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“He asked me, 'How many black jelly beans are in the jar...'”

“I couldn't understand why all the black men had signs that said 'I AM A MAN.'”

“I remember a private swim club...”

Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.

Elizabeth MacQueen is the sculptor of Four Spirits, a monument built to memorialize the four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In her memoir, she discusses how the project revealed to her how sheltered she had been as a child growing up in Birmingham.

This essay expounds on the injustices and false perceptions faced by women in the welfare system. Tillmon contends that the system is overrun with sexism and that until American women are liberated by equal pay, the welfare system will continue to be a trap for them.

In this transcript, Fanny Lou Hamer describes the way in which she was forced to leave the plantation where she worked as as sharecropper for 18 years, was arrested and was beaten--all on account of trying to register to vote.

These images are from The Negro Motorist Green Book 1940 edition. The Green Book, published from 1936 – 1964, served as a guide for African Americans traveling around the country during the Jim Crow segregation era. To explore the complete issues visit the New York Public Library Digital Collections at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=ab…