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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.

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.

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…

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.

Medical and legal inspections were the first of many tests immigrants would have to pass on their arduous journey to establish lives in the United States.