Chronicling the Civil Rights Fight

A major portion of the organization’s processed records, spanning 1915 to 1968, now are available online at the Library for the first time. About 80% of the approximately 80,000 items have been digitized thus far, greatly expanding research access to primary source materials for scholars and students studying the civil rights movement.

The records cover many topics: segregation in schools, on buses and in public facilities; discrimination in housing and property ownership; voting rights; police brutality; racial violence; and countless other infringements of civil rights.

The digitization was done in collaboration with the Legal Defense Fund and was made possible with the support of the Ford Foundation. The foundation has provided core funding for the establishment of the Library’s For the People: Fund for Powering Knowledge initiative, designed to connect Americans with important social movements and show how they shape American life and government.

Highlights of the Legal Defense Fund records include files pertaining to the 1943 Detroit riot; correspondence related to Josephine Baker’s treatment at the Stork Club in 1951; letters between Thurgood Marshall and Simeon Booker, the Washington bureau chief for Jet magazine, concerning witnesses for the Emmett Till trial; documents about Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and related cases; and cases concerning elections and voting rights in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Library’s Manuscript Division houses the country’s most comprehensive civil rights collection.

In addition to the Legal Defense Fund records, the division holds the original records of its parent organization, the NAACP, along with those of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Urban League and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. It also holds the personal papers of Marshall, Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Rosa Parks, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, Roy Wilkins and many others.