enslaved peoples, some Africans themselves sold captives to the European traders. The captured Africans were generally marched in chains to the coast and crowded into the holds of slave ships for the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, usually to the West Indies. Shock, disease, and suicide were responsible for the deaths of at least one-sixth during the crossing. In the West Indies the survivors were "seasoned"-taught the rudiments of English and drilled in the routines and discipline of plantation life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African Americans | History, Facts, & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
African Americans constitute one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States. African Americans are mainly of African ancestry, but many have non-Black ancestors as well. Learn more about African Americans, including their history, culture, and contributions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Freedom Summer | Article

Fannie Lou Hamer

From the Collection: Women in American History

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. She first joined her family in the cotton fields at the age of six. Although she managed to complete several years of school, by adolescence she was picking hundreds of pounds of cotton a day. In the early 1940s she married Perry Hamer, known as Pap, and worked alongside him at W.D. Marlow's plantation near Ruleville, in Sunflower County. Hamer's ability to read and write earned her the job of timekeeper, a less physically demanding and more prestigious job within the sharecropping system.

The Hamers adopted two daughters, girls whose own families were unable to care for them. (They later adopted their two grandchildren after the older daughter's death.) Hamer's own pregnancies had all failed, and she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent in 1961. She was given a hysterectomy while in the hospital for minor surgery, a procedure so common it was known as a "Mississippi appendectomy." "[In] the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the 10 Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied," she told a Washington, DC, audience three years later.

The forced sterilization was one of the moments that set Hamer on the path to the forefront of the Mississippi Civil Rights movement, but the incident that brought her into a leadership role came a year later. On August 31, 1962, not long after attending a voting rights meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Hamer joined 17 of her neighbors on a bus to Indianola, the county seat. Officials blocked most of the group from even attempting to register; Hamer and one man were the only ones allowed to fill out the application and take the literacy test, which both failed.

On the drive back to Ruleville, the bus was stopped and the driver arrested -- the bus was too yellow, the police claimed. While the passengers were held on the bus, the deeply religious Hamer began to sing spirituals. Singing, in particular, "This Little Light of Mine" and "Go Tell It on the Mountain," became one of the defining features of her activism.

When the passengers scraped together enough money to cover the driver's fine, the bus was allowed to return to Ruleville. When Hamer got home, she found that plantation owner W.D.

Marlow was already aware that she had tried to register to vote. He demanded that she withdraw her application. She refused, with an explanation that would become a familiar refrain in her Civil Rights speeches: "I didn't go down there to register for you. I went down to register for myself." Marlow ordered her off his land.

Hamer stayed with friends in Ruleville for a few days, but it was clear that there would be reprisals against the people who had gone to Indianola. Pap drove Hamer and their daughters to Tallahatchie County, where they stayed with rural relatives for some time before returning to Sunflower County, ready to take up the fight.

Her singing on the bus and her willingness to challenge the county registrar had been noticed by local organizers, and SNCC field secretary Bob Moses saw her as a potential leader. He sent Charles McLaurin, a young activist, to find Hamer and bring her to a SNCC conference at Fisk University in Nashville in the fall of 1962. The conference was a success, and Hamer left Nashville eager to take on her new role as a community organizer.

Pap Hamer had stayed at the Marlow plantation, working through the harvest to pay off the family's sharecropping debt, but in the fall of 1962 he rejoined his wife and daughters. Marlow took possession of the Hamers' car, as well as the contents of the house they had rented from him, so they started over in Ruleville. The family's main source of income was Hamer's $10 weekly stipend from SNCC.

Through 1962 and 1963, Hamer continued to work for desegregation and voter registration. She would also become involved in relief work, distributing donated food and clothes to the poorest Delta residents. Hamer had spent her entire life in poverty, and she understood that the fight for economic security was a crucial component of the Civil Rights movement. At the same time, she was willing to use the donations as leverage, and sometimes refused to hand over food until the recipients agreed to register to vote.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer and several fellow activists were returning from a citizenship training program in Charleston, South Carolina, when their bus stopped in Winona, Mississippi. In an act of protest, several members of the group sat at the bus station's whites-only lunch counter. Before long the police removed them from the café, arresting six people.

In jail, several of the activists were beaten by the police and by other African American inmates, whom the police forced to use blackjack weapons. The damage done to Hamer's eyes, legs, and kidneys would affect her for the rest of her life.

When the activists did not check in with the SNCC office that afternoon, organizers knew they were in trouble. It took several days -- and the arrest and beating of Lawrence Guyot, another SNCC worker -- before they were finally released on June 12. After they left the jail, Hamer and her colleagues learned that Medgar Evers had been assassinated on the front steps of his Jackson, MS home the previous day. As the NAACP field secretary, Evers had been the driving force behind the admission of the first black student to the University of Mississippi.

In the following months, Hamer increased her public profile, both through her SNCC work and as one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the dominant force in Mississippi politics, the pro-segregation Democratic Party. In early 1964, Hamer ran for Congress as the MFDP candidate. She challenged veteran Congressman Jamie Whitten in the Democratic primary. Though Whitten won with an overwhelming majority, Hamer's run set a precedent by challenging the established Mississippi congressional delegation, and set the stage for the MFDP to have a national presence.

The work of MFDP was one part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of college students to the state to work for Civil Rights. Although some SNCC organizers were wary of bringing in a group of outsiders, mostly whites from the North, Hamer saw value in an integrated movement and convinced many to abandon their objections. "If we're trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can't segregate ourselves," she said in a SNCC meeting.

Hamer traveled to Oxford, Ohio, to train the volunteers who would be teaching classes and registering voters -- and to sing the spirituals and movement songs she was known for. Tracy Sugarman, who spent the summer in Mississippi as both a volunteer and a journalist, accompanied Hamer as she visited Delta churches to encourage parishioners to register to vote. "Mrs. Hamer rose majestically to her feet," he wrote. "Her magnificent voice rolled through the chapel as she enlisted the Biblical ranks of martyrs and heroes to summon these folk to the Freedom banner. Her mounting, rolling battery of quotations and allusions from the Old and New Testaments stunned the audience with its thunder."

While the student volunteers knocked on doors and taught classes, Hamer was busy with the MFDP. The party held its own conventions at the precinct, county, and state levels to select a group to send to Atlantic City in August, where they would challenge the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Hamer was elected vice chair of the integrated delegation, which consisted of 64 black members and four white members.

The MFDP's goal was to persuade the convention's Credentials Committee to seat them as Mississippi representatives. President Lyndon Johnson, who needed Southern Democrats' support in his bid for re-election, was determined to block them. Hamer was among those who testified before the Credentials Committee. During her powerful testimony, Johnson called a last-minute press conference, causing the networks to break with their convention coverage and broadcast from the White House instead.

But Johnson's ploy to keep Hamer off television did not work. Her testimony was compelling enough for many evening news programs to broadcast it, incidentally granting it a much larger audience. Hamer held the committee's attention as she spoke from memory about her eviction from the Marlow plantation and her brutal beating in the Winona jail. After less than 10 minutes she concluded: "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?"

Nonetheless, under pressure from Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, members of the Credentials Committee dropped their support for the MFDP. As a conciliatory gesture, Democratic officials offered two at-large seats to MFDP representatives, though Humphrey made it clear Johnson would not stand for one of the seats going to Hamer, "The President has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention." The MFDP rejected the offer, and Hamer's voice was one of the loudest in opposition. "We didn't come all this way for no two seats," she said.

After the MFDP delegation returned to Mississippi, Hamer was in high demand as a speaker. Her appearances were good for fundraising, always a concern for civil rights organizations, and she spent the remainder of the 1960s balancing national activism with her work within Mississippi. Voting rights remained a priority, even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and Hamer took the lead in lawsuits that led to the first elections in which large numbers of black residents of Sunflower County were registered and eligible to vote in 1967. She also organized plaintiffs for a school desegregation lawsuit, instituted livestock and agricultural co-ops to improve economic prospects in the Delta, and was involved in the introduction of Head Start programs for low-income children of all races. Hamer had mixed success, particularly as her worsening health -- a combination of a lifetime in poverty, her 1963 beating, and a 1976 cancer diagnosis -- limited her capacity for public speaking and made fundraising difficult.

Hamer died in 1977 from complications associated with heart disease and cancer. Hundreds of local residents turned out for her funeral, as did most of the leaders of the civil rights movement. Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, and Delta Democrat-Times editor Hodding Carter all spoke in celebration of Hamer's contributions to her family, her community, and the fight for Civil Rights that was her driving passion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fannie Lou Hamer | American Experience | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta.

# data[].attributes.headline
Reconstruction 1865-1877 and Jim Crow Era 1877-1950

# data[].attributes.subject
Reconstruction 1865-1877 and Jim Crow Era 1877-1950

# data[].attributes.headline
Interactive Timeline Black Activism 1954-

# data[].attributes.subject
Interactive Timeline Black Activism 1954-

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No More: The Children of Birmingham 1963 and the Turning Point of the Civil Rights Movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
16 queer Black trailblazers who made history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lesbian drag king Stormé DeLarverie, trans activist Marsha P. Johnson and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin are among the Black LGBTQ pioneers who changed the course of history.

# data[].attributes.headline
Malcolm X: Nation of Islam to Black Power Movement

# data[].attributes.subject
Malcolm X: Nation of Islam to Black Power Movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Described as one of the greatest African American leaders and hailed as the person who laid the foundations of the Black Power movement, Malcolm X would have been 9 3 today.

The civil rights leader was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on Sunday, February 21, 1965, just three months before he turned 40.

In his lifetime, he was not always recognised for his achievements. Many dismissed him as an angry young man. This is his story:

Carpenter instead of lawyer

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925. When he was six years old, his father, Reverend Earl Little, a Baptist minister, died after being hit by a car.

Nation of Islam

In his teenage years, he was involved in criminal activities and was imprisoned from 1946 to 1952.

In prison, he went through a transformation and ended up joining the Nation of Islam, an African American movement that combined Islam with black nationalism.

Malcolm quit smoking and gambling. With the ambition to re-educate himself, he spent long hours reading books in the prison library and memorised a dictionary.

After his release from prison, he helped lead the Nation of Islam, marking a period of its greatest growth. He founded the Nation's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and led the administration of mosques for the Nation in New York, Philadelphia and Boston.

A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything

Malcolm X

Civil rights movement

An articulate public speaker, Malcolm X expressed the frustration and bitterness of African Americans during the major phase of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965.

Malcolm advocated the separation of black and white Americans and rejected the civil rights movement for its emphasis on integration.

In a stark counterpoint to Martin Luther King's philosophy of non-violence, Malcolm X said: "I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem."

Malcolm urged his followers to defend themselves "by any means necessary".

He was one of the early voices to speak out against the US' growing engagement in Vietnam. And he infuriated many when, in reaction to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, he said it was "chickens coming home to roost".

He provided the intellectual foundations for the Black Power and black consciousness movements in the US in the late 1960s.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem

Malcolm X

Assassination

After deep tensions with Elijah Muhammad over the political direction of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm left the Nation in 1964.

After travelling to Africa and the Middle East, where he performed the Muslim pilgrimage of Hajj, he embraced Islam and became known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

The growing hostility between him and the Nation led to death threats and open violence against Malcolm.

In 1965, Malcolm was shot while delivering a lecture at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

He was rushed to an emergency clinic a block away. Fifteen minutes after he was admitted, he was pronounced dead. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the murder.

The public viewing at Unity Funeral Home in Harlem was attended by 14,000 to 30,000 mourners.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary

Malcolm X

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Malcolm X: From Nation of Islam to Black Power Movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Described as one of the greatest African American leaders and hailed as the person who laid the foundations of the Black Power movement, Malcolm X would have been 9 3 today. The civil rights leader was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on Sunday, February 21, 1965, just three months before he turned 40.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark" reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut's sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England's small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state's 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20 th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan - and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.

One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: "My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors...came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark."

A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. "He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. ... [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn't be up to any good..."

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, "No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race." Then they often added, "Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants."

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, "No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot." The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner's employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. ( Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, "From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere."

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman's Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere's descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn't necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.
Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2022. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Secret History of New England's Sundown Towns - New England Historical Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark" reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut's sundown towns. Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who Was: Ida B. Wells | Encyclopaedia Britannica

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Start Activity

In this activity, students will analyze a letter written by Jackie Robinson when he was in the Army in Texas in 1944. It describes a racially-charged incident for which he was court-martialed on what he considered trumped-up charges (he was ultimately acquitted). After analyzing the document, students will reflect on the impact of this event in Robinson's life prior to breaking the color barrier in major-league baseball and his civil rights activism following his retirement from baseball.

Suggested Teaching Instructions

This activity can be used during a unit on civil rights, segregation, or World War II. For grades 7-12. Approximate time needed is 30 minutes. Students can work individually, in pairs, or in small groups.

Direct students to the activity and ask them to carefully read the document and answer the questions that follow.

After students have answered all of the analysis questions, they should click on "When You're Done." Facilitate a class discussion based on the questions:

1. Was there anything you found surprising about this letter? What was it and why?

2. The author wrote that they believe in "fair play and justice" - what do you think they would have considered fair in this case?

3. Think about when this document was written and what you know about the author. Where would the event that this letter describes fit on a timeline of that person's life? How do you think this event might have impacted them? (Students might suggest something like: This event happened in 1944, a few years before Jackie Robinson "broke the color barrier" in Major League Baseball. These incidents in his life put him on a track to civil rights activism.)

If your class is not familiar with Jackie Robinson's life and career, provide the following biographical information as needed:
In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's (MLB) "color barrier" when he started his rookie season with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was the first Black man to play in the MLB in the 20th century. (A player named Moses Fleetwood Walker became the first Black man to play major-league baseball in 1884.) When Robinson joined the Dodgers, all the other players in Major League Baseball were white. Because of his race, Robinson was the target of racial abuse and discrimination. But Robinson played the best baseball he could, even as fans yelled insults at him and the entire nation focused its attention on his game. In the course of a distinguished 10-year career, Robinson led the Brooklyn Dodgers to six National League titles and one victorious World Series. In 1962 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Beyond his many and stellar baseball feats, Jackie Robinson went on to champion the cause of civil rights when he retired from the game. He attended the March on Washington and wrote letters to presidents and government officials.

Robinson had been drafted into the Army during the second World War and commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943. When Robinson wrote this letter in 1944, he was stationed at Camp Hood, Texas (later named Fort Hood), which maintained complete segregation and whose surrounding community had a reputation for discrimination and racism. (Read additional information about this letter; this information is hidden from students during the activity.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Analyzing a Letter from Jackie Robinson: "Fair Play and Justice"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Start Activity In this activity, students will analyze a letter written by Jackie Robinson when he was in the Army in Texas in 1944. It describes a racially-charged incident for which he was court-martialed on what he considered trumped-up charges (he was ultimately acquitted).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about Black History Month including its origins, famous African-American leaders, civil rights events, resources, and fun facts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the liberties it provided were withheld from the hundreds of thousands of Africans living here in slavery. That same year, a free African-American, Benjamin Banneker, challenged the way blacks were seen and treated by whites in America in a public letter to Thomas Jefferson. In this letter, Banneker pointed to the contradictions between the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, and the continued existence of slavery.

In courteous but forceful words, Banneker called on one of Jefferson's own great Enlightenment principles, an ideal that intimately tied together political liberty and religious faith in a democracy-the idea that God creates all men equal:

That one universal Father hath given being to us all; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties; and that however variable we may be in society or religion, however diversified in situation or color, we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him.

Banneker was a skilled surveyor who had gained an education and a profession working with a leading Quaker family in Maryland, the Ellicotts. Considered to be America's first African-American scientist and civil engineer, Benjamin Banneker was born a free person on November 9, 1731, a rarity in a period when almost 700,000 of the country's estimated 750,000 blacks were enslaved. A self-taught natural philosopher who became an amateur mathematician and astronomer, Banneker helped to survey the new capital city, the District of Columbia, and published widely-read almanacs. However, his most daring action was to publically challenge Thomas Jefferson on the issue of slavery and racism.

By 1791, Jefferson had already authored the Declaration of Independence, had been Governor of Virginia (1779-1781) and was serving as the first United States Secretary of State (1789-1793). The lifelong contradictions between Jefferson's stated beliefs, politics, and practice on issues of race and slavery are so complicated that entire books have been written about them. Early in Jefferson's political career, he made some attempts to gradually end slavery in the United States. In 1778, he drafted a law in Virginia that prohibited the future importation of enslaved Africans, and in 1784 he proposed a law that would ban slavery in the growing territories of the Northwest. He hoped that these limits would contribute to gradually phasing away the slave economy.

But despite Jefferson's misgivings about the slave trade, he continued to believe in the moral and social superiority of whites over blacks. In fact, he personally owned and sold upwards of 700 slaves. And evidence suggests that Jefferson had a decades-long relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and fathered six children by her.

Meanwhile, in his famous Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Jefferson condemned slavery itself, but reiterated the idea of blacks' physical and intellectual inferiority to whites.

I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.

He went on to write disparagingly of the physical appearance of blacks and witheringly dismissed the intellectual and creative potential of the entire race:

Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior . . . and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous . . . But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture.

In the light of such passages, Benjamin Banneker's decision to take up his pen and address Jefferson with a plea for a change of heart might have seemed like an extraordinary, and potentially risky, gesture. He began:

SIR, I AM fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom, which I take with you on the present occasion; a liberty which seemed to me scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished and dignified station in which you stand, and the almost general prejudice and prepossession, which is so prevalent in the world against those of my complexion.

But Banneker had carefully thought through why he was the right person to address Jefferson, and why Jefferson was the right leader to whom he should make his plea. He enclosed a copy of the popular astronomical almanac he had authored, and mentioned in passing his employment on the survey of the District of Columbia, adding:

Sir, I freely and cheerfully acknowledge, that I am of the African race, and in that color which is natural to them of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I now confess to you, that I am not under that state of tyrannical thraldom, and inhuman captivity, to which too many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the fruition of those blessings, which proceed from that free and unequalled liberty with which you are favored; and which, I hope, you will willingly allow you have mercifully received, from the immediate hand of that Being, from whom proceedeth every good and perfect Gift.

In other words, Banneker suggested that his own achievements as a freeman were both a contradiction of Jefferson's belief that blacks innately lacked intellectual ability, and proof of what they could achieve when they were not limited by the "tyrannical thraldom" of slavery.

He reminded Jefferson of the very language of religious humility that the Secretary himself had used elsewhere-the idea that the blessings of liberty come from a Supreme Being, rather than being doled out by one human being to another. Readers of this site will recognize the idea of an equality originating in God as one of the principles that inspired Moses Seixas's address to George Washington, a principle also found in the writings of Jefferson, Madison, and others among the Founding Fathers who sought to widen religious freedom as the national government took shape. Banneker hoped to get Jefferson to take that principle further and to accept that the same ideal applied to people of all races.

Less than two weeks after receiving Banneker's letter, Jefferson sent him a polite response (dated August 30, 1791). In it, he appears to extend Banneker his good will. Seemingly impressed with Banneker's calculations, he says that that he will send the almanac to the French Academy of Science, explicitly to contradict the kind of widespread racial theories that his own Notes had echoed.

I considered it as a document, to which your whole color had a right for their justification, against the doubts which have been entertained of them.

Discussing "the degraded condition" of blacks in African and America, the short letter even seems to suggest that Jefferson might change his own views about race:

No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, owes merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.

Unfortunately, Jefferson's reply fell far short of addressing the political, religious, and ethical challenges that Banneker had put forth. The engineer had written

Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.

It was a question which the future president chose not to debate with the freeman: the fundamental contradiction between the principles of democracy and freedom and the cruelty of slavery, passionately voiced by Banneker.

Jefferson, it seems, saw Banneker's intelligence as an exception among African-Americans, rather than evidence that Jefferson's perceptions about race might be fundamentally flawed. Sadly, three years after Banneker's death in 1806, Jefferson wrote to Joel Barlow, an American poet and politician, disparaging the by-then well known Banneker and arguing that he could not have made the calculations contained in the almanac without assistance. With time, he had convinced himself that the "proofs" of ability he had once seen in the black author could not be real.

Banneker, however, may have had more then one purpose in crafting his plea to the Jefferson. In 1793, he had the letters between Jefferson and himself printed in his annual almanac. These periodicals contained not only tables of tides and weather, planetary cycles and astronomical calculations, but also essays and poetry by the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the English anti-slavery poet William Cowper, and anti-slavery speeches and essays from England and America.

They were supported and circulated by Banneker's Quaker allies, the Ellicott family, and by Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery of Maryland and of Pennsylvania. The pamphlets circulated as far as Great Britain, where the famed anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce praised Banneker in the House of Commons.

Banneker, then, not only embodied the principles of those who argued for an end to slavery in his achievements, but worked actively to influence public opinion in favor of abolition. Like Washington's outreach to the Jews of Newport, Banneker's address to Jefferson belongs to the great tradition of public letters. Through the freedom of the press, circulating his writings within a country eager for political debate, Banneker could craft his own appeal to public opinion and claim some of Jefferson's most powerful ideas for the cause of African-Americans seeking freedom-even where one of the Founding Fathers far fell short of those ideals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Created Equal: How Benjamin Banneker Challenged Jefferson on Race and Freedom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the liberties it provided were withheld from the hundreds of thousands of Africans living in slavery. In a public letter to Thomas Jefferson, a free African-American Benjamin Banneker challeneged the treatment of blacks and the continued existence of slavery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Africans in America/Part 2/Banneker’s Letter to Jefferson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On August 19, 1791, Benjamin Banneker wrote a lengthy letter to Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, in which “having taken up my pen in order to direct to you as a present, a copy of an Almanack... I was unexpectedly and unavoidably led” to develop a discourse on race and rights.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Civil Rights Movement: Black Power and Sports | Retro Report | PBS LearningMedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This 11-minute video tells the story of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, their raised-fist Black Power salute on the medal podium during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, and the consequences they went on to face.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Frederick Douglass | Orator, Editor, and Abolitionist Video | PBS LearningMedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After escaping from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass went on to become a prominent writer, orator, and abolitionist in the years leading up to the Civil War. This video is a part of a lesson plan including two primary source activities and a short video: understand how Douglass stood firm in his…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Malcolm X | Minister and Civil Rights Activist Video | PBS LearningMedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the struggle for civil rights, several leaders rose to prominence, seeking the best solution to the longstanding marginalization and disenfranchisement of the black population in the United States. Malcolm X became a powerful voice in this movement, especially for the poor and victims of racial violence, bringing pride and power to his people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jackie Robinson in Jim Crow America | Jackie Robinson | PBS LearningMedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this activity, students analyze how experiences of discrimination and prejudice in Jackie Robinson's early life shaped his character and values. Students will consider more broadly how discrimination and prejudice affect people's lives, and develop strategies for addressing prejudiced actions and attitudes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Interested in learning more about Benjamin Banneker and his life? Visit PBS and reads excerpts from his almanac, a summary of his letters to Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson's response to him. The National Archives of the United States has a transcript of Banneker's actual letter to Thomas Jefferson here. Here is a link to the Library of Congress that displays Jefferson's letter in response to Banneker. Here are more resources about Banneker that include actual photos of Banneker's Almanac.

Retrobituaries: Benjamin Banneker, the African-American Mathematician Who May Have Saved Washington, D.C. has some links to awesome resources about Banneker and discusses the impact he had on our country's history.

For more information on Banneker's Almanac, and his place in the history of the United States, visit this Library of Congress site.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The exceptional life of Benjamin Banneker - Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Born in 1731 to freed slaves on a farm in Baltimore, Benjamin Banneker was obsessed with math and science. And his appetite for knowledge only grew as he taught himself astronomy, mathematics, engineering, and the study of the natural world. Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua details the numerous accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Witness History - Nasa's pioneering black women - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

# data[].attributes.headline
National Museum of African American History and Culture: Black History Month

# data[].attributes.subject
National Museum of African American History and Culture: Black History Month

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
National Museum of African American History and Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The national theme for Black History Month is "Black Health and Wellness." In celebration of Black History Month, the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) will examine the legacy of not only Black scholars and medical practitioners in Western medicine, but also other ways of knowing (e.g., birth workers, doulas, midwives, naturopaths, herbalists, etc.)

# data[].attributes.headline
Black History: Antebellum Period (Revolution to Civil War)

# data[].attributes.subject
Black History: Antebellum Period (Revolution to Civil War)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cinque, Leader of the Amistad Captives

The Gilder Lehrman Center is located in New Haven, Connecticut, the home port of the freedom schooner Amistad, and a city with a rich storehouse of events in the history of slavery, resistance, and abolition. Our emphasis on local stories is deliberate. The most famous episode involving resistance to slavery in New Haven was the Amistad incident, in which a group of Africans secured their freedom twice, once through violent struggle and once through the U.S. Courts, and returned home.

Our inaugural events, in November 1998, focused on the Amistad story, and included a talk by Professor Howard Jones, author of Mutiny on the Amistad, as well as two days of community events including a worship service, a reception at the New Haven Colony Historical Society, a luncheon for all of the different statewide organizations involved in the Amistad story, a press conference in front of the stature of Cinque beside New Haven's City Hall, and a showing of Spielberg's film Amistad, preceded by a panel discussion. This series of events established a strong connection to New Haven and its community. As the Gilder Lehrman Center expands its global reach, it remains firmly rooted in its home in New Haven and Connecticut.

