Frances dreams of swimming with her classmates, but will everyone be welcome at her new community pool?

Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered this speech at the United Nations International Human Rights Day on December 6, 2011. The day commemorates the UN's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

John Brown was charged with murder, insurrection and treason after the raid on Harpers Ferry. After being found guilty and while awaiting his sentencing, he was asked if there was any reason he should not be given the death sentence. He responded with this speech.

“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” was a speech given by abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, N.Y., at an event commemorating American independence.

“Everywhere we went my mother would make sure that they enrolled us in school.”

This 2005 news segment reports on a recently discovered recording from 1963, in which Kennedy responded to news of police violence against civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

“What was the saddest moment of your life?”

This essay explores the deadly Ku Klux Klan attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It details where and why the four victims—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley—were in the basement of the church on that morning, and summarizes the sentiments expressed across the country following their deaths.

In this personal narrative from Living Up the Street: Narrative Recollections, Gary Soto recounts a moment when he began to understand Frankie T., a boy who bullied him in the fifth grade.