Africana Studies: Sources on Civil Rights and related movements

-Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files
-The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces, Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses.
-Legal Department Files
-Special Subjects
-Branch Files

contains significant material on the activities of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to oppose racial discrimination and segregation, as well as to educate and organize blacks into a formidable political force.

contains significant material on the development, activities, and changing focuses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as the civil rights movement as a whole during the 1960s, and the relationships between SNCC and other organizations. The papers provide detailed documentation of the founding of SNCC, the internal workings of the organization, local conditions throughout the South, white resistance to civil rights workers, and SNCC's increasing awareness of international affairs. Most of the papers date from between 1960 and 1968, the period of SNCC's active involvement in the civil rights movement.

The National Negro Business League was a business organization founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1900 by Booker T. Washington, with the support of Andrew Carnegie. The mission and main goal of the National Negro Business League was "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro." The organization was formally incorporated in 1901 in New York, and established 320 chapters across the United States.

“The National Negro Congress was established in 1936 to “secure the right of the Negro people to be free from Jim Crowism, segregation, discrimination, lynching, and mob violence” and “to promote the spirit of unity and cooperation between Negro and white people.”

This collection consists of a range of materials, including FBI surveillance and reports from several offices; intercepted correspondence; Justice Department memoranda, and analyses; articles; and more.

Contains a large amount of material on an influential African American radical leader who advocated armed resistance to racial segregation during the late 1950s and the 1960s. The collection covers Williams's career from his leadership of the Union County, North Carolina, NAACP branch in the 1950s and early 1960s, through his life in exile in Cuba and China between 1961 and 1969, to his return to the United States in 1969, and his continuing activism from the mid-1970s until his death in 1996.

This collection of Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) consists of the personal files of RAM founder and National Field Chairman Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford) and of RAM members John H. Bracey Jr. and Ernie Allen Jr. RAM was an organization that advocated a philosophy of revolutionary black nationalism combining armed self-defense, Pan-Africanism, self-determination, and Marxism.

Following the Detroit riot of July 1967, an event known to some as the Great Rebellion, General Baker and his fellow radicals sensed an opportunity for new organizing efforts. In September 1967, Baker, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Luke Tripp started a newspaper called the Inner City Voice. The paper focused on issues of concern to Detroit's black population, including working conditions, housing, health care, welfare programs, and schools, all from a Marxist perspective

Associated Negro Press news releases, organizational files, subject files and name files.

Founded in Detroit in 1946, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) arose out of the merger of three groups with ties to the Communist Party USA to "combat all forms of discrimination against…labor, the Negro people and the Jewish people, and racial, political, religious, and national minorities." The CRC concentrated on legal defense and mass political action on behalf of victims of legal frame-ups.

The collection consists of records of the United Domestic Workers Union (U.S) from 1965-1979. The correspondence (1965-1979) reflects efforts in organizing the Union and includes such correspondents as Julian Bond, Senator Sam Nunn, Senator Herman Talmadge, Allen Williams, Andrew Young, and other Georgia and national political figures.

The Written Rastafari Archives Project (WRAP) involves an exclusive collection of Rastafari ephemerals written and published by a number of Rastafari Mansions, groups and individuals over the past four decades.

The American Committee on Africa (ACOA) was founded in 1953 by American sympathizers of the antiapartheid movement in South Africa. ACOA grew out of a predecessor organization, Americans for South African Resistance, which was formed in 1952 as a result of correspondence between George Houser, then head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Walter Sisulu, secretary general of the African National Congress and a leader of the antiapartheid "Defiance Campaign" in South Africa.

Although the membership of the BSCP was never large (the total number of porters never exceeded 12,000 and fewer than half that number ever signed on with the union during its struggle to organize), the BSCP is of major importance in American history. The efforts of the porters to forge a national organization, under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, Ashley L. Totten, and C. L. Dellums, attracted much attention during the 1920s and 1930s and launched the officials, especially Randolph and Webster, to prominent leadership roles in the United States. In addition, the BSCP became the spawning ground for ideas and people who would contribute much to the later civil rights movement.

The National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, Inc. (NACWC) is the oldest African American secular organization in existence today. The NACWC series provides researchers access for the first time to the records of this crucial social movement. This collection documents the founding of the organization and the role that it has played in the political, economic, and social development of the modern African American community, as well as its involvement in national and international reform movements.

FBI intelligence documents chronicle the activities of the Republic of New Afrika organization.

Papers of James and Esther Cooper Jackson. The papers contain clippings, correspondence of Esther and James Jackson, James Jackson’s lectures (typescripts and audiocassettes), research notebooks, and writings (published and unpublished), subject files, correspondence, internal documents and printed ephemera pertaining to the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and more.

Includes Chicago Urban League Papers, 1917-1985 along with other more narrowly focused collections from Atlanta and North Carolina.

Digitized oral histories.

The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.

The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.

This online database/catalog provides acce ss to audio and video excerpts, and over 10,000 pages of transcriptions, all of which are full-text searchable and can be sorted by county, by subject or by decade. At present 122 interviews are represented in this databse. We hope to add an additional 150 in the coming year.

Transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.

The archive consists of digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees as well as print materials related to this book. All of the print materials appear on the website in two versions: an image of the original document which is not searchable and a re-transcribed document which is searchable.

The African Activist Archive Project is building an online archive of primary materials - documents, photographs, artifacts, and written and oral memories - of 50 years of activist organizing in the United States in solidarity with African struggles against colonialism, apartheid, and injustice. This is a "people's archive" focused primarily on local organizations in the U.S. that supported African struggles against colonialism and white minority rule.

This collection of FBI, local and state police, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, shed new light on the motivations of the Communist organizers, the shootings, subsequent investigations, and efforts to heal the Greensboro community.

This archives consists of documents comprising RG 319: Records of the Army Staff, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations, Domestic Disturbance Files: Records of Operations "Oak Tree" and "Palm Tree," 1963.

This collection contains extensive FBI documentation on Meredith’s battle to enroll at The University of Mississippi in 1962 and white political and social backlash, including his correspondence with the NAACP and positive and negative letters he received from around the world during his ordeal.

Freedom Summer was a nonviolent effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system during 1964. More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.