The following are some of the online resources related to the Amistad affair.

The Amistad Case

This document based lesson plan, located on the Gilder Lehrman Center website, was created by Dennis Fox, James Heaney, David Kersey, Vicki Memminger, and Fran Martino Smith. The website includes online documents, a lesson plan, a narrative of the Amistad incident, an abolitionism timeline, and a document essay by Professors David Brion Davis and Stephen Mintz.

Amistad America

AMISTAD America Inc. is a not-for-profit educational organization formed to promote the project to build the AMISTAD replica. The Mission of AMISTAD America is to teach the lessons of history, cooperation and leadership inherent in the Amistad incident and its legacy through the ownership, educational programming and operation of the vessel.

Visit New England: The Amistad Trail

This Visit New England site contains a list of historic sites related to the Amistad throughout the region. The site includes a link to the Connecticut Freedom Trail, over 60 historic locations throughout the state. Each location played an important role in the African-American journey from slavery to freedom in Connecticut. Places in addition to those listed on the Amistad Trail include historic homes, churches, graves, monuments, and sites on the Underground Railroad.

National Archives: The Amistad Case

Created by the National Archives and Records Administration, this site contains important primary documents, a brief introduction to the case, and teaching activities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cinque, Leader of the Amistad Captives The Gilder Lehrman Center is located in New Haven, Connecticut, the home port of the freedom schooner Amistad, and a city with a rich storehouse of events in the history of slavery, resistance, and abolition. Our emphasis on local stories is deliberate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” Performed by Kerry Washington

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Connecticut Freedom Trail documents and designates sites that embody the struggle toward freedom and human dignity, celebrate the accomplishments of the state's African American community and promote heritage tourism. The Trail officially opened in September 1996, and as of fall 2010, there are more than 130 sites in more than 50 towns, and the Trail continues to grow.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Connecticut Freedom Trail documents the struggle toward freedom. This trail designates sites that celebrate the struggle for justice and equality that continues in the 21st century. Sites depict the efforts, in all their forms, of the state's African American community and all the communities that championed the goals of universal freedom and human dignity.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ducksters American Revolution: African Americans 

# data[].attributes.subject
Ducksters American Revolution: African Americans 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about African Americans during the Civil War including soldiers and regiments. Famous patriots such as Crispus Attucks, James Armistead, William Lee, and Peter Salem.

# data[].attributes.headline
PBS African Americans : Part 1 Revolution

# data[].attributes.subject
PBS African Americans : Part 1 Revolution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Africans in America | Part 2 | Resource Bank Contents

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fort Mose * Venture Smith's narrative *"Bars Fight" *"Defense of Slavery in Virginia" *The Marriage of Washington to Martha Custis * Runaway ad for Jem * Illustration for Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects * Portrait of Phillis Wheatley

# data[].attributes.headline
Museum of the American Revolution: Black History

# data[].attributes.subject
Museum of the American Revolution: Black History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
AmRev Presents: "Meet James Forten" Performance & Panel Discussion

February 10, 2022 from 6:30-7:30 p.m.

Experience the Museum's newest first-person theatrical performance, "Meet James Forten," exploring Forten's life as a free Black Philadelphian, Revolutionary War privateer, and stalwart abolitionist, with a discussion to follow.

Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust's Lonaé A. Moore Memorial Forum

February 12, 2022 from 1-3:30 p.m.

In partnership with the Museum, Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust will present the fifth annual Lonaé A. Moore Memorial Forum, "It Begins with Each of Us: Fostering Racial Understanding."

Read the Revolution Speaker Series with Kari Winter featuring Rhonda Brace

February 17, 2022 from 6:30-8 p.m.

Historian Dr. Kari J. Winter will discuss the rare and powerful memoir of Jeffrey Brace, an enslaved man who won his freedom through service during the Revolutionary War, before being joined by Brace descendent and family historian, Rhonda Brace.

Presidents Day Weekend at the Museum

February 19-21, 2022

Join us at the Museum to explore the life, leadership, and legacy of the nation's first president, George Washington, and the diverse range of people who made it possible over Presidents Day Weekend.

This Museum was created to tell a diverse, inclusive, 'warts-and-all' narrative of the American Revolution, so sharing the often-untold stories-especially of people of color-is a core element of what we do every day. But during Black History Month, we are shining a special spotlight on the Black men and women who played essential roles in establishing our nation.

Adrienne Whaley, Director of Education & Community Engagement

Unsung Stories in Liberty

Throughout Liberty: Don Troiani's Paintings of the Revolutionary War, learn more about unsung Black Revolutionaries through art and artifacts. In the "Brave Men as Ever Fought" painting, see young Black sailor, businessman, and abolitionist James Forten watch Black and Native American troops march past the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) in Philadelphia on Sept. 2, 1781, en route to Yorktown, Virginia; compare Troiani's painting of the Boston Massacre to earlier depictions of the event, including those from the Abolition Movement centering the death of Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native American descent who was the first Bostonian killed that night; a character study of a soldier in Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment wearing a coat of the British 14th Regiment of Foot; and more.

First-Person Theatrical Performances

Explore the lives and legacies of James Forten and Elizabeth Freeman during Black History Month with performances in the Museum's Alan B. Miller Theater on the second floor.

Meet James Forten

Performed Saturdays at 1:15 & 3:15 p.m.

A 20-minute, first-person theatrical performance about the life of James Forten - a free Black Philadelphian, Revolutionary War privateer, successful businessman, and stalwart abolitionist - written by local playwright Marissa Kennedy and performed by actor Nathan Alford-Tate, accompanies the Museum's special exhibition, Liberty: Don Troiani's Paintings of the Revolutionary War.

Meet Elizabeth Freeman

Performed Feb. 18 at 11:15 a.m., plus Feb. 26 at 12:15 & 2:15 p.m.

A 25-minute, first-person theatrical performance about Elizabeth Freeman - a Massachusetts woman who sued for her freedom from enslavement and won - will be performed by actress Katrina Hall and was written by playwright Teresa Miller. The performance debuted in conjunction with our 2020-21 special exhibit, When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary Story, 1776-1807.

Cash Pallentine's Continental Army Discharge

"with bravery, fidelity and good conduct..."

Cash Pallentine (also spelled Palatine) was among hundreds of African Americans who served in Connecticut regiments during the Revolution. He enlisted in 1777, serving until the end of the war. In 1783, with peace on the horizon, General George Washington began issuing discharges. Pallentine's discharge, signed by Washington, states he served continuously and faithfully for six years, which included the winter at Valley Forge, the Battle of Monmouth, and time in the Hudson Valley.

Digital Resources

Dive deeper into the stories of unsung Revolutionaries at the Museum and online all month long.

Finding Freedom

The Museum's virtual resources are always available, including the new Finding Freedom digital interactive, which examines the stories of enslaved people of African descent in Virginia who followed different paths to freedom during the Revolutionary War. These stories are also available to explore in the Museum's galleries via a touchscreen kiosk.

"Meet Elizabeth Freeman" Performance

Watch the original first-person theatrical performance portraying the life and experiences of Elizabeth Freeman, a Massachusetts woman who sued for her freedom from enslavement and won, produced in conjunction with our past special exhibit, When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary Story, 1776-1807. "Meet Elizabeth Freeman" stars Tiffany Bacon as Elizabeth Freeman and was written by Teresa Miller.

When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary Story, 1776-1807

Explore the stories of the women and people of color who first pioneered the vote in the Revolutionary era with the When Women Lost the Vote virtual exhibit, available to all online through a robust virtual experience.

Virtual Museum Tour

Explore other personal, often-unfamiliar stories of free and enslaved people of African descent during the Revolutionary era. Learn about Deborah Squash, who ran away from Mount Vernon and sought protection with the British Army; Olaudah Equiano, who purchased his own freedom and published a memoir of his experiences; and Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of African and Native descent who was killed during the Boston Massacre and is considered by many historians to be the first casualty of the American Revolution; among many others.

Rhode Island Regiment Figurine

This miniature figurine depicts a soldier from the Continental Army's 1st Rhode Island Regiment and is one of the soldiers painted by nationally renowned historical artist Don Troiani in one of his latest works, "Brave Men as Ever Fought," commissioned by the Museum with funding provided by the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail of the National Park Service.

Ways to Save

See and do more for less with discounted ticket prices, Museum Membership, and special deals.

Plenty of Space for Better Understanding

Health & Safety Protocols

Learn more about the health and safety measures in place to ensure the safest and most enjoyable experience for all, including proof of vaccination, mask requirements, and enhanced sanitizing and cleaning protocols.
Learn More Plan Your Visit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
February 10, 2022 from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Experience the Museum's newest first-person theatrical performance, "Meet James Forten," exploring Forten's life as a free Black Philadelphian, Revolutionary War privateer, and stalwart abolitionist, with a discussion to follow. February 12, 2022 from 1-3:30 p.m. In partnership with the Museum, Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust will present the fifth annual Lonaé A.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nero Hawley, born into slavery in Connecticut in the 18th century, fought in the Revolutionary War. After his emancipation at the age of 41, he went on to become a successful businessman who diligently worked to emancipate his four children. His story is one that provides valuable insight into the legacy of slavery in Connecticut.

As an enslaved person, Nero was considered the property of Peter Mallet, his first owner, who gave Nero to Daniel Hawley when Hawley married Mallet's daughter, Phebe. Daniel Hawley owned a gristmill, cider mill, and brick-making operation in Trumbull (then known as North Stratford). Nero spent much of his younger life working and learned from Hawley his various trades.

One day, while attending church with the Hawley's, Nero met and fell in love with a servant of the Reverend James Beebee. They married in 1861 and Nero, though still the property of the Hawleys, went to live with his wife at the Beebee residence.

Serving at Valley Forge

In 1777, in place of Daniel Hawley, Nero went to Danbury and enlisted in the Continental army. He joined the 2nd Regiment under Colonel Charles Webb and promptly marched to Pennsylvania to serve with the troops under George Washington. Nero spent the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge and fought in numerous battles (primarily along the Hudson River) before receiving an honorable discharge from the army in 1781.

Nero returned to Connecticut, and on November 4, 1782, Daniel Hawley emancipated him. Now a free man, Nero chose to stay on and work alongside Hawley at his saw and brick mills. In addition to the salary he drew from mill work, Nero received $8 per month from the US government as a pension for his military service. The money he saved eventually allowed him to purchase some land in the Daniels Farm area and start his own brick-making business.

Nero Hawley's Life Commemorated by Freedom Trail

While the Reverend Beebee maintained ownership over Nero's children, it is believed that while he was alive he released two of them to Nero. Upon Beebee's death, Nero finally regained all his children. He emancipated all four (then between the ages of 26 and 34) in 1801.

Nero Hawley, who lived to be 75 years old, passed away on January 30, 1817. He received a burial at the Riverside Cemetery near his home in Trumbull. Today, Nero's gravesite is a stop on the Connecticut Freedom Trail, and this war veteran's life continues to remain an inspiration for new scholarly research on slavery in the state.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
slave received pension for military service

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Connecticut Slave in George Washington's Army | Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nero Hawley, born into slavery in Connecticut in the 18th century, fought in the Revolutionary War. After his emancipation at the age of 41, he went on to become a successful businessman who diligently worked to emancipate his four children. His story is one that provides valuable insight into the legacy of slavery in Connecticut.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is pleased to announce "Slavery and Its Legacies," a podcast series featuring visiting scholars, activists, and others about their contributions to the understanding of slavery past and present and its ongoing role in the development of the modern world. New episodes will be available every other Monday. This podcast series is made possible through a grant from the Robina Foundation, with the assistance of the Yale Broadcast Center. You can email comments and suggestions to gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu with subject line "podcast." "Slavery and Its Legacies" is available on and SoundCloud

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is pleased to announce "Slavery and Its Legacies," a podcast series featuring visiting scholars, activists, and others about their contributions to the understanding of slavery past and present and its ongoing role in the development of the modern world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About The Project

"Citizens All" is the collaborative work of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) and the Center for Media and Instructional Innovation ( CMI2) at Yale University. Aimed at both students and teachers, this project illustrates the importance of local history in creating as well as challenging how national and global histories are retold. The stories of international history begin with local events, with the stories of individuals, real people and places in our own backyards.

The project provides a scholarly introduction to the history of slavery in Connecticut, the process of gradual emancipation, and the struggle for citizenship rights by free blacks and abolitionists both within and beyond the state's boundaries.

The story of African Americans' efforts to become full citizens raises important questions about the very definition of "citizenship" and the ideals upon which the United States was founded. We hope that the project contributes to larger discussions of issues such as freedom, education or citizenship and stimulates new discoveries about the legacies of slavery and racism at local, regional, national and international levels.

"Citizens All" grew out of GLC involvement with the US Partnership of the UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project: Breaking The Silence.
Credits
Executive producers: David Blight (GLC), Paul Lawrence (CMI2)

Co-producers: Angela Keiser (GLC), David Hirsch (CMI2)

Content development: Anne Farrow, Peter Hinks, Donna McCalla, Thomas Thurston (GLC)

Video production and editing: Karyl Evans, Doug Forbush (CMI2), John Minard, Keith Sandler, David Streit, Steve Wytas

Web design and development: James Milam and Chris Amelung (CMI2)

Special thanks to: Kaz Kazslowski and Nicole Chalfant, Prudence Crandall Museum; Heather Morgan and the staff of the Mark Twain Library; Matthew Troy; Connecticut Historical Society; staff of the Town of Greenwich Historical Society (especially Heather Cotter, Michele Couture, Teresa DeFlitch, Debra L. Mecky, Nola Taylor, and Anne Young); staff of the Stamford, CT Probate Court; American Antiquarian Society; Readex/NewsBank; and our featured speakers Calista Cleary, Donna McCalla, Wm. Frank Mitchell, and Jennifer Rycenga.
About The Gilder Lehrman Center
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition strives to make a vital contribution to the understanding of slavery and its role in the development of the modern world. While the Center's primary focus has been on scholarly research, it also seeks to bridge the divide between scholarship and public knowledge by opening channels of communication between the scholarly community and the wider public. In collaboration with secondary schools, museums, parks, historical societies, and other related institutions, the Center facilitates a locally rooted understanding of the global impact of slavery.

For more information about the Gilder Lehrman Center, please see our main web site:
http://www.glc.yale.edu We also invite you to contact us by email: gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Citizens ALL: African Americans in Connecticut 1700-1850

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About The Project "Citizens All" is the collaborative work of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) and the Center for Media and Instructional Innovation ( CMI2) at Yale University. Aimed at both students and teachers, this project illustrates the importance of local history in creating as well as challenging how national and global histories are retold.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore the permanent exhibitions at the Civil Rights Museum. With artifacts, films, and interactive displays, there is so much to see and learn during every visit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
he exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

The major presentation in the Jefferson Building, The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, explores black America's quest for equality from the early national period through the twentieth century. The Library's materials, gathered over the two hundred years of its existence, tell the story of the African American experience through nine chronological periods that document the courage and determination of blacks, faced with adverse circumstances, who overcame immense odds to fully participate in all aspects of American society. The exhibit includes the work of abolitionists in the first half of the nineteenth century, depictions of the long journey following the Civil War towards equality in employment, education and politics, strategies used to secure the vote, recognition of outstanding black leaders, and the contributions of sports figures, black soldiers, artists, actors, writers and others in the fight against segregation and discrimination.

The items in this exhibit attest to the drama and achievement of this remarkable story. Although they give a comprehensive, rich picture of more than 200 years of African American struggle and achievement, they represent only a rivulet of the collections the Library of Congress holds in this essential part of American history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
he exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The electrifying speeches of Sojourner Truth - Daina Ramey Berry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sojourner Truth - Civil Rights Activist | Mini Bio | BIO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search Part 1: Anti-Slavery Activists |Popularizing Anti-Slavery Sentiment
Part 2

Black and white abolitionists in the first half of the nineteenth century waged a biracial assault against slavery. Their efforts proved to be extremely effective. Abolitionists focused attention on slavery and made it difficult to ignore. They heightened the rift that had threatened to destroy the unity of the nation even as early as the Constitutional Convention.
Although some Quakers were slaveholders, members of that religious group were among the earliest to protest the African slave trade, the perpetual bondage of its captives, and the practice of separating enslaved family members by sale to different masters.

As the nineteenth century progressed, many abolitionists united to form numerous antislavery societies. These groups sent petitions with thousands of signatures to Congress, held abolition meetings and conferences, boycotted products made with slave labor, printed mountains of literature, and gave innumerable speeches for their cause. Individual abolitionists sometimes advocated violent means for bringing slavery to an end.

Although black and white abolitionists often worked together, by the 1840s they differed in philosophy and method. While many white abolitionists focused only on slavery, black Americans tended to couple anti-slavery activities with demands for racial equality and justice.

Benjamin Lay, a Quaker who saw slavery as a "notorious sin," addresses this 1737 volume to those who "pretend to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion." Although some Quakers held slaves, no religious group was more outspoken against slavery from the seventeenth century until slavery's demise. Quaker petitions on behalf of the emancipation of African Americans flowed into colonial legislatures and later to the United States Congress.

In this plea for the abolition of the slave trade, Anthony Benezet, a Quaker of French Huguenot descent, pointed out that if buyers did not demand slaves, the supply would end. "Without purchasers," he argued, "there would be no trade; and consequently every purchaser as he encourages the trade, becomes partaker in the guilt of it." He contended that guilt existed on both sides of the Atlantic. There are Africans, he alleged, "who will sell their own children, kindred, or neighbors." Benezet also used the biblical maxim, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," to justify ending slavery. Insisting that emancipation alone would not solve the problems of people of color, Benezet opened schools to prepare them for more productive lives.

Connecticut theologian Jonathan Edwards, born 1745, echoes Benezet's use of the Golden Rule as well as the natural rights arguments of the Revolutionary era to justify the abolition of slavery. In this printed version of his 1791 sermon to a local anti-slavery group, he notes the progress toward abolition in the North and predicts that through vigilant efforts slavery would be extinguished in the next fifty years.

The Negro Woman's Appeal to Her White Sisters.
[London]: Richard Barrett, [1850].
Broadside.
Printed Ephemera Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. (3-12)

Ye wives and ye mothers, your influence extend--
Ye sisters, ye daughters, the helpless defend--
The strong ties are severed for one crime alone,
Possessing a colour less fair than your own.
Abolitionists understood the power of pictorial representations in drawing support for the cause of emancipation. As white and black women became more active in the 1830s as lecturers, petitioners, and meeting organizers, variations of this female supplicant motif, appealing for interracial sisterhood, appeared in newspapers, broadsides, and handicraft goods sold at fund-raising fairs.

The quote below, echoing Patrick Henry, is from this biography of underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman:

Harriet was now left alone, . . . She turned her face toward the north, and fixing her eyes on the guiding star, and committing her way unto the Lord, she started again upon her long, lonely journey. She believed that there were one or two things she had a right to, liberty or death.

After making her own escape, Tubman returned to the South nineteen times to bring over three hundred fugitives to safety, including her own aged parents.

In a handwritten note on the title page of this book, Susan B. Anthony, who was an abolitionist as well as a suffragist, referred to Tubman as a "most wonderful woman."

Declaration of the Anti-Slavery Convention.

Philadelphia, December 4, 1833.
Broadside.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division. (3-3)

In 1833, sixty abolitionist leaders from ten states met in Philadelphia to create a national organization to bring about immediate emancipation of all slaves. The American Anti-slavery Society elected officers and adopted a constitution and declaration. Drafted by William Lloyd Garrison, the declaration pledged its members to work for emancipation through non-violent actions of "moral suasion," or "the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love." The society encouraged public lectures, publications, civil disobedience, and the boycott of cotton and other slave-manufactured products.

William L. Garrison.

"Sonnet to Liberty."
Manuscript, December 14, 1840.
Manuscript Division. (3-19a)

White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, born in 1805, had a particular fondness for poetry, which he believed to be "naturally and instinctively on the side of liberty." He used verse as a vehicle for enhancing anti-slavery sentiment. Garrison collected his work in Sonnets and Other Poems (1843).

During the 1840s, abolitionist societies used song to stir up enthusiasm at their meetings. To make songs easier to learn, new words were set to familiar tunes. This song by William Lloyd Garrison has six stanzas set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne."

William L. Garrison.

"Song of the Abolitionist."
November 10, 1841.
Manuscript Division. (3-19b)

Massachusetts sea captain Jonathan Walker, born in 1790, was apprehended off the coast of Florida for attempting to carry slaves who were members of his church denomination to freedom in the Bahamas in 1844. He was jailed for more than a year and branded with the letters "S.S." for slave stealer. The abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized Walker's deed in this often reprinted verse: "Then lift that manly right hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded palm shall prophesy, 'Salvation to the Slave!'"

John G. Whittier.

"The Branded Hand."
Philadelphia, ca. 1845.
Leaflet.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division. (3-15)

George W. Clark's, The Liberty Minstrel, is an exception among songsters in having music as well as words. "Minstrel" in the title has its earlier meaning of "wandering singer." Clark, a white musician, wrote some of the music himself; most of it, however, consists of well-known melodies to which anti-slavery words have been written. The book is open to a page containing lyrics to the tune of "Near the Lake," which appeared earlier in this exhibit (section 1, item 22) as "Long Time Ago." Note that there is an anti-slavery poem on the right-hand page. Like many songsters, The Liberty Minstrel contains an occasional poem.

Music was one of the most powerful weapons of the abolitionists. In 1848, William Wells Brown, abolitionist and former slave, published The Anti-Slavery Harp, "a collection of songs for anti-slavery meetings," which contains songs and occasional poems. The Anti-Slavery Harp is in the format of a "songster"--giving the lyrics and indicating the tunes to which they are to be sung, but with no music. The book is open to the pages containing lyrics to the tune of the "Marseillaise," the French national anthem, which to 19th-century Americans symbolized the determination to bring about freedom, by force if necessary.

The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-slavery Meetings.
Compiled by William Wells Brown.
Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848.
Music Division. (3-16)

The Child's Anti-Slavery Book: Containing a Few Words about American Slave Children. . . .
New York: Carlton and Porter, 1859.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division. (3-13)

This abolitionist tract, distributed by the Sunday School Union, uses actual life stories about slave children separated from their parents or mistreated by their masters to excite the sympathy of free children. Vivid illustrations help to reinforce the message that black children should have the same rights as white children, and that holding humans as property is "a sin against God."

Abolition, Antislavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy: Part 1 | Part 2
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search Part 1: Anti-Slavery Activists |Popularizing Anti-Slavery Sentiment Part 2 Black and white abolitionists in the first half of the nineteenth century waged a biracial assault against slavery. Their efforts proved to be extremely effective. Abolitionists focused attention on slavery and made it difficult to ignore.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the biography of Muhammad Ali. Also known as Cassius Clay, he was one of the world's greatest heavyweight boxers and an Olympic gold medal winner.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fair Play: Athletes Speak, Assemble, Petition for Freedom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
History as news is never a contradiction if that history reveals something important, even startling.

"Beyond Complicity" is a startling story about a disturbing chapter in Connecticut history that skidded from the state's general consciousness centuries ago.

The transatlantic slave trade may have been the most prolonged, violent event in human history. Over three centuries, the major European powers drove an international economic system in which human beings were used as currency.

The numbers are almost beyond imagining. Nearly 12 million Africans were kidnapped, many by their own people, transported across the Atlantic Ocean, and worked, often to death, in the fast-developing New World.

The slave trade is hardly news. Its major players were France, the Netherlands and, most of all, Great Britain, whose ships carried nearly 3 million enslaved Africans before the legal trade ended in 1808.

In the American colonies, during most of the time that the slave trade was legal, tiny Rhode Island was our Great Britain.

There were about 1,100 documented voyages of slave ships from New England, and Rhode Island men were at the helm of more than 900 of them. Narragansett Bay is one of the world's largest and deepest harbors. Ocean-going vessels that could hold thousands of bales of cotton or hundreds of human beings had no trouble sailing in or out of Newport or Bristol, R.I.

Then there was Connecticut. We're not even on the Atlantic (the closest we come is Long Island Sound). But we do have very navigable rivers, such as the Connecticut and, of course, New London's Thames.

Two and a half centuries ago, before the American Revolution, many of Connecticut's cities were thriving commercial centers. River ports such as New London and Middletown were producing fortunes in both shipbuilding and trade. Many names that resonate today have their roots in those fortunes, good Yankee names like Alsop and Russell in Middletown, and Shaw and Avery in New London.

Connecticut's wealth exploded in the Triangle Trade, as smart merchants and other businessmen supplied the slave plantations in the West Indies that grew and processed sugar cane.

Connecticut's role in shipping food and livestock to these islands is no secret. But for many years, little connection had been made between that role and slavery. Most people, in fact, have assumed, if they thought of it at all, that the major role of Connecticut citizens in American slavery was one of liberation. But while this was certainly true - Connecticut played a large role in the abolition effort, and in the Civil War, Connecticut men fought beside other northerners - the total picture turned out to be more complicated, and far more damning.

In September 2002, Northeast produced our first special issue on Connecticut's involvement in slavery. We called it "Complicity: How Connecticut Chained Itself to Slavery." We explored the ways that our small New England state had profited as fully from slavery as any in the South, though our involvement was largely from a distance.

