Search

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.

Undercover, Walter White investigates an African-American woman's lynching in a rural Georgia town. White uses his Southern accent to keep suspicion at bay during a conversation with a general manager, whom he believes to be the lynch-mob leader.

Deborah Walker recalls that, growing up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, fear and rage lived side by side. She credits her lifelong fight for equity to her guardian angels.

Glenn Ellis gives a personal account of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and remembers his four friends: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair.

Reverend Noel Koestline and Reverend Spencer Turnipseed remember Turnipseed's sister, Marti, the first white student to join Birmingham's sit-in movement.

The announcement on November 20, 1969 from 89 American Indians – mostly students from colleges and universities – that they were taking over Alcatraz Island, set in motion what would become the longest occupation of a federal facility by Native Americans to date. This report aired a year later on NBC News, in December 1970, six months before the occupation ended.

In early September 1957, nine African-American students faced a violent mob when they attempted to enter the newly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed this executive order on September 23, 1957 to enforce an orderly desegregation.

The U.N. General Assembly adopted the original version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The intention was to safeguard the international community against atrocities such as occurred during World War II.

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…