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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.

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.

By the time the first few Mormon families moved back into Jackson County in 1867, old hostilities no longer threatened their freedom or safety. Nonetheless, Gov. Boggs' Extermination Order remained on the books more than a century, until a subsequent governor made this proclamation in 1976.

Preceding the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Mendez v. Westminster challenged the segregation of Mexican Americans in schools in Orange County, California.

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…

Richard and Mildred Loving were plaintiffs in the historic Supreme Court ruling Loving v. Virginia, which struck down race restrictions on the freedom to marry. What follows is Mildred Loving’s public statement delivered on June 12, 2007, the 40th Anniversary of the decision.

William Lloyd Garrison’s "Inaugural Editorial" was published in the first issue of The Liberator, an influential radical abolitionist newspaper, on January 1, 1831.

This is the transcript of “On Indian Removal,” a message presented by President Andrew Jackson to Congress on December 6, 1830. In this address, Jackson makes the case for the policy set forth in the Indian Removal Act.

With the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln freed all enslaved people in “rebellious” states, forbid the military from repressing their freedom and sanctioned their military service for Union forces. This decree made emancipation a clear objective of the American Civil War.