Far from being an exercise in political correctness, our research had been driven by news events:

Aetna had recently apologized for insuring slaves during the 19th century. In addition, a growing number of African Americans were calling for financial reparations for centuries of slavery, like those awarded to Holocaust survivors and their families, or to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II.

In "Complicity," we wrote of large farms - one could call them plantations - in southeastern Connecticut that had been worked by slaves.

We wrote of how eastern Connecticut's textile mills had depended on the millions of pounds of slave-grown cotton they imported from the Southern states.

We listed the names of slave owners in every county in Connecticut, and reported that at one point more than 5,000 black people were enslaved here.

We even wrote about how The Connecticut Courant, this newspaper's predecessor, profited by publishing runaway slave ads.

Frankly, we were shocked by what we'd learned, but the response from readers was even more surprising. The Courant was besieged by calls from throughout the state and across the country, from colleges and libraries, community groups, government agencies and just regular folks seeking copies of "Complicity." The state Department of Education ordered 25,000 copies and sent them to every middle school, high school and community college in Connecticut.

A literary agent in New York called, and within weeks we were offered a contract with Ballantine/Random House. Editors there, however, were eager for a broader perspective: Could we determine whether the entire North was somehow complicit in slavery?

Our book attempts to answer this question. "Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery in America" is scheduled for release in September.

These are the roots of today's special report which, as the name "Beyond Complicity" reflects, shows that Connecticut's involvement in slavery goes even deeper.

Researched and written by Anne Farrow, one of the lead writers on the first special issue and on the book, this report places Connecticut on the front lines of the slave trade.

"Beyond Complicity" is the story of Connecticut and Africa, of New London and a little-known island off the West African coast with a brutal and tragic history.

It's also a narrative about the past and the present, which, in any culture, as Farrow writes in Chapter 3, "swirl around each other, touching and, in some sense, changing the other."

In "Beyond Complicity," we try to illuminate this largely untold chapter of Connecticut's past, and make it a story we can talk about.

If past and present can, in some sense, change each other, this state history couldn't be more painfully relevant today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
History as news is never a contradiction if that history reveals something important, even startling. "Beyond Complicity" is a startling story about a disturbing chapter in Connecticut history that skidded from the state's general consciousness centuries ago. The transatlantic slave trade may have been the most prolonged, violent event in human history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Children's March of 1963 - Chapter 1 (Janice Kelsey)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Children's Crusade of 1963 | American Freedom Stories | Biography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The King Institute provides access to thousands of documents, photographs, and publications about the modern African American Freedom Struggle. Use this page to navigate to resources about King's life and work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The King Institute provides access to thousands of documents, photographs, and publications about the modern African American Freedom Struggle. Use this page to navigate to resources about King's life and work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history."

―Carter G. Woodson

Who is included in your curriculum and who can be added when teaching African American history?

What are the lasting contributions of African Americans to the culture and history of the United States?

How has change come about during the long civil rights movement?

The first national Negro History Week was organized by Carter G. Woodson in February 1926 to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. As interest and advocacy for expanding the study of African American history developed, a desire to expand beyond just one week also grew. In 1970, students at Kent State University celebrated Black History Month from January to February of that year, and since 1976, each President of the United States has endorsed commemorating February as Black History Month across the country.

The resources and lessons provided below are organized chronologically to illustrate that the achievements, perspectives, and experiences of African Americans are important to social studies and history curricula all year long. Users will find connections between these materials and those provided in subsequent sections of this Teacher's Guide to develop cross-disciplinary learning activities and projects.

Slavery and the Early Republic

Slavery and the American Founding: The "Inconsistency not to be excused": Framed by the compelling question " How did the American founders' views on slavery shape the creation of the republic?", this lesson asks students to examine the views of American founders regarding slavery and evaluate the extent to which they reflect the principles of the American Revolution.

What were the experiences of African-American individuals in the North in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War? To what extent were freed slaves citizens in the newly independent nation? This lesson provides primary sources for students to analyze in order to evaluate these questions.

Abolition and Reconstruction

"I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary!
Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.
The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common."

-Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"

Frederick Douglass What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?: This student activity brings together video and audio media, along with the text of Douglass's speech, to give students opportunities to discuss and deliberate who the 4th of July is for and the extent to which Douglass is justified in his position.

David Walker, a free African American, invoked the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to challenge the inequities of American slavery in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). John Day, also a free African American, was a major proponent of colonization and an early Liberian colonist who argued that African Americans would never achieve equality in the United States. Through this lesson, students examine the conflicting perspectives over slavery, abolition, and equality.

Jim Crow and War

Birth of a Nation, NAACP, and Balancing of Rights: Why did the NAACP challenge the showing of Birth of a Nation? The lesson asks students to analyze the efforts of the NAACP and evaluate the decision to not censor the film.

NAACP's Anti-Lynching Campaigns in the 1920s: This lesson sequence engages students with the deeply serious issues of Jim Crow and lynching in the United States during the inter-war period.

African American Soldiers in World War I: The 92nd and 93rd Division: Students combine their research using a variety of sources, including firsthand accounts, to develop a hypothesis evaluating contradictory statements about the performance of the 92nd Infantry Division in World War I.

African American Soldiers after WWI: Had Race Relations Changed?: Analyze archival photographs and archival newspaper accounts about race relations in the United States to evaluate different points of view about post-war riots in Chicago.

African Americans and the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corp: Students considers documents that present the CCC from the perspective of black participants in order to evaluate the impact of this New Deal program on race relations in America.

Civil Rights and Now

JFK, Freedom Riders, and the Civil Rights Movement: Resources provided in this lesson support student analysis of t he critical role of activists in pushing the Kennedy Administration to face the contradiction between its ideals and the realities of federal politics.

Revolution 67: Protest Why & How?: The intent of this lesson sequence is to help students comprehend and explain the changes in how the people of Newark, New Jersey viewed government and how those attitudes affected political change in the 1960s and 1970s.

Competing Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: This lesson sequence presents the views of several important black leaders who shaped the debate over how to achieve freedom and equality in a nation that had long denied a portion of the American citizenry the full protection of their rights.

Let Freedom Ring: The Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Students will learn about the life and work of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. by listening to a brief biography, viewing photographs of the March on Washington, and reading a portion of King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

The Election of Barack Obama: This lesson focuses on the relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and Obama's election, but it also asks students why they think Barack Obama's election is "historic."

African American Literature and Poetry

Poetry, literature, and plays make up the collection of resources and lessons provided below for K-12 literature and language arts courses. Users will find connections between these materials and those provided in subsequent sections of this Teacher's Guide to develop cross-disciplinary learning activities and projects.

Teacher's Guide: The Works of Langston Hughes: This Teacher's Guide includes video of public readings, access to NEH supported projects dedicated to the work of Langston Hughes, and classroom ready materials for teaching his poetry.

The Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You: This lesson asks students to consider what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?

Teacher's Guide: Maya Angelou: A Phenomenal Woman: This Teacher's Guide provides access to collections of poetry, lesson activity ideas, and multimedia resources to hear and see Dr. Angelou perform her poetry.

Gwendolyn Brooks' Poem "We Real Cool": In this lesson, students will closely analyze the poem's line breaks and the effect of enjambment on their reading and interpretation of the poem.

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

"A Raisin in the Sun": Whose American Dream?: This interdisciplinary lesson includes a critical reading and analysis of the play, close examination of biographical and historical documents produced at different times during the long civil rights movement, and a variety of assessment options.

Toni Morrison's Beloved: For Sixty Million and More: Close reading and reflective activities guide thoughtful inquiry into the novel and its major themes, while also providing teachers and students with creative outlets for making connections with one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: Folk Speech and Figurative Language: This lesson provides students with an opportunity to observe how Hurston creates a unique literary voice by combining folklore, folk language, and traditional literary techniques.

Scottsboro Boys and To Kill a Mockingbird: Two Trials for the Classroom: In this lesson, students will perform a comparative close reading of select informational texts from the Scottsboro Boys trials alongside sections from To Kill a Mockingbird to see how fictional "truth" both mirrors and departs from the factual experience that inspired it.

African American Arts and Culture

The resources and lessons provided below are designed for the study of art, music, and culture in K-12 classrooms. Users will find connections between these materials and those provided in subsequent sections of this Teacher's Guide to develop cross-disciplinary learning activities and projects.

The Music of African American History: This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history.

Learning the Blues: Students take a virtual field trip to Memphis, Tennessee, one of the prominent centers of blues activities, and explore the history of the blues in the work of W. C. Handy and a variety of country blues singers whose music preserves the folk origins of this unique American art form.

Martin Puryear's Ladder for Booker T. Washington: Students examine Booker T. Washington's life and legacy through Martin Puryear's sculpture and consider how the title of Puryear's sculpture is reflected in the meanings we can draw from it.

Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series: Removing the Mask: Focusing on composition, image, setting, characterization, and tone, while also analyzing the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Helene Johnson, students are invited to compare and contrast the works while considering how each work represents the life and changing roles of African Americans from the late nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance and The Great Migration.

Romare Bearden's The Dove: A Meeting of Vision and Sound: How do art and music reflect & inspire change in American society? This lesson asks students examine this and other questions about history, art, and culture.

Picturing Freedom: Selma to Montgomery in March, 1965: After analyzing photojournalist James Karales's iconic photograph of the march, reading background material on it, and considering what the marchers might have thought and felt, students write and illustrate a postcard describing this civil rights event from a marcher's viewpoint.

The National Endowment for the Humanities continues to fund a wide array of projects, programs, and publications focused on telling the many stories of African Americans in the United States. The following collection supplements the resources provided above and extends the work that can be done across K-12 classrooms when teaching African American history and culture.

Colored Conventions Project: From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national levels. A cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century, these "Colored Conventions" brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.

The Right to Love: The Case of Loving v. Virginia: This Humanities magazine article tells the story of how t he freedom to marry across racial lines was tested by a shy Virginia couple, who were very much in love.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African American History and Culture in the United States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history." ―Carter G. Woodson Who is included in your curriculum and who can be added when teaching African American history?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of African slaves and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although American slaves were emancipated as a result of the Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern of public facilities' being segregated by "race" in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865-77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

AP Images

When did the American civil rights movement start?

Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?

What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?

What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?

What are some examples of civil rights?

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country's inhabitants were denied essential rights. African slaves and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the "People of the United States" who established the Constitution in order to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of slaves until 1808 and providing for the return of slaves who had escaped to other states.

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights-such as the right to own land or serve on juries-were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of African Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called "free blacks" endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some slaves violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means-protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements-to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free blacks. Slave owners in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of slaves to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of African Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the ex-slaves who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography-one of many slave narratives-and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country's founders had viewed blacks as so inferior that they had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This ruling-by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories-ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not own slaves. The inability of the country's political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln's victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860-61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its slave property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of ex-slaves ( Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the " Jim Crow" system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American civil rights movement | Definition, Events, History, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of African slaves and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Competing Voices of the Civil Rights Movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When most people think of the Civil Rights Movement in America, they think of Martin Luther King, Jr. Delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But "the Movement" achieved its greatest results due to the competing strategies and agendas of diverse individuals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tell Me More salutes Black History Month with its series, Tell Me More About Black History. During February, the program travels with writer Kai Wright through centuries of black history and culture, noting contributions of African-Americans to North America. Listen and learn through first-person narratives, music profiles and other features.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts: BBC Black History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC World Service - Witness History, Black history - Downloads

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Stories about the people, traditions, innovations, and events that make up Connecticut’s rich history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The power of nonviolent actions and attitudes as a means to resist oppression and spur reforms is a recurring feature of democratic and democratizing societies.

The School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program presents educators with lesson plans that explore the use of nonviolence in history, paying particular attention to the civil rights movement and African American history.

This lesson asks students to revisit the well-known story of a figure in the civil rights movement-Rosa Parks-through the primary source documents associated with her arrest in 1955. The arrest occurred in the shadow of the Supreme Court decision in Lesson 4 - Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and had a powerful impact on the public policy of segregation and the application of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lesson 6 New - Students explore how music can be used to attain social and political changes in society. The lesson continues the theme of nonviolence by exploring ways in which music helped advance the civil rights movement.

Additional Resources

Janice Kelsey's Story In this interview, civil rights movement foot soldier, Janice Kelsey, describes her experience in The Children's March of 1963.

Dr. King on the Selma March-A very brief, but powerful clip in which King prepares foot soldiers for the March on Selma. He tells them, "If you can't accept blows without retaliating, don't get in the line."

An American Hero: The Story of Congressman John Lewis-A fifteen-minute video that tells the story of civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis. It highlights the use of nonviolence in sit-ins and at specific events, such as the Birmingham Church bombing and the March on Selma.

The History Channel: Woolworth Lunch Counter-An engaging six-minute segment on the Woolworth sit-ins in Greensboro, Tennessee.

Charles Moore: I Fight With My Camera--A long, but worthwhile piece in which photojournalist Charles Moore tells the story of the civil rights movement as he witnessed it through the lens of his camera.

Bridge to Freedom-A local news team retraces the steps of those who marched for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

Podcasts

The Power of Nonviolence: The Children's March

Sculpture of Children in Jail Commemorating 1963 Children's March

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Teacher's Guide

Lesson Overview

This lesson introduces students to the Children's March, also commonly referred to as the Children's Crusade, which took place in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. Students will understand why children were involved in the march, how children were prepared for the march, and what made it a success. The lesson asks students to imagine themselves as someone involved in the march and consider their competing responsibilities, values, and interests.

A lesson adapted from Foundations of Democracy has been provided for teachers who do not currently use School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program (SVPDP) curricula. The lesson, titled "How Should One Choose among Competing Responsibilities, Values, and Interests?" was adapted from the Responsibility portion of the text, Unit 1, Lessons 1 and 2, and Unit 3, Lesson 6.

The lesson defines responsibilities, values, and interests and examines situations in which people must make a decision among competing responsibilities, values, and interests. It can be used by itself in any classroom and does not require prior knowledge of SVPDP materials. The lesson should be reviewed by the teacher prior to class. It can be taught prior to the lesson on the Children's March, or information from the lesson and can be used as appropriate.

Correlations to SVPDP curricula are found at the end of this lesson plan.

Middle school (grades 6-8) Suggested Grade Level

Approximately 50 minutes
Estimated Time to Complete

After completing this lesson, students will be able to

describe the Children's March, its purpose, methods, and outcome;

identify the responsibilities, values, and interests of those involved in the march;

evaluate the decision to involve children in the march.

Lesson Objectives

Review or teach "How Should One Choose among Competing Responsibilities, Values, and Interests?" Materials Needed

Before the Lesson

Lesson Procedure

Discuss students' reactions to Kelsey's story.

Discuss the outcome of the Children's Crusade and what made this strategy successful in Birmingham.

Beginning the lesson. Read Dudley Randall's "Ballad of Birmingham." Use the poem to pique students' interest in the events behind the poem. Ask students whether the poem leaves them wondering about anything described or alluded to in the poem. Ask them if they can connect the poem to anything they have heard or learned about in the past.

A parent whose son or daughter wants to participate in the march

A student who wants to participate in the march

Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel, who organized the march

A teacher whose students walked out of class to march

A Birmingham store owner

Reading about it. As a class, read the Children's Crusade of the Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign (Handout 1). Ask students to make connections between Handout 1 and the poem, "Ballad of Birmingham."
Discuss students' findings and the decision to involve children in the civil rights movement.
Video viewing. Introduce the video, Janice Kelsey's Story, by telling students that Kelsey was a foot soldier in the Children's Crusade. Have students watch and listen actively using the Note-Taking Guide: Janice Kelsey's Story (Handout 2).

Group work. Have students work in small groups to identify the responsibilities, values, and interests of the people listed below. Use the Responsibilities, Values, and Interests Chart (Handout 3). Each group can select one of the bullet points below and present its findings to the class. As an alternative, each member of a group can pretend to be of one of the people listed below and act out their response with other members of their small group.

Concluding the lesson. Discuss with the class the ways in which children today make a difference in their communities.
Authority: Unit 1, Lesson 3
Correlations to the SVPDP Curricula
Unit 2, Lessons 6 and 7
Foundations of Democracy, middle school level
Privacy: Unit 4, Lesson 9

Responsibility : Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 4, Lesson 11

Justice: Unit 1, Lesson 1

Unit 2, Lesson 2

Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 4, Lessons 11 and 12

Authority: Unit 1, Lesson 2

Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Privacy: Unit 4, Lesson 9

Responsibility: Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 4, Lesson 11 Foundations of Democracy, high school level

Justice: Unit 1, Lesson 1

Unit 2, Lesson 3

Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 4, Lessons 10 and 11

Unit 1, concepts from Lesson 3

Unit 5, Lessons 23, 25, 26

Unit 6, Lessons 29 and 30

Unit 1, Lesson 2

Unit 5, Lesson 27

We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution, Level 2 (middle school) Unit 6, Lessons 33, 34, and 35

What Is Public Policy and Who Makes It?

We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution, Level 3 (high school)
Chapter 1: Introduction to Project Citizen

Chapter 2: An Introduction to Public Policy

Chapter 4: Why Is Citizen Participation Important to Democracy?

Project Citizen, Level 1 (middle school) Project Citizen, Level 2 (high school)

© 2014, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

The Power of Nonviolence: What Is Nonviolence? What Does It Cost?

Sculpture of Rosa Parks Sitting on Bus Seat Labeled "WHITE"

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Teacher's Guide

Lesson Overview

This lesson uses primary sources and stories of participants in the civil rights movement to introduce students to the concept of nonviolence. Students will analyze the characteristics, costs, and benefits of nonviolence, realizing that it is an active, intentional, and effective way to achieve goals.

Correlations to School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program (SVPDP) curricula are found at the end of this lesson plan.

Suggested Grade Level
Middle and high school (grades 7-12)

Estimated Time to Complete Approximately 60 minutes

After completing this lesson, the students will be able toLesson Objectives

describe the characteristics of nonviolence;

discuss the costs and benefits of using nonviolence.

Student Say-So (Handout 1)-two copies per student

KWL Chart on Nonviolence (Handout 2)

Poster paper and markers for the KWL chart and for recording students' ideas during discussion

Characteristics, Costs, and Benefits Chart (Handout 3)

Printer-friendly versions of the following:

"Heed Their Rising Voices," New York Times, March 29, 1960

"Rosa Parks," by Rita Dove, The Time 100, June 14, 1999

An excerpt from Walking with the Wind, by John Lewis

"'School' Prepares Negroes for Mass Return to Buses," December 15, 1956

"Notes from a Nonviolent Training Session," by Bruce Hartford, 1963

Materials Needed

Lesson Procedure

Beginning the lesson. Begin the lesson by asking students to respond individually to the statements contained in the Student Say-So (Handout 1). Students respond to the statements with - Agree (A), Disagree (D), or Unsure (U). They should complete the same handout after the lesson and discuss if/how their ideas have changed.

KWL chart on nonviolence. Complete the KWL Chart on Nonviolence (Handout 2) with students to activate prior knowledge and engage students in the lesson. Use the K column to record what students already know, or think they know, about nonviolence. Use the W column to record what they want to know. At the end of the lesson, complete the L column with facts the students have learned. This will also be the point in the lesson at which you invite students to make any necessary corrections to the Reading about it. Divide students into small groups. Assign each group one of the sources listed below. Ask the students to become "experts" on the source by reading and taking notes. Tell the students that at the end of the allotted time, they will present a summary of their source to the class. This summary should include specific examples from their source that demonstrate the characteristics, costs, and benefits of nonviolence. Review these terms with your class, if necessary. The Characteristics, Costs, and Benefits Chart (Handout 3) can be used to help students take notes.K column as a result of their new learning.

Heed Their Rising Voices," New York Times, March 29, 1960: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/documented-rights/exhibit/section4/detail/heed-rising-voices.html

"Rosa Parks," by Rita Dove, The Time 100, June 14, 1999: http://www.yachtingnet.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/parks01.html

An except from Walking with the Wind, by John Lewis: http://www.tolerance.org/activity/commitment-nonviolence-leadership-john-l

"'School' Prepares Negroes for Mass Return to Buses," December 15, 1956: http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/article_561215_schools.htm

"Notes from a Nonviolent Training Session," by Bruce Hartford, 1963: http://www.crmvet.org/info/nv1.htm

Whole-class discussion. Use the quotation below to stimulate the class discussion:

"Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue [so] that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.

-Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

Questions to guide discussion:

According to this quotation, what is the goal of nonviolence?

Why is nonviolence effective in achieving this goal?

What have you learned today that demonstrates King's point? Give specific examples from your reading.

Concluding the lesson.

Complete and correct the KWL Chart on Nonviolence (Handout 2).

Give students a fresh copy of the Student Say-So (Handout 1). Discuss to see if their attitudes toward nonviolence have changed.

Supplemental Activity: Write a Letter
Remind students that Malcolm X, at one time, did not believe that nonviolence was the best way to gain rights for African Americans. In 1964, he wrote, "Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks." Write a letter from Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X persuading him that nonviolence is the best way to seek justice for African Americans. Include the characteristics of nonviolence, why it is effective, and other reasons why it should be used. Address concerns that Malcolm X might have had about using this method.

Correlations to the SVPDP Curricula

Foundations of Democracy, middle school level

Authority: Unit 1, Lessons 1 and 3

Unit 2, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 3, Lesson 8

Privacy: Unit 1, Lessons 1, 2, and 3

Unit 4, Lessons 9, 10, 11, and 12

Responsibility: Unit 1, Lesson 2

Unit 3, Lessons 6, 7, and 8

Justice: Unit 1, Lesson 1

Unit 2, Lesson 2

Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 4, Lessons 11 and 12

Authority: Unit 1, Lessons 1 and 2

Unit 2, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 3, Lesson 8

Foundations of Democracy, high school level Privacy: Unit 1, Lessons 1, 2, and 3

Unit 4, Lessons 9 and 10

Responsibility: Unit 1, Lesson 3

Unit 3, Lessons 5 and 6

Justice: Unit 1, Lesson 1

Unit 2, Lesson 3

Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Unit 4, Lessons 10 and 11

Unit 1, concepts from Lesson 3

Unit 5, Lessons 23, 25, and 26

Unit 6, Lessons 29 and 30

Unit 1, Lesson 2

Unit 5, Lesson 27We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution, Level 2 (middle school)

Unit 6, Lessons 33, 34, and 35

What Is Public Policy and Who Makes It?

We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution, Level 3 (high school)

Chapter 1: Introduction to Project Citizen

Chapter 2: An Introduction to Public Policy

Chapter 4: Why Is Citizen Participation Important to Democracy?

© 2014, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

Project Citizen, Level 1 (middle school)Project Citizen, Level 2 (high school)

The Power of Nonviolence: Change through Strategic Nonviolent Action

Nonviolent marchers demand "VOTES FOR WOMEN" on Fifth Avenue in New York City, 1912

1. 3. Copy for each student of Hypotheticals: Change through Strategic Nonviolent Action 1. 3. 4. 5. 6. Teacher's Guide

Lesson Overview

Nonviolence is introduced to students as a concept with a deep history that reverberates in the present. The power of nonviolence as a catalyst for change is a function of both its philosophical foundations and the strategic application of specific nonviolent tactics. Students will analyze major figures in the history of nonviolence through the intellectual framework of what constitutes philosophical nonviolence as opposed to tactical nonviolence. The lesson guides students as they apply the analysis to a series of hypothetical situations that have been based on actual events. At the conclusion of the lesson, students should understand that nonviolence is both a philosophy and a strategy that has been and continues to be adopted by individuals and organizations to push for reforms.

Suggested Grade Level

Middle school and high schools (grades 7-12)

Estimated Time to Complete
Approximately 60 minutes

Lesson Objectives After completing this lesson the students will be able to

identify some of the major historical proponents of nonviolence;

distinguish between the adherence to nonviolent philosophies ("philosophical nonviolence") and the strategic application of nonviolent tactics ("tactical nonviolence");

describe various nonviolent tactics and the challenges that they present in their implementation;

develop, present, and defend strategies aimed at bringing about change through nonviolence.

Materials Needed

2. Five background information sheets on proponents of nonviolence Teacher Concept Paper: Nonviolent Resistance to Oppression

4. Articles on facts underlying hypothetical situations:
(Handout 6)

Lesson Procedure 2. Studying historical proponents of nonviolence. Divide the class into pairs and distribute to each pair one background sheet on one of the following major proponents of nonviolence: Henry David Thoreau (Handout 1), Susan B. Anthony (Handout 2), Mohandas K. Gandhi (Handout 3), Martin Luther King Jr. (Handout 4), and Cesar Chavez (Handout 5). Each pair of students will focus on only one proponent. You might pause here to define proponent.

Beginning the lesson. Ask students to share their understanding of nonviolence as a historical concept and as it practically applies to their everyday lives. Write the terms philosophy, tactics, and strategy on the board and have students free associate these with the concept of nonviolence. Write down the results of the free association on the board and leave it there for the duration of the lesson. Introduce the lesson topic and review the purpose of the lesson with students. Ask each set of paired students to draw a table composed of three columns on a blank sheet of paper, with the columns labeled: (1) Who am I? (2) What did I believe? (3) How did I act on my beliefs? After reading the background information, the students should write notes in each column that respond to the question being posed about their assigned proponent.

After students have completed the columns, call on each pair to report highlights of their notes to the class. Use these to create a master table on the board for each of the proponents.

