Postwar America (1946-1975)
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Seattle's open housing advocates had been organizing and protesting for nine years when the city finally passed an open housing ordinance in 1968. Both the local ordinance and the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 were passed partly in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April; leaders hoped to quell further urban riots and…

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Item Type: Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date: 1968

Though civil rights workers in Mississippi have often been characterized as young college students, both black and white, from out-of-state, the hard work of bringing potential voters to polls was usually done by local black Mississippians of all ages. One such activist was M.A. Phelps, a grassroots worker who wrote this letter to Robert L.T.…

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Item Type: Diary/Letter
Date: 1962

A coalition of activists led by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initiated a statewide direct-action voter registration and education campaign in Mississippi. Although most remembered for 1964's Freedom Summer, when black and white college students traveled south to participate, SNCC's campaign started in 1961. Organizers…

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Item Type: Quantitative Data
Date: 1966

Pauli Murray entered law school in 1941 with the "single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow." Murray and her peers, though on the frontlines of civil rights demonstrations and behind the scenes of many organizational meetings since the 1940s, had grown disenchanted with their exclusion from the Movement's leadership. Especially humiliating…

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Item Type: Speech
Date: 1963

The Democratic Party political machine notoriously ruled Chicago, distributing jobs and city services in exchange for political support. James Bevel, the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's direct action campaigns, was a veteran strategist of sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the Birmingham Children's Crusade, the Mississippi Freedom…

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Item Type: Speech
Date: 1966

Chicago's School Board insisted that its overcrowded schools were not segregated and that there was no pattern of discrimination against black students. Activists in the 1950s and 1960s produced numerous reports that proved otherwise, documenting gerrymandered districts that kept black students in schools with over 90% black populations and…

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Item Type: Map
Date: 1962

Though rallies featured national figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and lawsuits were often filed by men, the day-in, day-out on-the-ground organizing and protesting against school segregation was led by mothers who demanded the best possible education for their children. In 1958 in New York City, a group of mothers nicknamed the "Harlem Nine"…

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Item Type: Photograph
Date: Circa 1964

Freedom Day I, October 22, 1963, was one of several city-wide boycotts organized by the Coordinating Council of City Organizations to protest Chicago's segregated schools. Participating students instead attended one-day "freedom schools" organized in black churches and community centers, following a curriculum that encouraged students to discuss…

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1966

The cooperative efforts of local grassroots activists and Freedom Summer volunteers yielded the election of three African American officials, including L.B. Paige, in Mississippi's Benton County for the first time since Reconstruction. The news was announced in the Benton County Freedom Train newsletter, which noted that black candidates lost…

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Item Type: Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date: 1964

This photograph was published in a report chronicling the intimidation and violence towards African-American voting activists. As the original photo caption notes, police documented voters as they entered courthouses so that the "evidence" could later be used to identify them to employers and landlords for possible firing and eviction. The report…

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Item Type: Photograph
Date: Circa 1964