Civil Rights

I Am A Man, Sanitation workers assemble outside Clayborn Temple, Memphis, TN, 1968.

The Power of Imagery in Advancing Civil Rights

"Whether it was TV or magazines, the world got changed one image at a time," says Maurice Berger, curator of a new exhibit at American History

John Howard Griffin, left in New Orleans in 1959, asked what "adjustments" a white man would have to make if he were black.

Black Like Me, 50 Years Later

John Howard Griffin gave readers an unflinching view of the Jim Crow South. How has his book held up?

"People who knew Dr. King personally, all of them look at it [the memorial] and say, 'That's him,'" says Lisa Anders, senior project manager.

Building the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial

For those working behind the scenes on the King memorial, its meaning runs deep

Jack Johnson, left, fought Jim Jeffries for more than the undisputed heavyweight title; Scott Joplin aspired to more than "King of Ragtime" renown.

A Year of Hope for Joplin and Johnson

In 1910, the boxer Jack Johnson and the musician Scott Joplin embodied a new sense of possibility for African-Americans

The black community in 1960 were relegated to mere swatches of sand and surf on the Biloxi beach. After a series of "wade-in" protests, violence ensued.

A Civil Rights Watershed in Biloxi, Mississippi

Frustrated by the segregated shoreline, black residents stormed the beaches and survived brutal attacks on "Bloody Sunday"

After being refused service at a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's, four African-American men launched a protest that lasted six months and helped change America.

Courage at the Greensboro Lunch Counter

On February 1, four college students sat down to request lunch service at a North Carolina Woolworth's and ignited a struggle

Simeon Wright, 67, is Emmett Till's cousin and was with him the night Till was kidnapped and murdered.

Emmett Till's Casket Goes to the Smithsonian

Simeon Wright recalls the events surrounding his cousin's murder and the importance of having the casket on public display

Hazel Scott captivated audiences with her renditions of classical masterpieces by Chopin, Bach and Rachmaninoff.

Hazel Scott’s Lifetime of High Notes

She began her career as a musical prodigy and ended up breaking down racial barriers in the recording and film industries

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Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 Passed by House of Representatives

Langston Hughes' epic poem, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz is the text for the piece performed by Jessye Norman, among others.

A Jazzed-Up Langston Hughes

A long-forgotten poem about the African-American experience is given new life in a multimedia performance

The Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Lincoln's Contested Legacy

Great Emancipator or unreconstructed racist? Each generation evokes a different Lincoln. But who was our sixteenth president?

After a mob attacked a bus with protesters in Alabama in 1961, hundreds more joined the cause.

The Freedom Riders, Then and Now

Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later?

As James Chaney's family awaited the drive to his burial, 12-year-old Ben gazed outward. "There were a dozen questions in that look," says photographer Bill Eppridge.

The Lasting Impact of a Civil Rights Icon's Murder

One of three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964 was James Chaney. His younger brother would never be the same

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Civil Wrongs

In a painstaking study of 1960s Atlanta, Kevin Kruse takes suburban whites to task

16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama

Fearing the Worst

A church is bombed. A daughter is missing. A rediscovered photograph recalls one of the most heart-wrenching episodes of the civil rights era

35 Who Made a Difference: Robert Moses

A former civil rights activist revolutionizes the teaching of mathematics

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The Old Ballgames

Civil rights chronicler Ernest Withers also photographed the glories of black baseball, including pioneering big leaguer Jackie Robinson

James Meredith, center, is escorted by federal marshals on his first day of class at the University of Mississippi.

Down In Mississippi

The shooting of protester James Meredith 38 years ago, searingly documented by a rookie photographer, galvanized the civil rights movement

Artifact of bondage: This 19th-century tobacco barn (on its original site, a Kentucky alfalfa pasture, in 1998) contains an interior hut fitted with manacles. The entire structure—a slave jail—was dismantled and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where it forms the centerpiece of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which opened in August.

Free at Last

A new museum celebrates the Underground Railroad, the secret network of people who bravely led slaves to liberty before the Civil War

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Off the Beaten Track

During a civil rights march in 1965, photographer Bruce Davidson left the highway to focus on a single Alabama sharecropper and her nine children

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