Please note that more than one pair of students can be assigned the same proponent. Teacher may then call on pairs who worked on the same proponent at the same time.

Ask each group to present its hypothetical situation and its proposed strategy of nonviolent action aimed at reform. The other groups should offer constructive critiques of the student group proposals following the presentation. Time permitting, presenting groups may respond to the critiques of their proposals. Defining philosophy v. tactics. Return to the free association between philosophy, tactics, strategy, and Tackling change hypotheticals. Distribute the hypothetical situation sheet to students, and then divide the class into four groups, assigning one of the four hypothetical situations to each group. Explain that each hypothetical situation sheet describes a situation that the students, as a group, will seek to reform. Ask students to work in their groups to develop a nonviolent strategy that reflects their own nonviolence philosophy (if any) and includes specific nonviolent tactics to bring about the desired reforms. The strategy and a clear statement of its objectives should be prepared for presentation to the class. Visual aids may be used to complement the presentation. nonviolence. Ask the entire class to categorize the quotes and actions in the background sheets as reflecting either philosophical or tactical nonviolence. Guide the class as it comes up with working definitions of philosophical nonviolence and tactical nonviolence. What is the difference between the two? Are the two indivisible? Why does it matter whether something gets labeled as philosophical or tactical? Does a nonviolence strategy require both? Please note that useful background information for teachers may be found in the Teacher Concept Paper: Nonviolent Resistance to Oppression.

Concluding the lesson. To conclude the lesson, distribute articles describing the factual situations that served as the basis for the hypotheticals. Lead students in a discussion comparing the hypothetical situations to the actual facts and examine the types of nonviolent tactics actually used and their effectiveness.

Assessment. Assign students to search for articles about a current situation that they would like to change. Ask the students to write one-page memos addressed to their fellow students summarizing the situation and then presenting a nonviolent campaign aimed at reforming the situation. In their memo, students may also predict the reaction to their proposed campaign and how best to anticipate and address that response.

© 2014, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

The Power of Nonviolence: Rosa Parks: A Quest for Equal Protection Under the Law

Teacher's Guide

Lesson Overview

This lesson asks students to revisit the well-known story of a figure in the civil rights movement-Rosa Parks-through the primary source documents associated with her arrest in 1955. The arrest occurred in the shadow of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and had a powerful impact on the public policy of segregation and the application of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This lesson can be used to either introduce or enhance a unit on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the civil rights movement. For teachers not currently using the School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program (SVPDP), the lesson can be used as is. For those who are using the SVPDP curriculum, this lesson allows students to apply the concepts of authority and issues of distributive, corrective, and procedural justice to a historical event. It also demonstrates the concepts taught in the We the People: the Citizen & the Constitution lessons on equal protection of the law. Specific references to individual lessons in the curriculum are found at the end of this guide.

Students will examine the documents at pre-designed stations and complete a journal (provided) using their observations. The class will then discuss findings and apply what they have learned about the Fourteenth Amendment, Jim Crow laws, and civil rights.

Suggested Grade Level

Elementary/Middle School (grades 5-8)

Estimated Time to Complete

Approximately 50-90 minutes

Lesson Objectives

After completing this lesson, students will be able to do the following:

use primary source documents to make observations and take notes

correct possible misconceptions about events on the day Rosa Parks was arrested

apply what they have learned about the Fourteenth Amendment

evaluate the actions of the three key players (Rosa Parks, the bus driver, and the arresting officer) on the day of Rosa Parks's arrest, based on the standards set by the Municipal City Code of 1955 and the Fourteenth Amendment

Materials Needed

Montgomery City Code (five to ten copies)

Diagram of the bus (five to ten copies)

Arrest Report, page 1 (five to ten copies)

Arrest Report, page 2 (five to ten copies)

Student Journal: The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks (one copy for each student)

"Teaching with Documents: An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks"
(one copy for each student)

A copy of the Fourteenth Amendment

Before the Lesson
Review this guide and all materials provided.

Set up four stations around the room. At Station One, place several copies of the Montgomery City Code; at Station Two, place several copies of the diagram of the bus; at Station Three, place several copies of the first page of the police report; and at Station Four, place several copies of page two of the police report (students will likely need help deciphering the handwriting on this page). For large classes, set up two sets of four stations, or complete this lesson in the school library, where you may have more room to move around.

For SVPDP teachers: Read or review We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution, Level 1, Lesson 19, or Level 2, Lesson 26.

Lesson Procedure

1. Beginning the lesson. Ask students to share aloud everything they know about Rosa Parks. Write their answers on a chalkboard or chart paper. This should be done fairly quickly and conducted similar to a brainstorm activity, where there are no right or wrong answers. Simply list the responses, and then set them aside to return to later in the lesson.

2. Working with primary source documents. Tell students that they will examine the experience of Rosa Parks on the day she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white. Explain to students that they will be looking at copies of the actual papers pertaining to her arrest.
Help students differentiate between primary and secondary source documents.

Give each student a journal and ask them to go to each of the four stations to look at the documents and write about what they see, answering the questions provided. (They do not need to go to the stations in order. Students may disperse to view the documents individually, or you might choose to have them visit the various stations in assigned groups.)

3. Sharing their findings. After students have visited all four stations and returned to their seats with their journals completed, distribute copies of "Teaching with Documents: An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks."

Read the first paragraph of "Teaching with Documents," then have students look at their answers from Station One.

What does Section 10 require bus drivers to do? (Answer: Keep the races separate on the bus.)

What kind of authority does Section 11 of the Montgomery City Code give bus drivers? (Answer: The same authority as police officers.)

How is the bus driver supposed to use his authority according to Section 11? (Answer: The bus driver is supposed to use his authority to keep the races separate.)

Read the second paragraph of "Teaching with Documents," and direct students' attention to the diagram of the bus. Show students the first ten seats that were designated as the white section of the bus. Point out that Rosa Parks was not in the white section of the bus.

Ask the following questions:

Which rule in the Montgomery City Code that you just read support Rosa Parks's position that she should not have to move? (Answer: She wasn't in the white section; the races were still separate.)

What language in the Montgomery City Code supports the bus driver's position? (Answer: The bus driver has the authority of a police officer. It is unlawful for "any passenger to refuse or fail to take a seat among those assigned to the race he belongs.")

Read the third paragraph of "Teaching with Documents."

Remind students that Rosa Parks was charged with "refusing to obey orders of bus driver," which was against the city code at the time. Remind them that there was a higher law, however: the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the highest law in the land. Ask students to review or apply what they have learned about the Fourteenth Amendment to this situation.

How was Rosa Parks's arrest seemingly a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment? Was there a good and fair reason for her not to sit anywhere she liked on the bus?

Why were states able to have laws upholding segregation when the Constitution said that people were entitled to "equal protection under the law?"

Rosa Parks's mother asked her, "Did they beat you?" How does her question demonstrate that the Fourteenth Amendment was not being upheld in Montgomery, Alabama?

From what you have learned from this account and others, does it seem like "separate" was ever "equal"? Give examples.

Read the fourth paragraph of "Teaching with Documents." Emphasize to students that Mrs. Parks was very active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Tell them she is often portrayed as someone who was "just tired," but in reality she was someone who had struggled against segregation for a long time.
Look at page one of the police report from Rosa Parks's arrest.

What did the bus driver say was the problem? (Answer: A black woman was sitting in the white section of the bus and would not move to the back.)
Ask: Is that a true statement? Was Rosa Parks seated in the white section of the bus?

Which city code was Rosa Parks charged with violating? (Answer: Section 11: Powers of persons in charge of vehicle; passengers to obey directions.)

What date was this report written? (Answer: December 1, 1955)

Ask the following questions:

Is it always wrong to disobey laws and rules?

What are some consequences of disobeying laws and rules?

Explain that Rosa Parks and others in the civil rights movement disobeyed rules and laws and accepted the consequences as a way to demonstrate that the laws were unjust and wrong. By responding nonviolently to mistreatment, they were powerful in their efforts to bring about change.

Look at page two of the police report from Rosa Parks's arrest.

What does it list as the charges against Rosa Parks? (Answer: Refusing to obey orders of a bus driver.)

What is listed as Rosa Parks' nationality? (Answer: Negro)

Nationality refers to the country in which one is born or of which one has become a citizen. Rosa Parks was born in America. Why do you think the police did not list her nationality as "American"? (Answers will vary.)

Ask the following questions:

Does it seem from this report that African Americans in Montgomery were viewed as full-fledged American citizens? What would have been listed under "Nationality" if the police officer had viewed Rosa Parks as an American citizen?

How might being considered noncitizens affect the way African Americans were treated by police officers and other officials?

The Montgomery City Code says that equalbut separate accommodations must be provided for whites and "negroes." Thinking about Rosa Parks's experience, were equal accommodations provided?

What is the danger in saying things are equal when they are not?

4. What we have learned. Look back at the list the students developed at the beginning of the class, and ask them the following:

How much of their list was accurate?

What was inaccurate or perhaps a misconception?

What have they learned about Rosa Parks or the events of that day?

What is the value of working with primary source documents?

Help students understand how Rosa Parks's arrest began the Montgomery Bus Boycott and led to Parks being known as the "mother of the modern civil rights movement." Remind students that the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) declared that separate but equal educational facilities are unconstitutional-the decision pertained only to schools-and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation in public places.

Correlations to SVPDP Curricula

Foundations of Democracy , Elementary School Level

Unit 2, Lessons 7 and 9

Unit 4, Lesson 11

Unit 2, Lessons 2 and 3

Unit 3, Lessons 5 and 6

Unit 4, Lessons 9 & 10

Unit 2, Lessons 3 and 4

Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Foundations of Democracy , Middle School Level

Unit 3, Lesson 6

Unit 4, Lessons 8 and 9

Unit 5, Lessons 12 and 14

Unit 2, Lesson 4

Unit 3, Lesson 5

Unit 2, Lesson 3

Unit 3, Lessons 7 and 8

Unit 4, Lessons 10, 11, and 12
We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution
Project Citizen , Level 1

"What is Public Policy and Who Makes It?"

This lesson was developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents of this lesson do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.

©2012. Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

© 2014, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

The Power of Nonviolence: CITIZENSHIP SCHOOLS AND CIVIC EDUCATION

CITIZENSHIP SCHOOLS AND CIVIC EDUCATION
DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND IN THE PRESENT

Teachers Guide

Lesson Overview

This lesson is intended to help guide students through a historical and contemporary examination of citizenship schools and civic education. During the civil rights era, citizenship schools were an integral part of the effort to educate African Americans about the rights that they had as United States citizens so that they could vigorously assert these rights in the fight against segregation. Presently, citizenship education tends to be associated with efforts to prepare noncitizens to meet the requirements for becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. Underpinning both forms of citizenship education is the concept of civics or civic education, defined by John J. Patrick as the "development of intellectual skills and participatory skills, which enable citizens to think and act in behalf of their individual rights and their common good" in a constitutional democracy.[1]

For teachers not currently using the School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program (SVPDP), this lesson can be used as is. For those who are using the SVPDP curriculum, this lesson allows students to apply the Foundations of Democracy concepts of authority and responsibility. It also demonstrates concepts taught in We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution. Specific references to individual lessons in the curriculum are found at the end of this guide.

Suggested Grade Level

Middle school and high school

Estimated Time to Complete

45 minutes

Objectives

After completing this lesson, students will be able to

* explain the role that citizenship schools played during the civil rights movement, particularly in regard to preparing for state voting and literacy tests;
* identify at least two of the main objectives and instructional means of a citizenship school based on a study of the Highlander Folk School;
* compare the purpose of citizenship schools in the past with the objectives of citizenship schools in the present; and
* develop a list of three to five basic elements comprising a civic education, regardless of past or present.

Materials Needed

* Historical Information on Citizenship Schools
* 60-Second Civics: Septima Clark (http://www.civiced.org/index.php?page=audio&&mid=336)
* Excerpts of Interview with Septima Clark (http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0017/excerpts/excerpt_2165.html; http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0017/excerpts/excerpt_2167.html)
* 1965 Alabama Literacy Test
(www.ccle.fourh.umn.edu/literacy.pdf)
* U.S. Naturalization Test (www.history.com/images/media/pdf/100qENG.pdf)

Before the Lesson

Review this guide and all of the materials provided.

Lesson Procedure

1. Beginning the lesson. Ask each of your students to write a one-sentence definition of "citizenship." As a class, discuss what the students came up with and list some of the important elements of the definition: which should include most or all of the following: rights, duties, citizen, member, society, disposition, conduct, and community. Follow up by posing an open question: What is a "citizenship school"?

2. Introducing Septima Clark and Citizenship Schools. Arrange for students to listen to the 60-Second Civics episode on Septima Clark, or use the transcript provided. Why was Septima Clark later called the "queen mother of the civil rights movement"?

Analyze how citizenship classes were conducted at Highlander Folk School and elsewhere during the civil rights era by listening to or reading the excerpts from an interview with Septima Clark and the historical background provided. Have students discuss what made this method of instruction both necessary and effective.

3. Analyzing documents. Read some of the questions in the 1965 Alabama literacy test, which was intended to discourage or prevent African Americans from voting. Ask the students to assess the difficulty of the questions. Are any of the questions tricky or unfair? How relevant were any of these questions to the act of voting? How might such questions have presented obstacles to qualifying for voter registration? How might the obstacles have been surmounted?

Gauge student familiarity with the requirements to become a "naturalized" citizen of the United States. Specifically, ask students to consider the naturalization test requirement and the preparations needed to pass this test. What are the similarities and distinctions between citizenship education as it pertains to passing something like the 1965 Alabama Literacy Test and the U.S. Naturalization Test?

Working in groups or as individuals, ask students to compare the 1965 Alabama Literacy Test with the current U.S. Naturalization Test. They should note that the first test had to be taken by a select group of people who were already citizens, while the second test must be taken by persons applying to become citizens. Are there any similarities or differences in the questions?

4. Where are we today? Ask students to consider the role of citizenship schools and civic education today. The following questions can help guide the discussion:
* How might citizenship schools be conducted today?
* What purpose would they serve?
* Are courses in "civics" beneficial only to persons who are applying for citizenship?
* Are you-as students-currently engaged in civic education?
* If so, is it anything like the forms of citizenship education that you have been examining?
Students should understand that, in the broad sense, citizenship schools and civic education both consist of educational programs that are designed to instruct students as to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, while also imparting the knowledge and skills necessary to exercise those rights and responsibilities.

Additional Resources

* http://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm
* http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis54.htm#1954ccs
* http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9b.html
* "Lighting The Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America" by Karenna Gore Schiff, Miramax Books
* http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers/lessonplans/us/july-dec08/constitution_day.html

Correlations to SVPDP Curriculum

Foundations of Democracy, Elementary School Level

* Authority

* Unit 1, Lessons 1 and 3
* Unit 2, Lessons 7 and 9
* Unit 4, Lesson 11

* Justice

* Unit 1, Lesson 1
* Unit 2, Lessons 2 and 3
* Unit 3, Lessons 5 and 6
* Unit 4, Lessons 9 and 10

* Responsibility

* Unit 1, Lesson 1
* Unit 2, Lessons 3 and 4
* Unit 3, Lessons 6 and 7

Foundations of Democracy, Middle School Level

* Authority

* Unit 1, Lessons 1 and 3
* Unit 3, Lesson 6
* Unit 4, Lessons 8 and 9
* Unit 5, Lessons 12 and 14

* Responsibility

* Unit 1 Lessons 1 and 2
* Unit 2, Lesson 4
* Unit 3, Lesson 5

* Justice

* Unit 1, Lesson 1
* Unit 2, Lesson 3
* Unit 3, Lessons 7 and 8
* Unit 4, Lessons 10, 11, and 12

* We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution

* Level 2 (Middle school), Lessons 26 and 29
* Level 3 (High school), Lessons 17 and 19

This lesson was developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents do of this lesson do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.

© 2011, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

Patrick, John J. "Civic Education for Constitutional Democracy: An International Perspective. ERIC Digest." [1] ERICDigests.Org - Providing Full-text Access to ERIC Digests. ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/Social Science Education Bloomington IN., 00 Dec. 1995. Web. 15 Feb. 2011. <http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-3/civic.htm>.

© 2014, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

The Power of Nonviolence: Music Can Change the World

The Power of Nonviolence: Music Can Change the World

Lesson Overview

Students explore how music can be used to attain social and political changes in society. The lesson continues the theme of nonviolence by exploring ways in which music helped advance the civil rights movement.

Suggested Grade Level

Middle school and high school

Estimated Time to Complete

Up to two class periods

Objectives

After completing this lesson, students will be able to

* discuss how music can positively influence social and political issues in society,
* identify how specific pieces of music have had an impact on the civil rights movement, and
* explain the motivation or inspiration of various composers for becoming involved musically.

Materials Needed

* A laptop, speakers, and internet connectivity or a tape recorder with preselected songs
* Lyrics and fact sheet for "We Shall Overcome" ( Handout 1)
* Song list ( Teacher Resource 1)
* Student direction sheet ( Handout 2)

Before the Lesson

* Determine how the various musical selections will be shared with the class and with the groups.

* Decide how long the groups will have to gather information and then prepare for a short presentation to the class.

* Determine how long each group's presentation will be.

Lesson Procedure

Day 1

1. Beginning the lesson. Using the blackboard or a screen, share the following quote from Berthold Auerbach: "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." Begin a class discussion by asking students what they think of this quote. Ask students to share the following:

* What do they think of music?
* What kind of music do they listen to and why?
* How often do they listen to music, and how accessible is it today?
* Provide current and historic examples of negative influences attributed to music.
* Provide current and historic examples of positive influences attributed to music.

To help transition from this discussion to the next segment, share one or more of the following quotes and ask students to discuss their meaning. Also solicit any examples the students can recall.

"Music can change the world because it can change people." -Bono

"Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music." -Jimmy Hendrix

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." -Bob Marley

2. Music as an instrument of social change. Play a modern-day popular protest song, such as Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Same Love." Lyrics can be found at http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/macklemore/samelove.html. Engage your students in a class discussion:

* Ask students to discuss the meaning of the modern-day protest song you have chosen and to explain why it has become popular.

* What other social issues have been discussed through music? Name the issues and the songs.

* How has music helped to bring about social or political change? Give examples.

* Can you think of songs associated with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s?

3. A civil rights song-"We Shall Overcome." Play this song for the students and ask them to identify the song and its meaning. Below are two options. Many other renditions of this song are available online. The lyrics and a fact sheet for the song are provided in Handout 1. Discuss with students the origins of this song from gospel music and old spiritual songs. What other eras can they associate with spirituals?

* Sung by Pete Seeger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b24Ewk934g

* Sung by various artists: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW2MRTqzJug

4. A songwriter and his or her song. This group activity will allow students to research some of the most compelling pieces of music and the stories behind them. Divide the class into groups of four. Give each group one of the songs on the song list ( Teacher Resource 1). Students will first need to read the lyrics and, if possible, listen to the song. Ask students to complete the following activity:

* Determine whether the song speaks specifically about a real-life event or incident, and compare what the song describes with the actual event, or whether the song is a general commentary on the state of affairs at the time. If so, what aspects of social injustice does the song describe?

* Who was the singer/songwriter of the piece? What was his or her connection to the civil rights movement?

* What impact, if any, does a song like this have on the social consciousness of a community or society? Please distribute the student direction sheet ( Handout 2) provided. This should be the stopping point for the first class. Tell students how long the groups have to complete the research and compile the responses for the activity.

Day 2

5. Reconvening the group. Divide the class into the groups formed for the activity. Give them a few minutes to prepare themselves for sharing their work.

6. Sharing. Ask each group to share with the rest of the class their chosen or assigned song and their responses to the questions. Have the songs on hand in the event that the other students have not heard the song before. You may wish to have them listen to at least one or two songs, depending on how much time you have.

7. Concluding the lesson. Once all the groups have shared, ask the students to reflect on what they have heard and conduct a class discussion. Some questions that can be used are as follows:

* What have you learned from this exploration?
* The music in this activity spanned almost thirty years. Why did it take so long to have an impact?
* What role did the songwriters and singers play in this movement?
* Could music have the same impact today? Why or why not?

© 2014, Center for Civic Education. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely reproduce and use this lesson for nonprofit, classroom use only. Copyright must be acknowledged on all copies.

60-Second Civics is a daily podcast that provides a quick and convenient way for listeners to learn about our nation's government, the Constitution, and our history. The podcast explores themes related to civics and government, the constitutional issues behind the headlines, and the people and ideas that formed our nation's history and government.

During the entire month of February, 60-Second Civics will be devoted to exploring nonviolence and the civil rights movement. You can download each episode here and subscribe to the podcast using the links below.

Music for 60-Second Civics is provided by Music Alley from Mevio.com. The song featured on the podcast is Cheryl B. Engelhardt's "Complacent Pretending." Terms of use can be found here.

Subscribe to the 60-Seconds Civics Podcast:

RSS:

Talking Civics is a personal look at civics in action. Podcasts feature conversations with individuals about their experiences as first-hand participants in civic history and civic affairs.

Subscribe to the Talking Civics Podcast:

RSS:

Talking Civics: Episode 1, Jones Doug Jones played a pivotal role as United States attorney - Part 1 - Doug Jones played a pivotal role as United States attorney in the prosecution of two former Ku Klux Klansmen for the murder of four young girls in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing was a deadly act of violence that revealed the brutal side of racism to the world and helped generate widespread support for the civil rights movement.

Part 1
Doug Jones recalls growing up in a segregated suburban area just west of Birmingham and talks about how he became involved in reopening the case of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Talking Civics: Episode 1, Jones Doug Jones played a pivotal role as United States attorney - Part 2 - Doug Jones played a pivotal role as United States attorney in the prosecution of two former Ku Klux Klansmen for the murder of four young girls in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing was a deadly act of violence that revealed the brutal side of racism to the world and helped generate widespread support for the civil rights movement.

Part 2
Doug Jones recounts his prosecution of Thomas Blanton, Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry for bombing the 16th Street Baptist Street Church and considers the significance of this event in the context of the civil rights movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the center specializes in civic/citizenship education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and international educational exchange programs for developing democracies. programs focus on the u.s. constitution and bill of rights; american political traditions and institutions at the federal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and local levels; constitutionalism; civic participation; and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. 

today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the center administers a wide range of critically acclaimed curricular

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and community-based programs. the principal goals of the center's programs are to help students develop (1) an increased understanding of the institutions of american constitutional democracy and the fundamental principles and values upon which they are founded

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
(2) the skills necessary to participate as effective and responsible citizens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and (3) the willingness to use democratic procedures for making decisions and managing conflict.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The power of nonviolent actions and attitudes as a means to resist oppression and spur reforms is a recurring feature of democratic and democratizing societies. The School Violence Prevention Demonstration Program presents educators with lesson plans that explore the use of nonviolence in history, paying particular attention to the civil rights movement and African American history.

# data[].attributes.body
Ducksters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
History >> Civil Rights for Kids

African-American Civil Rights Movement

March on Washington Aug 28, 1963
from the United States Information Agency

The African-American Civil Rights Movement was an ongoing fight for racial equality that took place for over 100 years after the Civil War. Leaders such asMartin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Rosa Parks paved the way for non-violent protests which led to changes in the law. When most people talk about the "Civil Rights Movement" they are talking about the protests in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Background

The Civil Rights Movement has its background in the abolitionist movement before theCivil War. Abolitionists were people that thought slavery was morally wrong and wanted it to come to an end. Before the Civil War, many of the northern states had outlawed slavery. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln freed the enslaved with the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war, slavery was made illegal with the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Segregation and the Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow Drinking Fountain
by John Vachon

After the Civil War, many southern states continued to treat African-Americans as second class citizens. They implemented laws that kept black people separate from white people. These laws became known as Jim Crow laws. They required separate schools, restaurants, restrooms, and transportation based on the color of a person's skin. Other laws prevented many black people from voting.

Early Protests

In the early 1900s, black people began to protest the Jim Crow laws that southern states were implementing to enforce segregation. Several African-American leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells joined together to found the NAACP in 1909. Another leader, Booker T. Washington, helped to form schools to educate African-Americans in order to improve their status in society.

The Movement Grows

The civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s when theSupreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was illegal in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. Federal troops were brought in to Little Rock, Arkansas to allow the Little Rock Nine to attend a previously all white high school.

Major Events in the Movement

The 1950's and early 1960's brought about several major events in the fight for the civil rights of African-Americans. In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. This sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted for over a year and brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forefront of the movement. King led a number of non-violent protests including the Birmingham Campaign and the March on Washington.

Lyndon Johnson signing Civil Rights Act
by Cecil Stoughton

Civil Rights Act of 1964

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law byPresident Lyndon Johnson. This act outlawed segregation and the Jim Crow laws of the south. It also outlawed discrimination based on race, national background, and gender. Although there were still many issues, this law gave the NAACP and other organizations a strong base on which to fight discrimination in the courts.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

In 1965, another law was passed called the Voting Rights Act. This law said that citizens could not be denied the right to vote based on their race. It outlawed literacy tests (a requirement that people be able to read) and poll taxes (a fee that people had to pay to vote).

Interesting Facts about the African-American Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Act was originally proposed by President John F. Kennedy.

