Search

This is the text of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. It shows how lawmakers tried to balance power between slave and free states when admitting Maine and Missouri into the Union.

In this document, the U.S. government outlined its new policy towards escaped formerly enslaved persons during the Civil War.

In this speech, Alexander H. Stephens justifies the Confederacy’s secession, arguing that the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy is the maintenance of the institution of slavery and the belief in the inferiority of African Americans.

Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.