The Civil Rights Movement: Web Resources

Jack Roosevelt Robinson (1919-72), the first black man to "officially" play in the big leagues in the 20th century, possessed enormous physical talent and a fierce determination to succeed. In the course of a distinguished 10-year career beginning in 1947, Robinson led the Brooklyn Dodgers to six National League titles and one victorious World Series. Beyond his many and stellar baseball feats, Jackie Robinson went on to champion the cause of civil rights when he retired from the game.

This website allows you to explore the destinations important to the Civil Rights Movement, as well as plan your journey to cities along the trail. On this site, you’ll find places to see and things to do at each destination. Plus, you’ll find in-depth explorations crafted to allow you to experience the destination or event in a more comprehensive way.

Celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with this special collection of videos and web-exclusive features from trusted public media partners.

Harry Tyson Moore was an African-American educator, a pioneer leader of the civil rights movement, founder of the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Brevard County, Florida, and president of the state chapter of the NAACP.

For much of the 20th Century, African Americans in the South were barred from the voting booth, sent to the back of the bus, and walled off from many of the rights they deserved as American citizens. Until well into the 1960s, segregation was legal. The system was called Jim Crow. In this documentary, Americans—black and white—remember life in the Jim Crow times.

Learn how the bus on which Rosa Parks sat that day in 1955 was restored—going from a discarded relic in an Alabama field to one of the most popular artifacts in Henry Ford Museum.

In one remarkable day, four college freshmen changed the course of American history. On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil—later dubbed the Greensboro Four—began a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in a small city in North Carolina. The act of simply sitting down to order food in a restaurant that refused service to anyone but whites is now widely regarded as one of the pivotal moments in the American Civil Rights Movement.

The original We Shall Overcome travel itinerary was created in 1998. While it by no means included all of the sites associated with civil rights, it presented a range of churches, private residences, and public sites of protest that spoke to the history of the African American Civil Rights Movement.

The purpose of this course is to examine the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directed the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a national survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record and make widely accessible new interviews with people who participated in the struggle. The activists interviewed for this project belong to a wide range of occupations, including lawyers, judges, doctors, farmers, journalists, professors, and musicians, among others. The video recordings of their recollections cover a wide range of topics within the freedom struggle, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists.

This series of lessons commemorates the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. This lesson focuses on questions of justice and the role youth have played in social and political movements. By reading a combination of primary and secondary sources, students will learn how the Little Rock Nine came to play their important role. These teenagers’ participation in school integration stemmed not from the prodding of the parents or activists, but from within themselves.

This lesson is part of The Role of Gay Men and Lesbians in the Civil Rights Movement series. This series introduces students to four lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people of African descent, and their allies. All four—James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin—were indispensable to the ideas, strategies and activities that made the civil rights movement a successful political and social revolution.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Define civil liberties and civil rights
Describe the origin of civil liberties in the U.S. context
Identify the key positions on civil liberties taken at the Constitutional Convention
Explain the Civil War origin of concern that the states should respect civil liberties