The 1968 Civil Rights Act, also known as the Fair Housing Act, outlawed discrimination in the selling or renting of housing.

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee was once the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in 1968.

Today, African-Americans have been elected or appointed to the highest positions in the U.S. government including Secretary of State (Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) and President (Barack Obama).

Activities

Take a ten question quiz about this page.

Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

Your browser does not support the audio element.
To learn more about Civil Rights:

Civil Rights Leaders

Overview Works Cited

History >> Civil Rights for Kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the history of the African-American Civil Rights Movement including segregation, Jim Crow laws, protests, Martin Luther King, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, spoke in front of a quarter of a million people at the March on Washington.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech 50 years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. This August, tens of thousands of people came back to the same spot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's speech and the March on Washington.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held on August 28, 1963. The march brought 250,000 people from across the United States to the nation's capital. The marchers called on the government to give African Americans equal rights and equal access to jobs. Dr. King was the final speaker at the march.

African Americans have made progress since 1963 in getting better jobs. They also have more protection of their civil rights. Speakers at the 2013 anniversary march reflected on African Americans' gains. They also urged young people to continue the fight for full economic equality and social justice.

Speakers named three areas that they believe need correction: the gap between rich and poor, efforts to restrict voters' access to the polls, and cases of discrimination in the criminal justice system. Some criticized the recent ruling from the Supreme Court that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin Luther King III, the son of Dr. King, said that more work needs to be done to achieve his father's vision of a country free of racial prejudice.

Today's activists hope to bring about as much progress as civil rights workers did a half-century ago. They are taking up the cause of justice and equality with new tools. They use the Internet and social media to spread their message. They register student voters electronically and also file online petitions.

On August 28, the day that Dr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech a half-century ago, President Barack Obama gave his own speech from the Lincoln Memorial's steps. He spoke about how Dr. King and the March on Washington continue to inspire. He said, "We may never duplicate the swelling crowds and dazzling procession of that day so long ago-no one can match King's brilliance-but the same flame that lit the heart of all who are willing to take a first step for justice, I know that flame remains."

Image credit: ©Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Related Links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
march on washington for jobs and freedom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Celebrating the March on Washington's 50th Anniversary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, spoke in front of a quarter of a million people at the March on Washington. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech 50 years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Overview - Civil Rights - Themed Resources | Teacher Resources - Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore the fight for voting rights as well as the racial history of the United States in sports and schools.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The papers of nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher, consist of approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), most of which were digitized from 34 reels of previously produced microfilm. The collection spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1895. Many of Douglass's earlier writings were destroyed when his house in Rochester, New York, burned in 1872.

For a fuller overview of the collection, please consult the Scope and Content Note in the collection finding aid to the Frederick Douglass Papers, which is available online ( PDF and HTML) with links to the digital content on this site. Also see the essay on this site titled Provenance, Publication History, and Scope and Contents.

The collection is organized in the following series:

Diary, 1886-1894 (Reel 1): A single diary that Douglass kept during his tour of Europe and Africa, 1886-1887, with notes made in later years.

Family Papers, 1859-1903 (Reel 1): Diary, speeches, writings, and miscellaneous papers of Frederick Douglass's second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, but also includes a biographical sketch of Douglass's wife of forty-four years, Anna Murray Douglass, written by their daughter, Rosetta Douglass Sprague.

General Correspondence, 1841-1912 (Reels 1-9): General and family letters received and drafts and copies of letters sent with miscellaneous attachments. Includes letters Douglass received from prominent reformers and politicians, including Susan B. Anthony, Grover Cleveland, William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Harrison, Russell Lant, Gerrit Smith, and Ida B. Wells. Arranged chronologically. An index to the names in this series (PDF), created in 1974 before the original finding aid was published by the Library of Congress in 1976, is available online in PDF form.

Subject File, 1845-1939 (Reels 9-13): Newspaper clippings, notes, prayers, plats, architectural drawings, printed and near-print material, and reports, which reveals Douglass's interests in diverse subjects such as politics, racial prejudice, and prison reform. Arranged alphabetically by subject.

Speech, Article, and Book File, 1846-1894 (Reels 13-27): Contains the writings of Douglass and his contemporaries in the abolitionist and women's rights movements and includes autographed copies of editorials and opinion pieces from Douglass' antislavery weekly, North Star, and a partial handwritten draft of Douglass's third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Speeches and Articles by Douglass, 1846-1894 (Reels 13-19): Manuscripts, typescripts, and near-print and printed copies of Douglass's speeches, articles, and related material. Arranged chronologically. Undated items organized by titled and untitled and arranged alphabetically thereunder by title or supplied title.

Speeches, Articles, and Other Writings Attributed to Frederick or Helen Pitts Douglass, 1881-1887 (Reels 20-21): Manuscripts, typescripts, notes, photocopies, and fragments. Arranged alphabetically by topic or title when possible.

Book File, undated (Reel 21): Fragments of various drafts of Douglass's autobiography. Arranged by page number according to Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Rev. ed. Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske. 1893.)

Speeches and Articles by Others (Reels 21-27): Primarily printed copies. Arranged alphabetically by name of author with miscellaneous material at the end of the file.

Financial Papers, 1847-1928 (Reels 27-30): Bank books, bills, receipts, canceled checks, contracts, insurance policies, ledger books, promissory notes, lists, stocks and bonds, and tax bills. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Legal File, 1843-1900(Reel 30): Abstracts of titles, agreements, copyrights, deeds, depositions, mortgages, suits, articles of incorporation, wills, and miscellaneous legal documents. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Miscellany, 1870-1924 (Reel 31): Invitation file (includes calling cards, programs, menus, announcements, and other related material), newspaper clippings, memorabilia, maps, photographs, printed matter, and miscellany. Arranged alphabetically by type of material and chronologically therein.

Addition I, 1851-1964 (Reels 32-34): Correspondence, speeches, account books, printed matter, and miscellaneous material. Includes scrapbooks that document Douglass's role as minister to Haiti and the controversy surrounding his interracial second marriage. Arranged by type of material and chronologically therein.

Addition II, 1846-1967 (Box 53; not filmed; not yet digitized): Clippings, correspondence, deeds, memorabilia, photographs, newspapers, printed matter, and speeches. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Addition III, 1880-1934 (Box 53; not filmed; not yet digitized): Correspondence and programs. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Brief History of the Papers

The Frederick Douglass Papers were originally in the library at Cedar Hill, Douglass's home in Anacostia, Washington, D.C., from 1878 until his death in 1895. In 1900 Helen Pitts Douglass, Douglass's second wife, established the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association so that the home and its contents might be maintained after her death. The association held the property from 1903 until 1916, when it joined forces with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. In 1962 Congress declared Cedar Hill a national historical site, and ownership of the home and its contents was transferred to the National Park Service.

The National Park Service transferred the Frederick Douglass Papers to the Library of Congress between 1972 and 1974 to ensure their proper custodial care and to make them more readily accessible to researchers. In 1975 additional Douglass materials were acquired by the Library of Congress and added to the Frederick Douglass Papers as the Addition I Series. The papers were microfilmed and made available to the public. The online Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress has been digitally scanned from a thirty-four-reel microfilm set. Since the microfilming was performed, additional materials have been received; they are currently contained in the Addition II and Addition III series. These new materials have not been microfilmed and are not included yet in this online collection. For more history of the collection, see the essay on this site titled Provenance, Publication History, and Scope and Contents.

Frederick Douglass documented many instances of racial prejudice and violence in his papers. Therefore, some of the materials in this online historical collection contain language or negative stereotypes that may be offensive to some readers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
About this Collection | Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The papers of nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher, consist of approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), most of which were digitized from 34 reels of previously produced microfilm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities external link and the Library of Congress. Learn more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chronicling America " Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities external link and the Library of Congress. Learn more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Famous activists have shaped the world we live in today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Extraordinary courage stepped up to bigotry in America during the summer of 1961. The acts of bravery came not from soldiers in battle or politicians taking a stand. No, in this case, the valor came from everyday Americans - civilians concerned about the state of their country. Eventually, there would be hundreds of them, acting over a five month period. They came from all over the U.S. They were black and white; liberal and conservative; Catholic, Protestant, and Jew. Many were college students; some from the seminary. They came to lend their presence and put their bodies on the line. Their actions were innocent and non-violent. All they set out to do was ride on a bus - or rather, insure that a person of any color could ride on a bus from one state to another. They were called "Freedom Riders."

Before it was all over more than 60 "Freedom Rides" would criss-cross the South between May and November of 1961. At least 436 individuals would ride buses and trains to make their point. However, a number of the "freedom riders" were physically assaulted, chased, and/or threatened by white mobs, some beaten with pipes, chains and baseball bats. Many of the riders were also arrested and jailed, especially in Mississippi. Yet these arrests became part of the protest - and in this case, a badge of honor.

For those arrested were not criminals. Far from it. They were among America's finest heroes. Yes, America has a long line of heroes, and none more honorable than those who fought and died in military conflicts - from the Revolutionary War through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Those heroes occupy a special and honored place. Yet few heroes stand taller on the domestic front than those who came from the civilian population during the 1961 civil rights "freedom rides." What follows here is part of their story, offered with photos and sidebars, culled from a much more detailed record that is referenced in "Sources" at the bottom of this story. This piece also adds a few more recent events and parts of the story that have not generally appeared together in the same profile.

The freedom rides of 1961, mostly bus rides, had a legal as well as a moral objective. They were testing two U.S. Supreme Court rulings - Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960) - rulings that found that segregated public buses and related facilities on interstate transportation routes were unconstitutional and illegal. That meant trains, buses, planes, ferries, and related terminals and waiting rooms. The first case dates to July 1944, when Irene Morgan was arrested in Virginia after refusing to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus while traveling home from Baltimore, Maryland.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took up Morgan's case, with the Supreme Court ruling in her favor in June 1946, striking down racial segregation on interstate buses. The 1960, Boynton v. Virginia ruling expanded on the Morgan case, outlawing segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters, and restroom facilities for interstate passengers. However, both rulings were largely ignored in the Deep South; the status quo prevailed and black patrons had to use separate facilities. As Diane Nash, a young student activist and one of the Freedom Rider organizers would explain in a later interview: "Traveling the segregated South, for black people, was humiliating. The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks were so subhuman and so inferior that we could not even use public facilities that white people used..."

In early 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), headed by James Farmer, set about organizing interracial groups to ride interstate buses through the South to test the Supreme Court rulings.

Farmer and CORE were also testing the newly-elected Kennedy Administration in Washington - President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy - to see if they would enforce laws banning segregation.

The plan for the first ride was to send volunteers on two buses - one group on a Trailways bus and another on a Greyhound bus - both departing from Washington, D.C. bound for New Orleans, Louisiana. Along the route, there would be stops at bus terminals throughout the south, with the passengers selectively testing the "white only" or designated "negro waiting" areas.

The first group of 1961's Freedom Riders consisted of 13 individuals - black, white, male and female. They boarded the two buses in Washington, D.C. and departed on May 4th.

The Washington Post ran a story on the group's intentions the following day, May 5th, 1961 on p. B-4 by reporter Elsie Carper. The story, headlined "Pilgrimage Off on Racial Test," described the group's trip along with an Associated Press photo of five of the participants looking over a map of their planned route of travel over the next two weeks.

Shown in the photo, from left, were: Edward Blankenheim from Tucson, Arizona; James Farmer, of New York city and director of CORE; Genevieve Hughes of Chevy Chase, Maryland; Rev. Benjamin Elton Cox of High Point, North Carolina; and Henry Thomas of St. Augustine, Florida.

Among others in the first group of 13 - black and white, male and female - were: John Lewis, son of Georgia sharecroppers and student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary (and later member of the U.S. Congress); Albert Bigalow, 55, of Cos Cob, Connecticut, a former naval officer who had commanded battle ships in WWII; husband and wife, Walter and Frances Bergman; Robert G. Griffin, Herman K. Harris, Jimmy McDonald, Ivor (Jerry) Moore, Mae Frances Moultrie, Joseph Perkins, Charles Person, Isaac (Ike) Reynolds, and James Peck, a white veteran at CORE.

The first leg of their trip included stops at Richmond, Petersburg, Farmville, Lynchburg and Danville in Virginia. Stops in North Carolina included Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury and Charlotte. There were no confrontations with riders at most of these stops. Should trouble occur, however, the Freedom Riders were trained in non-violent tactics and would not fight back. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there was an arrest.

In Charlotte, when black rider Joseph Perkins tried to get a shoe shine at a "white only" shoe shine station, he was arrested for trespassing, refused bail, and spent two nights in jail. He later rejoined the group as the journey continued south. Violence did occur in Rock Hill, SC at the Greyhound Bus terminal on May 10th when black rider John Lewis and white rider Albert Bigelow attempted to enter a white-only waiting area. Several white men attacked the pair. In the skirmish, another Freedom Rider, Genevieve Hughes, also sustained injuries. The attack was broken up by local police. But more violence lay ahead.

The Freedom Riders left Rock Hill and continued through South Carolina, with stops at Winnsboro, Columbia, and Sumter. They then crossed into Georgia, with stops at Augusta, Athens and Atlanta. Arriving in Atlanta on May 13th, the Freedom Riders had dinner with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. They were hopeful that King would join them on the buses - perhaps becoming a Freedom Rider himself. Instead, King questioned the wisdom of proceeding into Alabama, where the probability of violent resistance was high. Sources told him at the time that the Ku Klux Klan has "quite a welcome" planned for them in Alabama. King urged the Riders to reconsider traveling through the Deep South. In fact, King flatly stated that night that the Riders would never make it to New Orleans. Still, the Freedom Riders left Atlanta on Mothers' Day, May 14th, bound for Alabama.

In Anniston, at the Greyhound station, a white mob had gathered waiting for the first bus with its Freedom Riders. As it arrived, the mob attacked the bus with iron pipes and baseball bats, breaking some windows and slashing its tires. By the time Anniston police arrived, the bus had taken a fair beating, but no arrests were made. The passengers had remained inside the bus. The Anniston police car escorted the bus out of the station to just beyond the Anniston city limit on a rural stretch of road. There, because of the punctured tires, the bus was forced to pull off the road near the Forsyth & Son grocery store. This was about five miles west of Anniston.

The white mob, meanwhile, had pursued the bus, with a line of some thirty cars and pickup trucks following behind - with at least one car later weaving back-and-forth in front of the bus to slow it down. After the one local police car disappeared, the mob resumed its assault on the bus and its occupants. One attacker hurled a firebomb into the bus. Some reports indicated that the bus door was held shut from the outside preventing riders from exiting, as some of the mob yelled, "burn them alive!" A few of the riders exited through windows.

The bus door was later forced opened, but only after one of the bus fuel tanks exploded, sending some of the mob into retreat. Riders exited gasping for their lives, choking on the thick smoke that had filled the bus.

Still, upon exiting the smoke-filled bus, some of the choking Freedom Riders were set upon and beaten by members of the mob. Rider Hank Thomas was one of those beaten with a baseball bat. Some of the mob remained, but a later-arriving state patrolman fired two warning shots into the air, and the mob gradually dispersed.

The Greyhound bus, meanwhile, became completely engulfed in flames and was totally destroyed. The riders on the second bus, the Trailways bus, were still on their way, unaware of what had happened in Anniston.

At the scene in Anniston, importantly was one lone photographer, Joe Postiglione of the Anniston Star, who had been tipped off by KKK members. Postiglione's photos of the Anniston bus bombing - shown above and at left - were the only still photographs of the incident, and they soon made it over the newswires to newspapers all across the country - some running the photo on the front pages, thereby drawing the first national attention to the Freedom Rides.

Also in Anniston that day was a 12 year-old white girl, Janie Miller, who lived nearby, and after the violence subsided, defied the Klansmen and brought water to the bleeding and choking riders.

"It was the worst suffering I'd ever heard," Miller would recall in the PBS / American Experience film, Freedom Riders. "I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her, I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else." For daring to help the injured riders, she and her family were later ostracized by the community and could no longer live in the county.

A number of Freedom Riders that day were taken, eventually, to the Anniston Memorial Hospital where one attempt was made, unsuccessfully, by a group of Klansman trying to block the entrance to the emergency room.

Meanwhile, the second bus with Freedom Riders - the Trailways bus - made a brief stop in Anniston at another bus station. At that stop, the bus was infiltrated by some ticketed KKK members who proceeded to restore the "blacks-in-the-back" seating order on the bus by way of brutally beating up two of the Freedom Riders and installing them in the rear seats.

These infiltrators stayed on the bus until it arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, slinging verbal abuse at the Freedom Riders en route and promising them a "special reception" in Birmingham.

As was later learned, Birmingham Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Conner had agreed to keep his police away from the Trailways station for 15 minutes to give local whites and members of the Klan time to beat up the arriving Freedom Riders. Connor had reportedly cut a deal with the KKK giving them 15 minutes to "burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don't give a god-damn what you do."

The Trailways station had filled with Klansmen and some reporters. When the Freedom Riders exited the bus, they were beaten by the mob, some wielding baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains. White Freedom Riders in the group were especially singled out by the mob, receiving ferocious beatings.

Jim Peck, a 46-year-old white CORE member from New York, and black Freedom Rider Charles Person, a student from Atlanta, both headed for the "whites only" lunch counter, according to plan, as they came off the bus. However, they never made it there.

A group of Klansmen pummeled Peck with fists, chains and clubs. He was knocked unconscious, his face and head ripped with wounds. "When I saw Peck, I was shocked," Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a Birmingham civil rights leader would later says. "His head was split down to the skull. Somebody had cracked him with a lead pipe. Peck was a bloody mess. . . ." It took more than an hour for Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital. Once there, staff refused to treat him. Only at Jefferson Hillman Hospital did Peck finally receive treatment, including some 53 stitches for his head wounds.

Freedom Riders were not the only ones attacked in Birmingham. Innocent bystanders were beaten too, and so were members of the press. As soon as the flashbulb went off for the photo shown above right, the mob took after the photographer, Tommy Langston of the Birmingham Post-Herald. He was caught in the bus station parking lot and beaten and kicked and threatened with pipes. His camera was also smashed to the ground. He later staggered down the street to the Post-Herald building and was later treated at the hospital.

A few of Langston's colleagues at the Post-Herald returned to the bus station to retrieve his smashed camera to find, amazingly, that the film was still intact. The photo of the melee, shown above, ran the next day on the front page of the Birmingham Post-Herald, one of the few pieces of evidence documenting the mob attack and its participants.

Meanwhile, back in Anniston, hospitalized Freedom Riders were told to leave the hospital as the staff there became afraid of a growing mob. A group of churchmen and others led by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth headed off around 2 a.m. that night to rescue the hospitalized Freedom Riders in Anniston.

In addition to news reports about the Anniston bus bombing and mob attacks in Birmingham, Howard K. Smith, a national CBS News correspondent, was already in Birmingham at the time of the attacks. He was working on a television documentary investigating allegations of lawlessness and racial intimidation in the Southern city. Smith, a Southerner himself from Louisiana, was trying to determine if the claims he and his network were hearing about were exaggerated or true.

On the night of May 13, Smith received a phone call tipping him off that the downtown bus station was the place to be the next day "if he wanted to see some real action." Smith thus witnessed the May 14 "Mother's Day" riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station, as a vicious mob of Klansmen attacked the Freedom Riders and innocent bystanders alike with pipes and baseball bats. After the riot, Smith helped badly injured Riders Jim Peck and Walter Bergman to hail a cab. He also found three other injured black men after the melee, one of whom was Ike Reynolds. These men had agreed to do on camera interviews which Smith conducted with the men and was hopeful of airing that evening on CBS-TV. But "signal difficulties" from the local TV station - WAPI - prevented that from happening, though Smith suspected that the local owner there had vetoed such broadcast.

Smith did deliver news accounts of the bus station melee over the CBS radio network that went out nationally. He would make a series of live radio updates from his hotel room that day. "The riots have not been spontaneous outbursts of anger," he reported in one broadcast, "but carefully planned and susceptible to having been easily prevented or stopped had there been a wish to do so." In another he explained: "One passenger was knocked down at my feet by 12 of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp."[i.e., the Jim Peck beating].The "rule of barbarism in Alabama," said Smith in his commentary, must bow to the "rule of law and order - and justice - in America." Smith reported the facts of the incident for CBS. "When the bus arrived," he explained in one report, "the toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists," But he was outraged by what he had witnessed, and stated at one point that the "laws of the land and purposes of the nation badly need a basic restatement." Smith at the time also did a Sunday radio commentary, during which he was more direct, "The script almost wrote itself," he would later recall. "I had the strange, disembodied sense of being forced by conscience to write what I knew would be unacceptable." In his commentary, Smith laid the blame squarely on Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, whose officers had looked the other way during the attack. During that commentary Smith also stated that the "rule of barbarism in Alabama" must bow to the "rule of law and order - and Justice - in America."

According to historian Raymond Arsenault, author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders, "Smith's remarkable broadcast opened the floodgates of public reaction. By early Sunday evening, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Americans were aware of the violence that had descended upon Alabama only a few hours before." At that point, few people had heard of CORE, and fewer still knew what the term 'Freedom Rider' meant. But with reports like the one Smith made, more and more of the general population would soon understand what was taking place in the southern part of their country.

By Monday, May 15th, photographs of the burning "Freedom Bus" in Anniston and Birmingham mob scene were reprinted in newspapers across the country. In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, on May 16th an editorial titled "Darkest Alabama" ran in the A Washington Post newspaper. Washington Post edito- rial of May 16, 1961 used the tagline, "Darkest Ala- bama." The editors, noting the traditions of the old South such as chivalry, hospitality, and kindness, found them notably absent in Birmingham and Anniston, where the busses and Freedom Riders had been attacked. The Post also noted that "Alabama has a Governor who encourages contempt for the Constitution of the United States and who preaches incendiary racist nonsense." The Post concluded that Americans traveling in Alabama could not be assured of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. "They are quite justified, therefore, in looking to the United States Department of Justice for the protection of their rights as American citizens." That message was likely read at the U.S. Justice Department and in the White House.

Although John F. Kennedy (JFK) won the 1960 presidential election by a slender margin, with the black vote playing a key role, he had not been quick to move on civil rights issues in the early months of his administration. Kennedy had been cautious on civil rights as he feared taking action would antagonize southern Democrats - "the Dixiecrats" - a group he needed for both his near-term legislative agenda in Congress, and looking ahead to 1964, for his re-election. (In time, the "Dixiecrat defection" JFK feared would occur, helping elect Richard Nixon in 1968). So the Freedom Rides were among the last thing that he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy(RFK), wanted to see in 1961.

Just a month earlier, Kennedy had gone though the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. And in May, he was in the midst of preparing for a scheduled June 3, 1961 Vienna Summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the first such summit of his presidential term. So Kennedy's focus was not on domestic issues, and civil rights, least among these. Journalist Evan Thomas explains in the PBS film Freedom Riders: "The Kennedys, when they came into office, were not worried about civil rights. They were worried about the Soviet Union. They were worried about the Cold War. They were worried about the nuclear threat. When civil rights did pop up, they regarded it as a bit of a nuisance, as something that was getting in the way of their agenda."

As President Kennedy first learned of the escalating tension around the Freedom Rides, he was not pleased. When reports of the bus burning and beatings in Birmingham reached Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), he urged restraint on the part of Freedom Riders. The Kennedys, in fact, had condemned the Freedom Rides as unpatriotic because they embarrassed the nation on the world stage at the height of the Cold War. At one point later that summer, Robert Kennedy had called on the Freedom Riders for a "cooling off period." James Farmer, head of CORE, responded saying, "We have been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off any more, we'd be in a deep freeze."

Although the Kennedys were initially angered by the Freedom Riders, and thought the bus rides should end, they soon became quite concerned with the incidents and the safety of the riders. Throughout the summer, Robert Kennedy especially, would become heavily involved in federal-state negotiations to protect the Riders - amid repeated attempts to dissuade them from continuing. However, the Administration was in a bit of quandary on just how much the federal government should get involved and what level of force might be needed. JFK, meanwhile, had some political alliances that would prove awkward.

During his 1960 presidential bid, JFK had made some political alliances that would come back to haunt him. Alabama's governor, Democrat John Patterson, was one of these. Patterson had been one of the few southern politicians to endorse JFK for president, doing so early in 1959. Yet, when it came to the Freedom Riders, Patterson was squarely on the side of the segregationists and "states rights," and he and the Kennedys would spar on the matter through May of 1961.

Given the Anniston and Birmingham incidents, the Kennedys worried that there might be more violence in Alabama, and they wanted protection for the Freedom Riders. Governor Patterson had refused to guarantee the Freedom Riders safety. JFK thought at one point he would be able to persuade his old political ally to come around on the matter, diffuse the tensions at the state level, and keep Washington out of the picture. Kennedy had White House telephone operators place a call to Governor Patterson. The governor's secretary responded that the governor was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and could not be reached. It was then that Kennedy realized what he was up against, and gave the go-ahead to begin preparing for the possible use of federal marshals.

