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Social History for Every Classroom

menuAmerican Social History Project  ·    Center for Media and Learning

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In May 1954, the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, Alabama wrote a letter to the Mayor of Montgomery asking for changes that would make the city’s public bus system treat African-American riders with more fairness. The Women’s…

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The U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the Montgomery bus boycott introduced integrated public transportation to the city in December 1956. Anticipating mixed reactions to the boycott's success, the Montgomery Improvement Association distributed…

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Rosa Parks gained international fame in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat in the "whites-only" section on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks, an employee of the Montgomery Fair department store and secretary for the NAACP, later said…

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Excise-man.tif
This 1774 British print, titled "The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring and Feathering," depicts the attack of a Patriot crowd on Boston Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm. Tarring and feathering was a ritual of humiliation and public…

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During the revolutionary era, cheap prints depicting current events were in demand in both England and the colonies. This 1775 British print presented a scene in Edenton, North Carolina, where fifty-one women had signed a declaration in support of…

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In the following excerpt, Reverend Ralph Abernathy remembers the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) at a local Baptist church on the first day of the boycott. After this, the MIA held regular weekly meetings until the…

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rosa-parks-bus-diagram-l.tif
The diagram below shows where Rosa Parks sat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. At the time, the first ten seats on Montgomery buses were reserved for white passengers only. Parks was sitting in the eleventh row. When the bus…

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This declaration, reprinted in a London newspaper, provides an example of women's political activism during the revolutionary period. Over fifty "American ladies" from Edenton, North Carolina signed an agreement to stop buying and using tea, British…

During the Montgomery bus boycott, researchers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee visited Montgomery to learn more about the boycott and document it. Researcher Willie Lee interviewed an African-American woman who worked as a domestic, who…

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