African-American History: Civil Rights Movement Primary Sources (1950-1970)

A digital collection of twenty issues of the Black Panther Party newspaper (1968-1973).

Google Books digital collection of The Crisis Magazine, the house magazine of the NAACP.

Includes documents such as books, pamphlets, periodicals, posters, and ephemera. Part of the American Radicalism collection

This open letter by Martin Luther King, Jr. was originally written in longhand from his Birmingham jail cell On April 16, 1963, in response to an open letter signed by eight white clergymen of Birmingham. It is also called "The Negro Is Your Brother."

The Negro Motorist Green Book, travel guide published during the segregation era in the United States identified businesses that would accept African American customers. The Green Book listed a variety of businesses—from restaurants and hotels to beauty salons and drugstores—that were necessary to make travel comfortable and safe for African Americans in the period before passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Print Culture of the Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1980, is a digital collection created by the Amistad Research Center. It is presented in the Tulane University Digital Library through a partnership between the Amistad Research Center and Tulane University.

A collection of photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America

The High Museum of Art (Atlanta)holds one of the most significant collections of photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks’ arrest to the Freedom Rides to the tumultuous demonstrations of the late 1960s.

This University of Virginia's site aims to collect, digitize, and present in streaming video format over the World Wide Web television news footage from the period and to make these valuable materials available to scholars, teachers, and students. The current archive contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. In this initial installment we have digitized over 230 films. This rare footage includes full speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens.

The March, the James Blue film documenting the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was released to countries around the world in 1964. Despite this wide reach, the film remained out of the American public eye for decades. That is, until August 1st, 1986 , when Congress passed HR 4985 instructing “the Archivist of the United States to provide for the distribution within the United States of the USIA film “The March.”

Produced by Stanford University’s Research and Education Institute, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is annotated. Here you can compare the written and spoken speech, explore multimedia images, listen to movement activists and uncover historical context.

Martin Luther King Jr. held his acceptance speech in the auditorium of the University of Oslo on 10 December 1964

National Archives video of Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Joseph Mankiewicz, James Baldwin and David Schoenbrun discussing the Civil Rights March on Washington and their participation in it. August 28, 1963. (National Archives, via YouTube)

MLK, Jr.'s last speech before he was assassinated the following day.

From the National Archives, this video is a newsreel in which Kathleen Cleaver spoke at Hutton Memorial Park in Alameda County, California. The footage also shows a student protest demonstration at Alameda County Courthouse, Oakland, California. Black Panther Party leaders Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale spoke on a 10-point program they wanted from the administration which was to include full employment, decent housing, and education, an end to police brutality, and blacks be exempt from the military.