Robert Kennedy, meanwhile, at the Justice Department, had conferred with a number of assistants on the matter, including Nicholas B. Katzenbach and Herbert J. Miller, shown in the photo above. Kennedy urged all citizens and travelers in Alabama to refrain from actions "which will cause increased tension or provoke violence" in troubled Montgomery. RFK had also sent his longtime friend, Justice Department representative John Seigenthaler, to mediate between the Freedom Riders and southern politicians. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Seigenthaler had local southern roots that Robert Kennedy hoped would help ease tensions with southern politicians. Seigenthaler went to Birmingham to monitor the situation and ensure that the Freedom Riders would get off safely to their next destination. Other RFK aides and DOJ officials, including John Doar and Deputy Attorney General Byron White, later a Supreme Court justice, would also become involved with the Freedom Rides.

Back in Birmingham, meanwhile, when the CORE Freedom Riders sought to continue their ride on May 15th to their next stop, Montgomery, Alabama, bus drivers refused to leave the station for fear for their lives. Behind the scenes in Washington, some calls were made to union officials to try to bring in willing bus drivers, but that effort failed. Robert Kennedy also tried to organize protection for the riders, but was unable to reach a compromise with Alabama officials. Finally, John Seigenthaler, one of the Robert Kennedy's team sent to Alabama, convinced the Freedom Riders to fly to New Orleans instead of going by bus. They agreed to the plan, and CORE leaders at that point also chose to halt the Freedom Ride, their ranks diminished by injuries. Seigenthaler secured a flight for the Riders to New Orleans, which departed from the Birmingham airport late on May 15th. Still, in this departure, and on the plane's arrival in New Orleans, the Freedom Riders faced threats and jeers. In Birmingham, a mob had gathered at the airport, making for a tense waiting period. When they first boarded the plane, all passengers had to exit because of a bomb threat. On arriving in New Orleans, the state police formed a "protective" corridor of troopers from the arriving plane's door to the airport terminal. Yet these state troopers, to the astonishment of John Seigenthaler, engaged in vicious jeers and taunts as the Freedom Riders made their ways to the terminal. In New Orleans, the Riders attended a May 17th rally to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

Meanwhile, other civil rights activists, realizing the importance of the Freedom Ride, and also seeing the national attention the Anniston and Birmingham incidents had brought to the civil rights movement, began planning to continue the bus rides. The Nashville Student Movement, lead by Diane Nash, decided to send "fresh troops" to Birmingham - replacement riders - to continue what CORE had started. Nash and other civil rights activists began to see that what CORE had put in motion could not be allowed to fail, and should not stop because of violence.

Raised in middle-class Catholic family in Chicago, Nash attended Howard University in Washington, D.C, before transferring to Nashville's Fisk University in the fall of 1959. Shocked by the extent of segregation she encountered in Tennessee, she became a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. In February 1961 she served jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" - nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in.

Nash felt that if violence was allowed to halt the Freedom Rides, the movement would be set back years. She pushed to resume the ride and began calling black colleges in nearby states to find replacements for the injured Freedom Riders. On May 17, 1961, a group of eight blacks and two whites - students from Fisk University, Tennessee State University and the American Baptist Theological Seminary - traveled by bus from Nashville to Birmingham, where they would then resume the Freedom Ride from there to Montgomery, Alabama, and then on to Mississippi and Louisiana. However, upon their arrival in Birmingham, they were immediately arrested - "protective custody," according to police. Later that night, in the early a.m. hours, this group was transported by Birmingham police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor to Ardmore, Alabama near the Tennessee line, and dropped off in a rural area - an area reportedly known for Klan activity. They were told to take a train back to Nashville. After finding refuge with a local black family, they reached Diane Nash who sent a car for them, returning them to Birmingham, where they intended to resume the Freedom Ride.

John Seigenthaler, a former reporter for The Nashville Tennessean newspaper, had worked with Robert Kennedy in Congress. In 1961, then 32, Seigenthaler became a special assistant in Robert Kennedy's Justice Department.

Dispatched by Kennedy to the south to help diffuse the Freedom Rider tensions, his first task in that crisis was to get the CORE Riders safely on airplanes to New Orleans. When the Riders - after some harassment and verbal abuse along the way - arrived safely in New Orleans, Seigenthaler thought both the Freedom Rides and the crisis were over. Instead, he learned that someone named Diane Nash and others from the Nashville Student Movement planned on continuing what the CORE Riders had started. In the PBS film Freedom Riders, Seigenthaler appears on camera offering his remembrance of that pivotal moment:

. . . I went to a motel to spend the night. And you know, I thought, "What a great hero I am. . . . How easy this was. . . I just took care of everything the president and the attorney general wanted done. Mission accomplished." My phone in the hotel room rings and it's the attorney general."Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night before they left..."
- Diane Nash, 1961 And he opened the conversation, "Who the hell is Diane Nash? Call her and let her know what is waiting for the Freedom Riders." So I called her. I said, "I understand that there are more Freedom Riders coming down from Nashville. You must stop them if you can."

Her response was, "They're not gonna turn back. They're on their way to Birmingham and they'll be there shortly." You know that spiritual [song]-"Like a tree standing by the water, I will not be moved"? She would not be moved. And . . . I felt my voice go up another decibel and another and soon I was shouting, "Young woman, do you understand what you're doing? You're gonna get somebody . . . Do you understand you're gonna get somebody killed?"

And there's a pause, and she said, "Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night before they left. We know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence."

That's virtually a direct quote of the words that came out of that child's mouth.

Here I am, an official of the United States government, representing the president and the attorney general, talking to a student at Fisk University. And she, in a very quiet but strong way, gave me a lecture.

Civil rights leaders at the national level, meanwhile, were spreading word of what had happened to the Freedom Riders in the south. In several U.S. cities, CORE chapters used the May 17th anniversary date of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to protest the violence in Alabama. They set up picket lines in front of bus terminals in cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. More than two thousand people came out for the New York City demonstration, with hundreds picketing the Port Authority terminals of the Greyhound and Trailways bus lines in protest over the segregated bus stations in the South. Some marchers carried signs that read, "segregation is morally wrong." At least two of the Freedom Riders - Hank Thomas, who had been attacked in Anniston, and James Peck, who was beaten in Birmingham and was still bandaged - joined the demonstration in New York City. Peck carried a large placard that identified him as "a victim of an attempt at lynching by hoodlums," and Thomas a sign that indicated he was arrested on a Freedom Ride in South Carolina. Following the New York demonstration, Peck and Thomas also answered questions and at a press conference held at the offices of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Lillian Smith, a well-known author and southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and who worked to dismantle the Jim Crow laws, was also at the press conference. Other national figures began voicing their opinions as well. On Thursday morning, May 18th, the New York Times and other newspapers reported a story citing the Southern Baptist evangelist, Rev. Dr. Billy Graham, who said that the Southerners who had attacked and beaten the "Freedom Riders" should be prosecuted for their actions.

That evening on television, a documentary about Birmingham that CBS reporter Howard K. Smith had been working on, was aired as a CBS Reports special. Titled, "Who Speaks for Birmingham?," the hour-long show featured a series of interviews with several black and white citizens, including one with Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a civil rights leader from Birmingham, and another with Temple Graves, a columnist for the Birmingham News. The documentary ran accounts of cultural and educational progress in Birmingham, alternating with stories of Klan violence and local segregationist resistance. On the whole, the show was not a flattering portrayal of Birmingham or Alabama. In the segment with Shuttlesworth, he recounted several beatings, two attempted bombings of his church, and a constant fear for his family's safety and need to hire someone to guard his home at night. During the show, Howard K. Smith also re-aired his radio account of the May 14th bus terminal melee. Near the end of the broadcast, Smith, standing in front of an enlarged photo of Bull Connor, said that "fear and hatred" had stalked the streets of Birmingham in the preceding days.

Meanwhile, the contingent of student riders from Nashville who had come to Birmingham to resume the Freedom Ride to Montgomery, were in a kind of limbo at the bus station; still trying to make their trip. An Associated Press news story filed from Birmingham reported that on May 19 a crowd (i.e., a mob) had gathered outside the bus terminal that evening. Civil rights leader, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, was quoted in the story saying more riders from other areas outside Alabama were ready to come join the Freedom Rides - "wave after wave, if necessary," he said. On May 20th, the group of replacement riders sent from Nashville boarded a Greyhound bus in Birmingham and finally headed for Montgomery. The Kennedy Administration had intervened on two counts: pressuring Greyhound to provide a bus driver, and secondly, securing a commitment from Alabama Governor John Patterson to protect the riders and the bus from Klan mobs and snipers on the road to Montgomery. Patterson's director of public safety, Floyd Mann, had arranged for the safe passage to Montgomery. The situation in Montgomery, however, was another story.

Beatings in Montgomery

The trip to Montgomery was made at high speed along with a contingent of the Alabama State Highway Patrol. At the Montgomery city limits, however, the troopers disbursed. The Freedom Riders then were on their own, and at the Greyhound bus terminal they were met by a mob of more than 200, many of whom were Klansmen, armed with baseball bats and iron pipes. The mob attacked not just the Riders, but reporters and other bystanders, leaving more than twenty people seriously injured. The local police did not show up for 20 minutes.

One of those on the arriving bus was Jim Zwerg, a 21-year-old white college from Beloit College in Wisconsin who became an exchange student at Fisk University an was also active in the Nashville sit-in movement. Zwerg was one of those selected for the "new troops" initiative for replacement Riders begun by Diane Nash and others. He was one of the group that left Birmingham earlier that day on May 20th. As Zwerg, stepped off the bus in Montgomery, someone shouted, "kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch!" With clubs and fists they attacked Zwerg brutally, beating him several times. He lost teeth in the beatings and was eventually hospitalized.

The mob also brutally attacked John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and William Barbee. Barbee was beaten unconscious and left on the sidewalk, suffering injuries that would later shorten his life. Three others escaped the violence by jumping over the retaining wall and running to the adjacent post office. Five black female Freedom Riders escaped in a cab driven by a black cab driver. Two white women were pulled from another cab and beaten by the mob.

Floyd Mann, Alabama's director of public safety, arrived on the scene and attempted to stop the violence, finally pulling out his pistol and firing two shots in the air. Mann succeeded in dispersing the crowd in one part of the bus station, but other areas of the station were still in turmoil. News reporters, camermen and photographers had been set upon by the mob even before the riders were attacked - their cameras and filming gear smashed to the ground.

Also on the scene that day in Montgomery to observe was Justice Department emissary John Seigenthaler, who was beaten as well. Seigenthaler, who saw the unfolding melee at the bus terminal from a distance, tried at one point from his car to help one of the female Freedom Riders being pursued in the street. But Seigenthaler was pulled from his car, beaten with a tire iron, his head fractured and left unconscious in the street.

In the aftermath, ambulances, manned by white attendants, refused to take the wounded to the hospital. Local blacks finally rescued the wounded, with some of the Freedom Riders eventually hospitalized.

Among the Freedom Riders on the bus into Montgomery that day was 18 year-old white girl, Susan Hermann of Los Angeles, CA, who said of her group's arrival there, reported in the Los Angeles Times: "We were all prepared to die-and for a while Saturday I thought all 21 of us would die at the hands of that mob in Montgomery. We did not fight back. We do not believe in violence..." Hermann and another white girl, Susan Wilbur, 18, managed to outrun the mob, reaching a local police station.

The Montgomery melee was front-page news the next day all across the country. The Montgomery Advertiser, for its part, ran a large photo of a beaten and bloody Jim Swerg on its front page (see photo at right).

In Washington, D.C., the melee was front-page news as well. Along with the bloody Zwerg photo, The Washington Post headlines that day also announced the actions of the federal government in response to the violence: "Kennedy Orders Marshals to Alabama After New Freedom-Rider Mobbing."

Attorney General Robert Kennedy had been on the phone with Justice Department lawyer John Doar who was relaying a nearly blow-by-blow account to Kennedy of the mob violence as the fists and clubs began flying that day.

"There are no cops present" Doar reported at one point, having already described to Kennedy the mob attacking people as they got off the bus. "It's terrible. It's terrible," Doar relayed to Kennedy. "Not a cop in sight! People are yelling 'Get 'em. Get em!' It's awful." Doar's eye witness phone-in account of the melee reportedly angered Kennedy to the point where he heard enough and moved to send U.S. Marshals to the area. On May 21st, Kennedy ordered a task force of U.S. Marshals and Byron R. White, Deputy U.S. Attorney General, to go to Montgomery to safeguard federal rights. Initially, some 400 marshals were ordered. The marshals would be dressed in civilian attire wearing yellow arm bands. Governor Patterson, for his part, publicly objected to the marshals - as well as the civil rights leaders and activists who had come to Montgomery - telling them all to go home and mind their own business. He also threatened to arrest the marshals if they broke the law.

In response to the violence, civil rights leaders called for a gathering of supporters in Montgomery for Sunday evening, May 21, 1961. They convened at Rev. Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church and organized a program of hymns and speakers. About 1,500 community members attended along with civil rights leaders, including, Martin Luther King, Jim Farmer, Joseph Lowery, and Rev. Shuttlesworth.

The purpose of the gathering was to show support for the Freedom Rivers - of which more than a dozen attended. Diane Nash was also listed on the program, possibly to introduce the Freedom Riders. The First Baptist Church was located just a few blocks from the state capitol. Federal marshals, now on the scene in Montgomery, stood watch from a park near the church as evening services began on May 21st.

As those inside the church that night listened to testimonials about courage and commitment and sang hymns and freedom songs, a white mob began gathering outside. By nightfall the mob had grown larger, and had begun yelling racial epithets and hurling rocks at the church windows.

Inside, Martin Luther King Jr., told the crowd that Gov. Patterson was responsible for allowing the violence to happen. King also called for legislation to end desegregation and stop the violence. "We hear the familiar cry that morals cannot be legislated. This may be true, but behavior can be regulated," King said. "The law may not be able make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me."

During the evening, the mob grew, overturned a U.S. marshal's car, and set a couple of small fires. The mob threatened to overwhelm the federal marshals who feared the church would be set on fire. According to one account of that evening by a U.S. Marshals historian, "a fiery projectile nearly burned the roof of the church." At one point during the evening, some 75 marshals charged the angry mob and were pelted with rocks. The marshals were later bolstered by local and state police. Still, the mob persisted.

From inside the church that night, at around 3 a.m., King called Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department for help. Kennedy then called Governor Patterson and also had his Deputy Attorney General, Byron White, later a Supreme Court Justice, meet with Patterson and his staff.

Back at the mob scene, meanwhile, it became obvious that the civilian federal marshals were overmatched by the mob's larger numbers. It was at that point that Patterson, under federal pressure, declared martial law and authorized a National Guard battalion to disperse the crowd. The Alabama National Guard took control of the scene and the U.S. marshals were placed under Guard command.

One wire story of the church attack by United Press International that appeared in newspapers on Monday, May 22nd, reported: "Tear gas and fire hoses were needed to beat off the angry mob of about 200 whites who converged on the church [other accounts had that number much larger]. It took 100 U.S. Marshals and more than that number of city police and a National Guard contingent to hold back the rock-hurling, club-swinging mob."

But it was early morning before the surrounding streets were secure enough for the Freedom Riders and their supporters to leave the church. Before dawn on May 22, 1961, the Guard moved the congregation out, using military trucks to transport some of the church attendees back to their communities,

Back in Washington, there had been early a.m. meetings at the Justice Department on the crisis, and Robert Kennedy, up all night, called President Kennedy at 7 a.m. to update him on what had happened.

On May 23, 1961, martial law was in place in Montgomery, Alabama, and national guard soldiers were present in front of the First Baptist Church and elsewhere in the city, including the Montgomery bus terminal.

Still, Patterson called the Freedom Riders "agitators" and said, "they were to blame for the race rioting because of their insistence on testing bus station racial barriers."

The church attack and martial law were front-page news across the country. In Rome, Georgia, the News-Tribune story covering the church attack included reaction from state and local politicians, including some who blamed the Kennedys for encouraging "these people to come into the South to change traditions and the way of life."

That story also quoted the Alabama Ku Klux Klan "grand wizard," Robert Shelton, who said the klans of the nation would amalgamate in an effort to prevent further integration attempts in the South. He also added: "It is regrettable that the President of the United States would used the power of his office to condone the unlawful activities of these integrationist groups by attempting to enjoin the Alabama klans from aiding in the preservation of our laws and customs." Shelton said that while the klan did not condone violence, it would "take all measures necessary" to preserve Alabama customs.

Back in Montgomery, on May 23, 1961, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy and James Farmer, and student leader John Lewis, held a news conference announcing that the Freedom Rides would continue.

The National Guard remained a presence in Montgomery following the mob activity at the First Baptist Church. Soldiers also lined the streets near the Montgomery bus terminals.

On the morning of May 24, 1961, the Freedom Riders in Montgomery resumed their travels with two buses departing at different times for Jackson, Mississippi. The two buses carried 27 Freedom Riders between them and also some 20 members of the press. The buses were escorted by 16 highway patrol cars, each carrying three National Guardsmen and two highway patrolmen. A few national guardsmen were also on the buses. The ride from Montgomery to Jackson, a distance of about 140 miles, would take about six hours.

More Freedom Riders were also converging on Montgomery to fill more buses for additional trips into Mississippi. On the same day as the first buses departed for Jackson, for example, two white college students, David Fankhauser and David Myers, students at Central State College in Ohio, arrived in Montgomery. They were among those responding to the earlier call of Diane Nash seeking new recruits. On their arrival, these prospective riders and others would stay at local homes for a few days awaiting additional Freedom Riders sufficient to fill more buses.

Another bus arriving in Montgomery that afternoon from Atlanta brought a group of Riders from Connecticut, including four white college professors and three black students. Leading this group was white clergyman Rev. William S. Coffin, Chaplin at Yale University. Coffin, 35, and a WWII veteran, was also a member of President Kennedy's Peace Corps Advisory Council. A day or so earlier on the Yale University campus, at a pre-Freedom Ride ally, Coffin had criticized southern ministers for not supporting the Rides. And in a Life magazine article a week or so later, Coffin also stated: "Many people in the South have criticized the Freedom Riders as 'outsiders' who want to stir up trouble. But if you're an American and a Christian you can't be an outsider on racial discrimination, whether practiced in the North or the South..."

Rev. Coffin also explained that by joining the Freedom Rides with his group "we hoped to dramatize the fact that this is not just a student movement. We felt that our being university educators might help encourage the sea of silent moderates in the South to raise their voices..."

Arriving at the Montgomery bus terminal on May 24th with Coffin that day were Dr. David E. Swift, Dr. John D. Maguire, and a contingent of Yale divinity students. The terminal was then patrolled by the National Guard. Still, a throng of angry whites had gathered there, but Sloan and others were able to make it to cars that carried them to meet with civil rights leaders at a local home. The next day, Coffin and his group were slated to board a bus for Jackson. However, while at the bus terminal that morning before departure, Coffin and others joined Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others at a terminal lunch counter, testing a "whites only" restriction. Most of this group, including Coffin, were arrested in the Montgomery terminal for "breach of peace and unlawful assembly," and did not make the trip to Jackson. They were later released after posting $1,000 bond.

As Freedom Riders and civil rights leaders gathered at Ralph Abernathy's home in Montgomery, including Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and student leaders, a new strategy was devised for the Freedom Rides heading into Mississippi. They decided that as more and more riders came to participate - then converging on Jackson, Mississippi where all incoming riders would likely be arrested - they would seek to "fill the jails" in Mississippi as part of the protest.

Back in Washington, meanwhile, the Kennedy Administration, was suffering some bad press overseas as new reports of the Freedom Ride violence spread around the globe. As one attempted counter to those reports, Robert F. Kennedy, on May 25, 1961, delivered a radio broadcast over Voice of America, defending America's record on race relations, and adding, "there is no reason that in the near or the foreseeable future, a Negro could [not] become President of the United States."

Back in Alabama, the two buses that had left Montgomery on May 24 were traveling on the road to Jackson with their convoy of police cars, National Guardsmen, and overhead helicopter. They were only making limited stops en route, during which National Guardsmen would array themselves around the bus in a protective manner. As they approached the Mississippi border, there would be a changing of the guard as the Mississippi Guard would take over from the Alabama Guard, and that transfer went smoothly. However, there had been one report of a phoned-in dynamite threat in Mississippi, so the Guardsmen at the state-line border exchange were especially attentive to their surroundings.

In Washington, Robert Kennedy had been negotiating with Mississippi officials over the safety of the Freedom Riders who were heading to Jackson. He struck a deal with Mississippi's Democratic Senator, James O. Eastland, allowing the Riders to be jailed in exchange for their safety. Kennedy would not interfere in Mississippi's affairs by sending in federal marshals as long as Eastland would guarantee there would be no mob violence. Kennedy explained that the Federal Government's "primary interest was that they [Freedom Riders] weren't beaten up."

There were no incidents en route to Jackson, with the exception of some hecklers and a thrown bottle or two. The first two buses of Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson safely on May 24th, with no rabid white mobs awaiting them. As the Riders exited the buses and tested the whites-only or colored waiting areas, they were immediately ushered by police into a waiting paddy wagon which drove them to jail. The riders were typically charged with "breach of peace," rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a "jail, no bail" strategy -part of the effort to fill the jails. Back in Montgomery, more Riders were preparing for the trip to Jackson. On May 28th, and in the days thereafter, additional buses with more Freedom Riders made the trip to Jackson.

Among those departing from Montgomery on May 28th for Jackson was Pauline Knight, a 20-year-old Tennessee State student, who would be arrested in Jackson and would later lead a brief hunger strike among female Rider-inmates. Describing the motivation that led Knight to participate in the Freedom Rides, she said: "It was like a wave or a wind, and you didn't know where it was coming from but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me, nobody told me."

In fact, like Pauline Knight, the same kind of motivation was true for many who came to the Freedom Rides that summer - they just came, in the hundreds, unselfishly, out of personal conviction, finding it was the right thing to do. It was a spontaneous movement of individuals, each coming from separate locations, but each making a similar decision to become personally involved. It was a simple but powerful statement of democratic action - one that augured well for America's future, and a proud moment for all of its citizens.

Back in Washington, meanwhile, on May 29th, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy formally petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to adopt "stringent regulations" prohibiting segregation in interstate bus travel. The proposed order would not be issued for several months, but the process was set in motion. Kennedy was also trying to dissuade the Freedom Riders from continuing their protest, asking for "cooling off" period that went nowhere. In fact, if anything, the movement only grew larger in the months ahead as individuals all around the country responded.

Within two weeks of the May 14th, 1961 bus bombing in Anniston, Alabama, Ray Cooper, a 19 year-old art student from Seattle, Washington, was on a bus bound for New Orleans. The CORE chapter in New Orleans was conducting training classes in the practice of nonviolent civil disobedience, preparing candidates for more Freedom Rides. Cooper recounts his experience there and some of his early thinking regarding what he was about to do:

...Gathering in New Orleans, we were getting to know one another, bonding to find the courage to act together. There was a wave of volunteers and we had the moral advantage. I could not have continued past New Orleans if there had been a meager turn out. Strength in numbers. Was I frightened? Yes. But like the others I was calm and focused. I was nineteen and was about to do something meaningful for the first time in my life. I had resolved not to participate with the U.S. military adventure in Vietnam. The battle at home was my choice. I was testing myself, challenging my country to actually "free the slaves" not just talk about it...

I had read about Gandhi in high school."I had read about Gandhi in high school. He stood against the British Empire. People listened to him and won. I admired that. . . ." He stood against the British Empire. People listened to him and won. I admired that. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted him. I respected that. I believed that nonviolent resistance would also work in America where people professed belief in democracy. It was a gamble but was a rather "strong hand"...

[Ray Cooper later boarded his Greyhound Bus in New Orleans, headed for Jackson, Mississippi].

...We arrived in Jackson in [July]. Police and their vans surrounded the terminal. They watched passively as we walked into the whites only waiting room. Once inside we sat on available benches together with arms locked. The police ordered us out. We declined. Threatened with arrest we went limp and were dragged from the Greyhound station by our feet and were loaded into paddy wagons. . . . Arrested and booked for unlawful assembly, we entered the jails of Jackson City and County. We were, of course, segregated by race and sex. Our fear was not of police mistreatment, but of the uncertainty of being housed with criminal prisoners. At no point during the summer did this occur. The standard length of incarceration was forty-five days, first in Jackson and ultimately at Parchman . . . All summer long the buses kept arriving with more Freedom Riders...

Throughout, the summer of 1961, the Freedom Riders kept coming to Jackson, most later ransferred to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, also known as Parchman Farm. A maximum security prison, Parchman had a reputation as a particularly inhospitable place. Basic jail cells had open toilets and were often rife with mice and insects, some with soiled mattresses. Abusive treatment of arriving female Freedom Riders included a Lysol-based vaginal examinations. Most Riders jailed there were issued only underwear, had no exercise, and received no mail. Some were placed in the maximum security unit on death row. Others were subject to solitary confinement or thrown in extremely crowded cells.

Mississippi's governor, meanwhile, Ross Barnett, had the Freedom Riders in his sights, and set out "to teach 'em a lesson" and "break the back" of their movement. By doing "real time in a real prison" like Parchman, Barnett believed his Mississippi jailers would give the Riders an education they would remember, helping to end the Freedom Rides. But Barnett's jailers would underestimate the resolve and ingenuity of their charges. Among other measures to maintain their spirits while jailed, the Riders sang freedom and folk songs - among them, "Buses Are A'Comin, Oh Yeah," which surely made their jailers boil. When the Riders refused to stop singing, prison officials took away their mattresses and toothbrushes. But the Riders kept singing, and also devised other strategies to survive their jail time. Most would endure a sentence of about 45 days.

