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American Indian tribes across the United States are working to revive their lost languages.

President John F. Kennedy made these notes on May 12, 1963, in response to multiple bombings and subsequent rioting in Birmingham, Ala.

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.

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.

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.

This 1915 cartoon by Henry Mayer depicts the struggle for women’s suffrage.

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…