Eventually there were more than 430 Freedom Riders that summer traveling various routes in the South, some 328 of whom would end up at Mississippi's Parchman prison farm. The map at left shows some of the routes traveled through July 1961 - although additional Rides would continue into November and even December 1961.

Freedom Riders would also test train and plane routes and their related facilities - waiting areas, restrooms, and restaurants - at train stations and airports. Riders also went to Arkansas, Florida and Texas; some came from New York and Los Angeles. In fact, they came from all regions of the U.S., and some from Canada as well. (see PBS Freedom Riders website for full list of rides, riders, and routes traveled).

By early June, the Freedom Riders story was front-page national news almost everywhere. Magazines such as Time and Newsweek had cover stories devoted to the latest developments. Life magazine in early June also chose the Freedom Riders and the unrest in Montgomery as its "story of the week."

magazine featured the Freedom Riders as its cover story, using a cover photo of 39 year-old Governor John Patterson and focusing on the governor's segregationist career, the incidents that had occurred in his state, and the fight between he and Robert Kennedy over enforcing the law.

also had a photo of Patterson on its cover that week, along with those of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy - featuring the three contending players in that week's news with quotes from each displayed with their photos. "We stand for human Liberty," ran beside RFK's photo. "We must be prepared to suffer...even die," was attributed to Rev. King. And in the third frame, Gov. Patterson was quoted saying: "The Federal government encourages these agitators."

magazine ran several pages of photos and narrative for its story of the week - "The Ride for Rights: Negroes Go by Bus Though the South Asking for Trouble and Getting It. Among Life's photos in that issue was a sequence from the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery.

More news reporters and photographers were drawn to the story by this time as well. A number of the media had already witnessed the early mob violence visited on the Freedom Riders in Montgomery. More reporters joined on the bus rides in late May 1961 during the National Guard escort from Alabama to Mississippi and others came to Jackson, Mississippi as the "breach of peace" arrests were made throughout that summer. As a result, Freedom Rider stories continued to appear in the news media through the summer and fall of 1961. The media coverage of the Rides kept the issue on the nation's front burner. Yet it was the rising up of individuals all across the country that kept the Rides going - much to the dismay of the Kennedy Administration which tried to dissuade the Riders from continuing.

By November 1, 1961, the ICC rule that Robert Kennedy had initiated began to be enforced. With the new rule, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains and related facilities. All the "white" and "colored" signs came down at all terminals. There would be no more segregated drinking fountains, toilets, or waiting rooms. Lunch counters would serve all customers, regardless of race. However, there were still pockets of resistance in some locations. Black riders encountered stiff resistance in December 1961 when they attempted to desegregate a white waiting room in Albany, Georgia. Other locations also offered resistance. But eventually, the rule took hold everywhere, and segregated interstate travel and accommodation ended.

The Freedom Rides and Freedom Riders of 1961 provided an important boost to the civil rights movement. The Rides brought new momentum, new energy, and a broadening constituency to the movement. The grass roots nature of its participants also empowered the cause in a new way, directly influencing, and helping inspire, other activities that followed - from the March on Washington in August 1963 and the Freedom Summer movement in Mississippi in 1964, to landmark federal legislation culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1961, the Freedom Rides shook up a complacent Washington, forcing a reluctant Kennedy Administration to act. Initially resistant to the Freedom Rider methodology, both President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were changed by the Rides, and both moved clearly to the side of quicker action in subsequent years. Robert Kennedy, acknowledging the impact of the Freedom Rides would later say, "I never recovered from it," but thereafter became a champion of civil rights. And President Kennedy sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the University of Alabama in 1963 to protect black students attempting to enroll. On June 11, 1963, JFK gave a nationally-televised speech calling upon Congress to pass a comprehensive Civil Rights bill, though adding that Americans were "confronted primarily with a moral issue, not a legislative or political one." Journalist Evan Thomas states in the PBS documentary Freedom Riders, that there is "a direct line from the Freedom Riders to the speech that President Kennedy gave in June of 1963."

And for the nation as a whole - the nation watching the horrors on television and reading the news accounts of what was happening, and seeing more and more people step forward willing to risk bodily harm and/or imprisonment - the Freedom Riders helped change minds and stiffen the national backbone for confronting Jim Crow. As the PBS Freedom Riders website has put it: "The courage and stoicism of the Freedom Riders, in the face of the most vicious hatred and racism and physical beatings, left a deep impression on the nation and the world."

The Freedom Rides also became established in popular literature and American history practically from the beginning. In 1962, James Peck, a veteran CORE member and Freedom Rider who was badly beaten in Anniston and Birmingham, published his account of the Rides in a book first published by Simon and Schuster, titled Freedom Ride. Later editions of Peck's book included a forward by African American author James Baldwin. Other books on the Freedom Rides followed in the 1980s and 1990s, some of which are listed in "Sources" below, as well as more comprehensive books on the overall civil rights movement, which typically incorporate special sections on the Freedom Rides.

In recent years, the Freedom Rides have received more in-depth treatment in volumes such as the January 2006 book by Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and The Struggle for Racial Justice, published by Oxford University Press. This volume, at 704 pages, is regarded by many as the definitive treatment of the 1961 Freedom Rides and their impact. One review of the book appearing in the New York Times Book Review by Eric Foner notes, for example:

"Drawing on personal papers, F.B.I. files, and interviews with more than 200 participants in the rides, Arsenault brings vividly to life a defining moment in modern American history.... Rescues from obscurity the men and women who, at great personal risk, rode public buses into the South in order to challenge segregation in interstate travel.... Relates the story of the first Freedom Ride and the more than 60 that followed in dramatic, often moving detail."

Aresnault's book became a primary source for a the PBS/American Experience documentary, Freedom Riders - an excellent two-hour show that first aired in mid-May 2011 and has since won numerous awards. 2011 was also the 50th anniversary year of the Freedom Rides, during which a number of other books, short films, museum specials, and other commemorations were produced - including a special May 2011 edition of The Oprah Winfrey Show. A number of these are also referenced in "Sources" below, many with links. However, one volume that came out in 2008 deserves special mention for the imagery and personal stories it brought forth, providing a whole new perspective on the Freedom Rides.

In 2003, Eric Etheridge, a native of Carthage, Mississippi, had lived and worked in New York City. He had done some work for Rolling Stone and Harper's, but was then looking for a new photography project.

During a visit in 2003 with his parents in Jackson, Mississippi, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission - an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation - to open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 320 police mug shots of Freedom Riders arrested for "breach of peace" in Jackson, Mississippi. The photos cover those incarcerated from late May to mid-September 1961.

The trove of photos, Eteridge concluded, was a pot of gold, and important history that should have wider circulation. "The police camera caught something special," Etheridge would later say. The segregationist Sovereignty Commission had unintentionally created and preserved an important visual record of the Freedom Rides and civil rights history.

"I was captivated by these images and wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked a number of the riders down, then called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even think that it still existed."

The result of Eteridge's sleuthing was the book, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, published in May 2008. It features 80 of the Freedom Riders, each shown in their 1961 mug shots alongside a more current photo that Etheridge took, plus interviews he did with the activists reflecting on their Freedom Ride experiences. More than two dozen of the riders Etheridge interviewed went on to become teachers or professors. There are also eight ministers as well as lawyers, Peace Corps workers, journalists and politicians.

Of the 320 or so Freedom Riders arrested in Mississippi, nearly 75 percent were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were black; a quarter, women. And as many who have examined these photos have concluded, the mug-shot expressions displayed by the riders in that famous summer of 1961 not only offer a look at the collective face of democracy in action, but also a measure of each Rider's composure and determination at the time - and in some cases, their defiance, pride, vulnerability and/or fear as well. Yet above all, at least in the collective, there is an overwhelming optimism that seems to come through - and for the observer, faith in one's "fellow man."

The Mississippi Freedom Rider mug shots helped bring a new dimension to the Freedom Rider story, and many are now circulating on the web with personal histories attached, including "where-are-they-now" details. This visual record also helped enliven the 2011 PBS documentary mentioned earlier, and in some cases the photos have also been used on more recent book covers, magazine specials, websites, and DVDs exploring Freedom Rider history. They have also been used in special exhibits and in displays at some museums. A dozen or so are also offered below in "Sources," only as a sampling, with very brief sketches.

For additional civil rights history at this website please visit "Civil Rights Stories," a topics page, which includes thumbnail sketches and links to 14 additional story choices. Thanks for visiting - and if you like what you find here, please make a donation to help support the research and writing at this website. Thank you. - Jack Doyle

____________________________________

Date Posted: 24 June 2014
Last Update: 4 April 2018
Comments to: jdoyle@pophistorydig.com

Article Citation:
Jack Doyle, "Buses Are A'Comin'- Freedom Riders: 1961,"
PopHistoryDig.com, June 24, 2014.

____________________________________

Sources, Links & Additional Information

Raymond Arsenault, F reedom Riders: 1961 and The Struggle for Racial Justice, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

WGBH, "Freedom Riders," PBS/American Experience, Film & Website, .

"Democracy in Action: A Study Guide to Accompany the Film, Freedom Riders," American Experience/PBS/WGBH,, 2011.

Terry Gross, "Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961," Fresh Air, WHYY/NPR, January 12, 2006.

"Freedom Rides," Encyclopedia of Alabama.

"1961: Freedom Rides (May-Nov)," Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, crmvet.org.

"Freedom Riders," Wikipedia.org.

Elsie Carper, "Pilgrimage Off on Racial Test," Washington Post, May 5, 1961, p. B-4.

United Press International ( Rock Hill, S.C., May 10), "Biracial Unit Tells of Beating in South," New York Times, May 11, 1961.

"Newsfilm Clip of a Burned out Greyhound Bus and Injured Freedom Riders in the Hospital in Anniston, Alabama," WSB-TV (Atlanta, GA), May 14, 1961, Civil Rights Digital Library.

Associated Press (Anniston, Ala., May 15), "Bi-Racial Buses Attacked, Riders Beaten in Alabama; Alabama Whites Fire Bi-Racial Bus, New York Times, May 15, 1961, p. 1.

"Darkest Alabama," Editorial, Washington Post, May 16, 1961.

United Press International (UPI), "Bi-Racial Group Cancels Bus Trip; Alabama Rejects Appeal by Robert Kennedy for Guard; Bus Drivers Balk at Bi-racial Trip; State Inspector Aids Passengers in Bus Burning," New York Times, May 16, 1961.

"Pickets March Here," New York Times, May 18, 1961.

Jack Gould, "TV: 'C.B.S. Reports' Turns Camera on Birmingham; Negroes and Whites State Their Views; Program Sheds Light on Conflicting Forces," New York Times, May 19, 1961, Business, p. 63.

Associated Press, "Judge Issues Writ; Alabama Judge Bars Attempts At 'Freedom Rides' in the State," New York Times, May 20, 1961, p. 1.

Associated Press (Birmingham, Ala., May 19), "Crowd at Bus Station," New York Time s, May 20, 1961.

"SNCC Wires President Kennedy," The Student Voice (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC), Atlanta, Georgia, April-May1961, p. 1.

"Freedom Rides,1961," The Student Voice (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC), Atlanta, Georgia, April-May1961, p. 3.

Associated Press (Montgomery, Ala, May 20), "Freedom Riders Attacked by Whites in Montgomery; President's Aide Hurt by Rioters; Battle Rages for 2 Hours as Mobs Chase and Beat Anti-Segregation Group," New York Times, May 21, 1961, p.1.

"Negroes, Whites Try to Renew Freedom Ride," Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1961, p. 3.

U.S. Sends 400 Officers to Alabama After Riot," Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1961, p. F1-F2

Montgomery Baptist Church Program, "The Montgomery Improvement Association Salutes The Freedom Riders," May 21, 1961, Montgomery, Alabama.

Anthony Lewis, "400 U.S. Marshals Sent to Alabama as Montgomery Bus Riots Hurt 20; President Bids State Keep Order; Force Due Today Agents to Bear Arms - Injunction Sought Against the Klan," New York Times, Sunday, May 21, 1961, p. 1.

"Kennedy Orders Marshals to Alabama After New Freedom-Rider Mobbing," Washington Post, May 21, 1961, p. 1.

"Russians Scornful; Refer to Alabama Violence as 'Bestial' U.S. Custom," New York Times, May 22, 1961.

"Martial Law Declared in Alabama's Capital; National Guard Troops Put Down New Riot; Wild Mob Trying to Overthrow U.S. Marshals; Scattered Troops Quell New Riots in Alabama's Capital," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1961, pp. 1-3.

Susan Herrmann, "Southland Coed Caught in Rioting; Coed's Story," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1961, p. 1

UPI, "Patterson Declares Martial Law As Alabama Negro Church is Attacked; New Violence Explodes in Montgomery Sunday," Rome News-Journal (Rome, Georgia), May 22, 1961, pp. 1-2.

Dave Turk, "An Emergency Call to Montgomery," U.S. Marshals Service.

Alison Shay, "On This Day: First Baptist Church Under Siege," This Day in Civil Rights History, May 21, 2012.

"27 on Freedom Busses Arrested in Mississippi," Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1961, p. 1-3.

"Days of Violence in the South," Newsweek, May 29, 1961, p. 22.

"'Freedom Riders' - and Mob Violence," U.S. News & World Report, May 29, 1961, p. 6.

"The South: Crisis in Civil Rights," Time, Friday, June 2, 1961, pp. 14-15.

"The Ride for Rights: Negroes Go by Bus Though the South, Asking for Trouble and Getting It," Life, June 2, 1961, pp. 46-53

William Sloan Coffin (as told to Life correspondent Ronald Baily) "Why Yale Chaplin Rode: Christians Can't Be Outside," Life, June 2, 1961, pp. 54-55.

"Freedom Riders Force a Test... State Laws or U.S. Law in Segregated South?," Newsweek, June 5, 1961, pp. 18-20.

"A New Breed - The Militant Negro in the South," Newsweek, June 5, 1961, p. 21.

"How the World Press Viewed the Days of Tension," Newsweek, June 5, 1961, p.22.

"Is the South Headed for A Race War?," U.S. News & World Report, June 5, 1961, p. 43.

"Ten Riders Hit City; 8 Jailed," State Times (Jackson, MS), July 30, 1961.

James Clayton, "ICC Forbids Bus Station Segregation," Washington Post, September 23, 1961, p. A-1.

Val Adams, "Howard K. Smith and CBS End Tie," New York Times, October 31, 1961.

James Kates, "Kicking Nixon: Howard K. Smith and the Commentator's Imperative," , March 6, 2014.

Sid Moody, Associated Press, "Freedom Rides Brought More than Violence," February 8, 1962.

James Peck, Freedom Ride, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962.

Taylor Branch, Parting The Waters: America In The King Years 1954-1963, New York, Simon & Schuster; 1988.

Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and the National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

David Halberstam, The Children, New York: Random House, March 1998, 783 pp.

John Lewis, Walking With the Wind, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Richard Lentz, Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King, LSU Press, March 1, 1999, 392 pp.

Jon Wiener, "Southern Explosure," , June 11, 2001.

David J. Mussatt, "Journey for Justice: A Religious Analysis of the Ethics of the 1961 Albany Freedom Ride," Ph.D. Thesis, Temple University, 2001

David Niven, The Politics of Injustice: The Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

PBS-WGBH, "1961: The Freedom Rides," Eyes on The Prize/American Experience, 2005 (page created, August 23, 2006).

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, New York: First Vintage Books, 2006.

Joan Mulholland, "Why We Became Freedom Riders," Washington Post, May 17, 2007.

Dale Anderson, Freedom Rides: Campaign for Equality, Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2007.

"More Freedom," PictureYear.Blogspot.com, Thursday, May 8, 2008.

Jennifer Balderama, Arts Beat, "Disturbing the Peace," <New York Times, July 3, 2008.

Bob Minzesheimer, Books, "Freedom Riders Again Ride in 'Breach of Peace;' They Put Up a Segregation Fight in 1961," USA Today, Tuesday, July 15, 2008, p. 3-D.

Eric Etheridge, Breach of Peace (website), 2008-2010.

Mississippi Department of Archives & History, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Files, 1956-1973.

"Tennessee A & I Freedom Riders 14," Tennessee State University, 2008.

Thomas Forrest, "Freedom Riders / Free At Last: 47 Years Later It's A Different Story," Jackson Free Press (Jackson,MS), July 30, 2008.

Marian Smith Holmes, "The Freedom Riders, Then and Now," Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009.

"The Freedom Riders: New Documentary Recounts Historic 1961 Effort to Challenge Segregated Bus System in the Deep South," Democracy Now, February 1, 2010.

Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Oxford University Press, 1st abridged edition, March 2010 (and companion book to the 2011 PBS documentary).

"Memories of a Freedom Rider, by Ray Cooper," SeattleInBlackandWhite.org.

"Freedom Rides: Recollections by David Fankhauser," U.C. Clermont College, Batavia, Ohio.

David Fankhauser, "I Was a Teenage Freedom Rider: Ride for Freedom; Ride for Justice 50 Years Later," Lecture & Slide Show, Presented to UC Blue Ash College, October 24, 2013.

Dr. Fankhauser is Professor of Biology and Chemistry, UC Clermont College, YouTube. com.

Michael T. Martin, "Buses Are a Comin'. Oh Yeah!": Stanley Nelson on Freedom Riders"
Black Camera, Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 96-122.

Jess Bidgood, "From Lowell to Jackson, One Freedom Rider's Story," , April 27, 2011.

"50 Years Ago Today Freedom Rides Began," Birmingham Public Library, Wednesday, May 4, 2011.

"Oprah Honors Freedom Riders," , May 4, 2011.

Colleen O'Connor, "50 Years Ago, Freedom Riders Blazed a Trail for Civil Rights," The Denver Post, May 6, 2011.

Freedom Riders Photo Gallery, Commercial Appeal.com, May 20, 2011.

"May 20, 1961: Riders in the Storm," YouTube.com, Posted by RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, Uploaded, May 24, 2011,

"May 1961: Freedom Rides," The '60s at 50, May 24, 2011.

"Photos: The 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Riders," DenverPost.com, Posted May 31, 2011.

Amy Lifson, "Freedom Riders," Humanities, May/June 2011, Vol. 32, No. 3.

Photo Gallery, "50 years After the Freedom Riders," WashingtonPost.com, 2011.

"Mug Shot: A Freedom Rider's Arrest Photo," Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov/Dec 2011.

EJ Dickson, "Memories of a Movement: Oberlin Alumni Reflect on Their Time in the Civil Rights Movement of the Early 1960s," Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Summer 2012, Vol. 107, No. 3.

"The Road to Civil Rights: Freedom Riders," Federal Highway Administration, Updated, October 17, 2013.

"Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders: Rare and Classic Photos," Life.Time .com.

Freedom Rides of 1961, from "History & Timeline of the Southern Freedom Movement, 1951-1968," Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.

Taylor Street Films, An Ordinary Hero: The True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, (documentary film; 91 minutes), February 2013.

"Civil Rights in America: Connections to A Movement," .

Civil Rights Series, "A Movement Emerges in Nashville," The Tennessean.

"Freedom Riders(film)," Wikipedia.org.

Olga Hajishengallis, "Portraits of Civil Rights Pioneers," , February 6, 2014.

"Singleton Freedom Riders," Website of Helen & Bob Singleton (with video), 2014.

"Freedom Riders," PBS Film, Online Viewing, .

Appendix: "Roster of Freedom Riders".

Rhonda Colvin, "'We Were Soldiers': The Flesh and Blood Behind the New Civil Rights Monument," WashingtonPost .com, January 15, 2017.

Thomas Rose, Black Leaders, Then and Now: A Personal History of Students Who Led the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's - And What Happened to Them: Julian Bond, Senator, Atlanta, Georgia: Marion Barry, Mayor, Washington, DC: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Television Correspondent, MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. Youth Project; Garrett Park, MD: Distributed by Garrett Park Press, 1984.

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, New York: W. Morrow, 1986.

Gary A. Donaldson, The Second Recon-struction: A History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 2000.

Bobby M. Wilson, Race and Place in Birm-ingham: The Civil Rights and Neighborhood Movements, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

John Blake, Children of the Movement: The Sons and Daughters of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, George Wallace, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, James Chaney, Elaine Brown, and Others Reveal How the Civil Rrights Movement Tested and Transformed Their Families, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2004.

Frederic O. Sargent, The Civil Rights Revolution: Events and Leaders, 1955-1968, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004.

Juan Williams, My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience, New York: AARP/Sterling, 2004.

Gilbert Jonas, Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909-1969, New York: Routledge, 2005.

Vanessa Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Use of Public Relations, New York: Routledge, 2006.

Linda Barrett Osborne, Women of the Civil Rights Movement, San Francisco: Pomegranate; Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2006.

Renee C. Romano, ed., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

___________________________________

Amazon.com Widgets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Buses Are A'Comin'"Freedom Riders: 1961

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1961, an extraordinary display of courage came from hundreds of ordinary Americans who stood up to racial bigotry in the South. They rode buses to make a point about senseless segregation... Some were beaten; many went to prison.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Civil Rights Web Sites

Civil Rights Special Collection ★★★★☆
The Teachers' Domain Civil Rights Collection is produced by WGBH Boston, in partnership with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Washington University in St. Louis. Materials are free but you have to sign up. Features an impressive array of audio, video, and text sources from Frontline and American Experience shows, Eyes on the Prize, and other sources. Also offers an interactive Civil Rights movement timeline and four lesson plans: Campaigns for Economic Freedom/Re-Examining Brown/Taking a Stand/Understanding White Supremacy.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project ★★★★☆
This project out of Stanford University disseminates historical information about Dr. King and the social movements in which he participated. There are papers, speeches, sermons, book chapters, scholarly articles, a biography and a chronology. Excellent research site.

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Movement ★★★★☆
The landmark Eyes on the Prize television series spans over three decades of history, and dozens of civil rights events. This American Experience feature presents 25 major civil rights events, including Emmett Till's murder in 1955, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, The Freedom Rides, The March on Washington, The Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, and much more. There are also two dozen primary sources presenting varied perspectives on the civil rights movement, as well as profiles of individuals and groups. Furthermore, there are 15 background articles on civil rights milestones, and even an opportunity to share your memories. In the For Teachers section there are five lesson plans each for High School or Middle School classrooms.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement ★★★★☆
This Seattle Times exhibit helps students learn about King as a civil-rights leader and his sweeping influence on the civil rights movement and beyond. Included are a photo gallery, biography, study guide, quizzes, essays from students and others and a focus on black history.

The History of Jim Crow ★★★★☆
Access historical background, source material, and lesson plans at this impressive site and learn how Jim Crow laws deprived African Americans of their civil rights.

The African-American Odyssey ★★★★☆
A Library of Congress resource guide for the study of Black History and Culture, the Mosaic explores colonization, abolition, migration, and the WPA. Included are maps, charts, primary sources, and background information on black history. Part IX Civil Rights Movement topics include Desegregation and Civil Rights in the Arena and on the Stage.

The Two Nations of Black America ★★★★☆
The Two Nations of Black America discusses the divide in the black American community and features audio excerpts, charts, graphs and analysis, interviews, readings and links. "Are we better off?" is an essay by famed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Black Panthers ★★★★☆
This Spartacus website looks at the history of the Black Panther movement and includes biographies of leading figures such as Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown and Bobby Hutton.

Jackie Robinson and other Baseball Highlights ★★★★☆
The special presentation called Baseball, the Color Line, and Jackie Robinson, 1860s-1960s draws on approximately thirty items-manuscripts, books, photographs, and ephemera-from many parts of the Library of Congress. It describes the color line that segregated baseball for many years, the Negro Leagues, and Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson-two men who played key roles in integrating the sport. The last two sections of the presentation explore Robinson's career as a Dodger and his civil rights activities.

African American History and Heritage ★★★★☆
Extensive collection of online resources for the history of the US civil rights movement and current projects and events in Black History.

Civil Rights Movement Veterans ★★★★☆
This site is by and for veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement who tell their story of the Civil Rights Movement in their own words. The Veterans explain the movement, provide a timeline, contribute a photo album, offer documents, and discussion, and more. Most importantly, they contribute their stories. A great primary source resource.

Voices of the Civil Rights Movement ★★★★☆
AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress team up to collect and present personal accounts of the Civil Rights Movement. In addition the various voices on the web site, there is a timeline, a historical overview, a music video montage, and a look at the movement at 50.

Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Scrapbook ★★★★☆
White state officials banned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a powerful civil rights organization, for its supportive role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. To fill the void, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth helped organize the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in Birmingham, Alabama. The ACMHR organized demonstrations and boycotts to protest segregation in Birmingham's schools and businesses. The group also challenged segregation laws by openly defying them and by filing lawsuits to overturn them. Features primary source documents. Part of WGBH Civil Rights Special Collection.

Civil Rights Movement ★★★★☆
History.com presents a Civil Rights Movement gallery featuring 15 video clips, 6 speeches, 8 photo galleries, and 1 interactive. Video clips include Little Rock Nine, Jackie Robinson Breaks Barriers, King Leads the March on Washington, and the interactive is a Black History Milestones interactive timeline. There are 25 combined photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. and The March on Washington.

Religion & Ethics News Weekly ★★★★☆
This PBS newsmagazine provides insightful coverage and analysis of the news, people, events and trends behind the headlines in the world of religion and ethics. The program explores how religion shapes both national and international events, and examines the challenges raised by difficult ethical issues. The Web site features individual show transcripts, an audio archive of past programs, full transcripts of interviews with notable guests, related articles dealing with significant issues in religion and ethics news, a list of related resources and an online pressroom featuring downloadable versions of the program press kit and quarterly newsletter as well as detailed summaries of individual stories. See Martin Luther King Jr. as Pastor (January 13, 2006; Episode no. 920); interview of Civil Rights movement leader Rep. John Lewis (January 16, 2004; Episode no. 720): What spiritual legacy did the civil rights movement give to the United States?; The Legacy of Howard Thurman - Mystic and Theologian (January 18, 2002; Episode no. 520). Howard influenced Martin Luther King, Jr.

We Shall Overcome ★★★★☆
The National Parks Services' story of the Civil Rights Movement centers around places listed in an interactive map historic places.

International Civil Rights Walk of Fame ★★★★☆
This National Parks Service presents essays and image of civil rights leaders such as Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, Thurgood Marshall, Julian Bond, Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and others.

Academy of Achievement: Rosa Parks ★★★★☆
The Academy of Achievement presents stories of "legendary achievers" of the 20th century in arts, public service, sports, science, and other fields. This feature on Rosa Parks includes video interviews that you can download and images from the Civil Rights Movement.

Rosa Parks Excerpts on NPR ★★★★☆
National Public Radio presents audio excerpts from 1992 interview and a 2004 tribute.

Rosa Parks Interview (YouTube video) ★★★★☆

Songs of the Civil Rights Movement ★★★★☆
National Public Radio presents jazz/blues versions of select songs that sustained the civil-rights movement in the 1960s through setbacks, hardships, failures and the many hard-won successes.

The First Civil Rights Bus Boycott ★★★★☆
The Baton Rouge bus boycott in 1953 inspired the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, but was largely forgotten. This National Public Radio reports from principals involved in the boycott.

Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement ★★★★☆
The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Agents of Social Change ★★★★☆
Smith College offers an on-line exhibit and several lesson plans drawn from its collections. The lesson plans are directed at middle and high school students and make use of both the text-based documents and visual images that can be found at the curriculum portion of the Web site. They highlight women's part in struggles for social change in the 20th century including labor, socialism, civil liberties, peace, racial justice, urban reform, welfare rights, and women's rights.

Life Covers the Civil Rights Movement ★★★★☆
Life Magazine presents the Civil Rights Movement in this slideshow of wonderful photographs of major events and individuals accompanied by brief descriptions.

Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement ★★★☆☆
This is an Infoplease.com annotated timeline of the Civil Rights Movement from the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 to the Selma (Alabama) March in 1965. It provides hyperlinked encyclopedic summaries of key events and brief biographies of key participants.

From Slavery to Civil Rights: Timeline of African American History ★★★☆☆
This Library of Congress timeline includes a section on the Civil Rights Movement replete with photographs of Rosa Parks, March on Washington, Little Rock Nine, and more.

Skin Deep: 1945-1994 (PBS) ★★★☆☆
The People's Century site is based on the 26-episode PBS television series and features a teacher's guide, a timeline, a thematic overview, and RealAudio excerpts. The highlights of the web site are the first-person narratives, often by ordinary people who lived through turbulent times. The Skin Deep: 1945-1994 episode probes the challenge to racial oppression in the United States and South Africa and features an interesting interview of Jim Zwerg, Civil Rights activist.

Civil Rights Movement ★★★☆☆
The New Georgia Encyclopedia presents a hyperlinked essay on the Civil Rights Movement with related links. Of note are the five video clips that accompany the essay.

Afterward with Clarence Jones ★★★☆☆
A former adviser to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Jones presents a behind the scenes picture of the weeks leading up to the March on Washington, and the writing and delivery of the civil rights leader's "I Have a Dream" speech. Courtesy of C-Span Video.

Martin Luther King and Current Public Policy ★★★☆☆
Former Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford and former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend speak on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and his possible approaches to current public policy issues

The Civil Rights Movement ★★★☆☆
CNN.com presents a timeline of the Civil Rights Movement with related stories and links. If the page fails to load, try opening it in Incognito mode (if using Chrome) or switching to a different Internet browser.

The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez (PBS) ★★★☆☆
This portrait of Chavez is presented in both English and Spanish and features audio excerpts from Chavez himself and an interview with his brother.

Lesson Plans, Teacher Guides, Activities and more

Civil Rights Themed Resources
The Teachers section of the Library of Congress features several excellent reaching resources on the Civil Rights Movement. It includes two primary source sets (images, manuscripts, maps, sound files) with analysis tools to help students think like historians: Jim Crow in America and The NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom. There are also six lesson plans created by teachers centering on civil rights:

After Reconstruction: Problems of African Americans in the South (Grades 9-12) Students identify problems and issues facing African-Americans immediately after Reconstruction using text based sources.

Segregation: From Jim Crow to Linda Brown (Grades 6-12) Students explore the era of legalized segregation.

Baseball, Race Relations and Jackie Robinson (Grades 6-12) Students explore racism in the United States, both in and out of sports. The lesson focuses primarily on race relations in the 1950s.

Women in the Civil War: Ladies, Contraband and Spies (Grades 6-12) Students view the perspectives of slave women, plantation mistresses, female spies, and Union women during the Civil War. Much of the lesson is centered on "contraband" in the South.

Baseball, Race and Ethnicity: Rounding the Bases (Grades 9-12) Students use primary sources focused on baseball to explore the American experience regarding race and ethnicity. Covering the period from 1860 to 1959, students are divided into groups each investigating a 20-year segment of time and use primary sources from the Library of Congress's American Memory collection to develop and defend a unique historical hypothesis about race and ethnicity. Students draw parallels between the changing role of race and ethnicity in the history of baseball to the changing role these factors played in broader American society.

To Kill a Mockingbird: A Historical Perspective (Grades 6-12) Students are guided on a journey through the Depression Era South in the 1930s.

African American Identity in the Gilded Age: Two Unreconciled Strivings (Grades 8-12) Students examine the tension experienced by African-Americans during the Gilded Age. The lesson explores the areas of family, work, play, faith, education, race, and violence.

Baseball, Race Relations, and Jackie Robinson
In this Library of Congress lesson students draw on their previous studies of American history and culture as they analyze primary sources from Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s in American Memory. A close reading of two documents relating to Jackie Robinson's breaking of the racial barrier in professional baseball leads to a deeper exploration of racism in the United States, both in and out of sports. Middle School and High School levels.

Teaching With Documents: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
This National Archives and Records Administration lesson explores "affirmative action" and relates to Articles I,II, and III in the Constitution.

Teaching With Documents: Competing Voices of the Civil Rights Movement
This National Archives and Records Administration curriculum unit contains two lessons that help students understand of the diversity of voices that shaped the debate over civil rights in 1960s America.

Birmingham 1963
In this Civil Rights movement lesson plan from the Alabama Department of Archives & History students read Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and other documents relating to King's incarceration in a Birmingham jail in April, 1963. Students are then asked to write a press release to be sent to each newspaper, radio station and television station in Alabama which will explain what happened in Birmingham. High School level resource.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project: Lesson Plans
This project out of Stanford University disseminates historical information about Dr. King and the social movements in which he participated. Primary sources and lesson plans include:

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

The Children's Crusade and the Role of Youth in the African American Freedom Struggle

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X: A Common Solution?

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam

Personal Stories of Liberation from the Civil Rights Movement

Teaching King and the Civil Rights Movement with Primary Source Documents

The Murder of Emmett Till: Teacher's Guide
Provided by PBS, this lesson plan is centered around the murder of Emmett Till. Students are also asked to discuss segregation, violence, and the Great Migration. This lesson plan is broken into four parts and is intended for grades 7-12.

Lesson Plan: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and the Power of Nonviolence
This Thinkfinity lesson introduces students to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philosophy of nonviolence and the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi that influenced King's views. After considering the political impact of this philosophy, students explore its relevance to personal life. Intended for grades 6-8

Whitewashing? History: Exploring Topics of Civil Rights from 1948-1964
In this New York Times lesson, students will revisit issues of civil rights in the U.S., using the recent national discussion of retiring Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat Presidential campaign as a starting point.(December 16, 2002)

Teacher Lesson Plan: Created Equal?
This Library of Congress lesson focuses on a few key concepts of the Declaration of Independence, beginning with the phrase "All men are created equal." Students gain an appreciation of Thomas Jefferson's efforts to deal with the complex issues of equality and slavery in the Declaration of Independence. Recommended for High school students.

The First Amendment: What's Fair in a Free Country
This EDSITEment lesson plan explores the difficult issues that arise related to our right to free speech.

Preserve, Protect and Defend? Considering Violent Protests and American Values
In this New York Times lesson plan students explore if ever Americans should ever use threats and violence to promote and defend their definitions of America.

Burning Hatred: Discussing the Constitutional Conflict Over Cross Burning
In this lesson, students examine the constitutionality of various forms of expression; they then take part in a mock trial on the issue of cross burning.

Is Everyone Protected By the Bill of Rights?
In this high school lesson plan, students explore whether gays should be entitled to serve in the military. To understand this issue, students take a look at the civil rights afforded to every US citizen. We explore how this applied to the civil rights movement, and whether it is also applicable to gays who want to serve in the military. All this is used to gather information for a final debate about the issue using skills and research found in the lesson.

Hip Hop: Today's Civil Rights Movement?
In this National Public Radio interview author Todd Boyd says that Hip-hop culture, with its street rhythms and explicit lyrics, is more relevant in advancing civil rights today than the peaceful messages of Rev. Martin Luther King.

Cesar Chavez: Model Curriculum
Standards-based model curriculum on the life and work of Cesar E. Chavez. Curriculum is provided for kindergarten through grade twelve, consisting of biographies and lesson plans. Page requires some time of Adobe Reader in order to be viewed.

Rounding the Bases - Lesson Plan
This lesson challenges students to investigate the roles that race and ethnicity have played in the United States by utilizing the lens of baseball. Covering the period from 1860 to 1959, students are divided into groups each investigating a 20-year segment of time and use primary sources from the Library of Congress's American Memory collection to develop and defend a unique historical hypothesis about race and ethnicity. Students draw parallels between the changing role of race and ethnicity in the history of baseball to the changing role these factors played in broader American society. Designed for grades 9 to 12.

Living Legacies - Commemorating People Who Have Positively Impacted Society
In this New York Times lesson, students explore the contemporary commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., research the positive impact another famous person has had on society and the images that best represent the actions and beliefs of that person, create an art exhibit honoring that person's legacy, and finally, write an essay analyzing the effect this individual has had on modern society.(June 20, 2003)

Non-Violent Protest Through The Ages
This is a detailed Middle School teaching unit from the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. It focuses on the beliefs of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King and is designed to be used for classroom discussion as well as independent reading projects. Includes terms, activities, and teaching strategies.

The Civil Rights Movement (A Web Project)
Designed by George Cassutto, this Lesson plan aims to give students a general historical understanding of the events of the Civil Rights Movement and its context in African-American history. It encourages students to construct a Black History timeline. A matching activity is also included, in which students pair a historical event with its correct description.

Little Rock Nine (Web Quest)
Little Rock Nine is an interactive Web Quest from the Pacific Bell Knowledge Network and explores racial desegregation in schools. Students are asked: What, if anything, should be done to racially desegregate U.S. schools? Activities are group-oriented and inquiry-based and are designed to promote critical thinking. There is a teacher's guide included.

Interpreting Primary Sources
Digital History provides brief excerpts from primary sources and statistics on slavery and presents several questions to think about

Digital History Resource Guides
The Digital Resource Guides provides links to American history web sites by period and provide historical overviews, readings (online textbook chapter, Reader's Companion) primary source documents (documents, maps, cartoons), teaching resources (chronologies, maps, quizzes), audio-visual resources, and additional resources. It is an excellent and comprehensive teaching resource.

All About Martin Luther King, Jr.: An Overview of his Life
This Enchanted Learning site provides an overview of Martin Luther King's Life and has some printable activities about King'?s life and achievements for both beginning and fluent readers. Elementary School.

HistoryTeacher.net: AP United States History Quizzes 1920-1970
A New York teacher has produced a great general site for history teachers that offers AP-level United States history quizzes on many different periods and topics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Civil Rights Movement - Best of History Web Sites

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Civil Rights Web Sites Lesson Plans, Teacher Guides, Activities, and more Civil Rights Web Sites Martin Luther King Jr.: I Have a Dream ★★★★★A complete audio recording of the famous speech. Why it's so Difficult to Find Full Videos of King's Historic Speech ★★★★★Due to copyright law, it can be tricky to find complete video recordings of the "I Have a Dream" Speech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Social Studies Unit: African-American History - BrainPOP

# data[].attributes.headline
Library of Congress: African Americans Revolutionary Era

# data[].attributes.subject
Library of Congress: African Americans Revolutionary Era

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Born free in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War, Paul Cuffe (sometimes spelled Cuffee) became an entrepreneur who saw opportunities in shipping. He thought that Africans and African Americans would be able to enjoy profits if they worked together to establish a shipping network of their own. During an 1811-12 visit to Sierra Leone, he formed the Friendly Society for the purpose of encouraging emigration of free people of color from the United States. He dictated this pamphlet after that visit. Unable to interest anyone in financing his colonization scheme, Cuffe determined to finance it himself, but the U.S., then at war with England, imposed a boycott on trade with British Colonies including Sierra Leone. Finally, in 1815, at a personal expenditure of $4,000, Cuffee took nine free black families to settle in Sierra Leone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African American Odyssey: Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period (Part 2)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Born free in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War, Paul Cuffe (sometimes spelled Cuffee) became an entrepreneur who saw opportunities in shipping. He thought that Africans and African Americans would be able to enjoy profits if they worked together to establish a shipping network of their own.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search Part 1: Desegregation |Civil Rights in the Arena and on the Stage
Part 2

The post-war era marked a period of unprecedented energy against the second class citizenship accorded to African Americans in many parts of the nation. Resistance to racial segregation and discrimination with strategies such as civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, marches, protests, boycotts, "freedom rides," and rallies received national attention as newspaper, radio, and television reporters and cameramen documented the struggle to end racial inequality. There were also continuing efforts to legally challenge segregation through the courts.

Success crowned these efforts: the Brown decision in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 helped bring about the demise of the entangling web of legislation that bound blacks to second class citizenship. One hundred years after the Civil War, blacks and their white allies still pursued the battle for equal rights in every area of American life. While there is more to achieve in ending discrimination, major milestones in civil rights laws are on the books for the purpose of regulating equal access to public accommodations, equal justice before the law, and equal employment, education, and housing opportunities. African Americans have had unprecedented openings in many fields of learning and in the arts. The black struggle for civil rights also inspired other liberation and rights movements, including those of Native Americans, Latinos, and women, and African Americans have lent their support to liberation struggles in Africa.

Few other institutions can present the African American mosaic of life and culture as completely as the Library of Congress. The Library's photographs, film footage, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, and music holdings chronicle this period better than any other collection in existence. In addition to the NAACP and NUL papers, the Library also holds papers of civil rights activists such as Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Patricia Roberts Harris, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Mary Church Terrell, Robert Terrell, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and others. Although the quest may not be fully realized, the Library's collections document the relentless and significant process of pursuing full equality.

Press release for Executive Order No. 9981, establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces.

July 26, 1948.
Typescript document.
NAACP Collection, Manuscript Division. (9-1)
Courtesy of NAACP

On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman issued two executive orders. One instituted fair employment practices in the civilian agencies of the federal government; the other provided for "equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion,or national origin."

"By Executive Order--President Truman Wipes Out Segregation in Armed Forces."

Chicago Defender, July 31, 1948.
Copyprint from microfilm.
Serial and Government Publications Division. (9-2)
Courtesy of the Chicago Daily Defender, Chicago, Illinois.

This was a major victory for civil rights advocates in the quest for full citizenship.

Oliver W. Harrington (1912-1995) knew he wanted to become a cartoonist during grade school, when drawing caricatures made him feel better about disturbing situations. Harrington received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University. In 1951, he left the United States, but continued to provide cartoon strips for American newspapers. His images address the social and political injustices of capitalism and racism. Harrington's Dark Laughter strip first appeared in The Amsterdam News in May 1935.

Oliver W. Harrington.

Dark Laughter.
"My Daddy said they didn't seem to mind servin' him on the Anzio beach head. . ."
Published in the Pittsburgh Courier,
April 2, 1960.
Crayon, ink, blue pencil, and pencil on paper.
Prints and Photographs Division. (9-28)
Courtesy of Dr. Helma Harrington

Kenneth B. Clark.

The Genesis of Racial Identification and Preferences in Negro Children, 1940.
K. B. Clark Papers, Manuscript Division. (9-15)

In the "doll test," popularized by social psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, children were given a black doll and a white doll and asked which one they preferred. Most black children preferred the white doll, to which they also attributed the most positive characteristics. During court trials relating to segregated schools, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund enlisted Kenneth Clark's services as an expert witness on the detrimental effects of racial exclusion and discrimination. The Defense Fund lawyers also submitted a report that explained the test results to the Supreme Court as evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case. In a unanimous ruling in 1954, the court found that separate schools were inherently unequal and specifically cited the Clark report.

Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court. His legal career began with the NAACP. Many of the NAACP's records reveal Marshall's grueling traveling and meeting schedule, as well as his acute sense of humor, even in the face of threats from whites and distrust by African Americans. After the inauspicious beginning of a case challenging the Texas primary, Marshall wrote this memo.

Thurgood Marshall to the NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, Research Department.

November 17, 1941.
NAACP Collection, Manuscript Division. (8-16)
Courtesy of the NAACP

George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, congratulating each other, following Supreme Court decision declaring segregation unconstitutional, 1954.

Copyprint.
New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-111236 (9-11)
Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.

Beginning in 1950, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys worked on a school desegregation case originating in Charleston, S.C. In 1952 the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose members decided to hear it with cases from Delaware, Virginia, Kansas, and the District of Columbia under the collective title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers argued the case and won. Brown marked a landmark victory in the fight for full citizenship, offering hope that the system of segregation was not unassailable.

Daisy Bates to Roy Wilkins, December 17, 1957, on the treatment of the Little Rock Nine.

Holograph letter.
NAACP Collection, Manuscript Division. (9-18a)

Arkansas-born Daisy Bates worked as a crusading newspaper owner-journalist, becoming president of the Arkansas NAACP. After the 1954 Brown school-desegregation decision, Little Rock school board officials decided to begin desegregation of Central High School in September 1957.

The Little Rock Nine, ca 1957-60.

Copyprint.
NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-119154 (9-18b)
Courtesy of the NAACP

Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to preserve order, a euphemism for keeping the nine prospective African American students out. However, on September 25, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed paratroopers to carry out the desegregation orders of the federal courts. Bates supported the students throughout the year and with them received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1958.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested in December 1955, she set off a train of events that generated a momentum the civil rights movement had never before experienced. Local civil rights leaders were hoping for such an opportunity to test the city's segregation laws. Deciding to boycott the buses, the African American community soon formed a new organization to supervise the boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen as the first MIA leader. The boycott, more successful than anyone hoped, led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregated buses.

"5,000 at Meeting Outline Boycott; Bullet Clips Bus." Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott.

Montgomery Advertiser, December 6, 1955.
Copyprint from microfilm.
Serial and Government Publications Division. (9-3)
Courtesy of the Montgomery Advertiser.

In September 1962, a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to accept James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force Veteran, much to the consternation of segregationists. Governor Ross Barnett said he would never allow the school to be integrated. After days of violence and rioting by whites, Meredith, accompanied by federal officials, enrolled on October 1, 1962. Because he had earned college credits elsewhere, Meredith graduated the following August without incident.

Marion S. Trikosko.
James Meredith, Oxford, Mississippi, 1962. Copyprint. New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-U9-8556-24 (9-8)

In 1966 Meredith began a 220-mile "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. He hoped to demonstrate a positive change in the racial climate, but he was shot soon after he commenced the march. Civil rights leaders rallied to the cause and came to continue the march from the point at which Meredith fell.

Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans in 1911, and from childhood sang in church. She resisted the lure to secular music saying, "When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong. But when you are through with the blues, you've got nothing to rest on." She first sang in church store-fronts, but as her recognition grew, she began giving church concerts, making records, and touring the U.S. and abroad. She also sang on radio and television. Jackson became involved with the civil rights movement at the urging of Martin Luther King, Jr. In this photograph she is singing at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial--a civil rights rally, held on the third anniversary of the Brown decision. Jackson also sang just before King's "I have a Dream" speech during the 1963 March on Washington.

Mahalia Jackson at the May 17, 1957, Prayer Pilgrimage of Freedom in Washington, D.C.

Silver gelatin print.
NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6177/LC-USZ62-119977 (9-16)
Courtesy of the NAACP

Max Roach.

We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite.
New York: Candid Records, 1960.
Record jacket.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. (9-6)
Courtesy of Candid Production, LTD

Jazz performers responded to the force of the civil rights movement by recording and performing their music. The most ambitious response was the Freedom Now Suite of Max Roach, recorded in August and September 1960, and involving such major performers as Coleman Hawkins, Abbey Lincoln, and Nigerian drummer Olatunji. The Freedom Now Suite was issued on the small label Candid Records rather than on Max Roach's regular label, Mercury.

William C. Green. [Willie Mays, standing, with his arm around Roy Campanella], 1961.

Copyprint.
New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Prints and Photographs Division. (9-25)

Born in 1921 in Philadelphia, Roy Campanella was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969. Willie Howard Mays, Jr. ("Say Hey"), born in 1931 in Westfield, Alabama, was inducted ten years later. Both Campanella, who was a catcher with the Brooklyn Dodgers for most of his professional years, and Mays, the third African American player in the 1951 Giants outfield, began their careers in the Negro Baseball Leagues. Although Jackie Robinson was the first black player in the major leagues, these other players also faced difficulties and sometimes even danger from hostile players and fans.

By hitting his 715th home run in 1974, Henry Louis Aaron, born in Alabama in 1934, broke Babe Ruth's famous home run record at the age of 40. Some whites resented an African American taking this coveted record and sent thousands of hate letters and threatened Aaron's life and family as he was nearing the record. Before he retired from the Atlanta Braves, Aaron increased the record to 755 runs and held twelve other major league records, including most at bats, most total bases, and most runs batted in. In 1969 the Atlanta Braves fans named "Hank" Aaron the greatest player ever. In 1982, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Richard Scott Rennert.

Hank Aaron.
New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1993.
General Collections. (9-26)
Courtesy of Chelsea House

The Civil Rights Era: Part 1 | Part 2
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search Part 1: Desegregation |Civil Rights in the Arena and on the Stage Part 2 The post-war era marked a period of unprecedented energy against the second class citizenship accorded to African Americans in many parts of the nation.

# data[].attributes.body
Freedom Riders: Documentary and more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Attracting a diverse group of volunteers-black and white, young and old, male and female, secular and religious, northern and southern-the Freedom Rides of 1961 took the civil rights struggle out of the courtroom and onto the streets of the Jim Crow South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
african americans selected internet resources science reference services library of congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African Americans in Science and Technology: Selected Internet Resources (Science Reference Services, Library of Congress)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Selected Internet Resources on African Americans in Science and Technology - Science Reference Services - Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories | PBS

# data[].attributes.headline
National Archives: African American History

# data[].attributes.subject
National Archives: African American History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Martin Luther King Clip Reel

Nine short stories on Martin Luther King, Jr., produced by the USIA for Black History month. Stories include: King holiday; wreath-laying at the Lincoln Memorial; Jesse Jackson on MLK; King/Civil Rights; Reagan speaking to schoolchildren; MLK bust unveiled at the Capitol; Andrew Young reflects; MLK celebration/Atlanta;and MLK celebration/Washington, DC.

Martin Luther King Press Conference

Martin Luther King, Jr., was interviewed by four journalists for "Press Conference U.S.A.," a U.S. Information Agency (USIA) series that was distributed internationally.

The March (1963, restored)

To mark the 50th anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom, the Motion Picture Preservation Lab completed a full digital restoration of James Blue's monumental film, The March, in 2008.

The March on Washington in Photographs

This Inside the Vaults video short follows the subject of the photograph, Edith Lee-Payne of Detroit, who celebrated her 12th birthday by attending the March on Washington with her mother.

"Civil Rights: Then and Now"

Highlights of the National Conversation on Rights and Justice in Atlanta in 2016. Moderated by Jelani William Cobb, contributing editor to the New Yorker and associate professor of history and the director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Emancipation Proclamation 150th Anniversary at the National Archives DC Emancipation Act
African American Life in Washington, DC, Before Emancipation
Madame C.J. Walker in the National Archives A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Revolutionary Movements Then and Now: Black Power and Black Lives Matter The 14th Amendment's Shield of National Protection Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad Lincoln's Gamble: How the Emancipation Proclamation Changed the Course of the Civil War Facing Slavery's Legacy at Georgetown University Protecting America's Treasures: Black History in the Vault

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The National Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the African American experience and highlights these resources online, in programs, and through traditional and social media. Explore our records documenting African American History through the African American Research page and within the National Archives Catalog.

# data[].attributes.body
Exhibits and Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African American History Month - Exhibits and Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
February is African American History Month. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.