NAACP chairman Julian Bond reviews his experiences as an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement, including helping found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also talks about the continuing need for social action today, both combating racism and other social issues.
An mp3 version of the lecture audio can be downloaded.
NAACP Chairman of the Board Julian Bond talks about the views of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his emphasis on improving conditions for the working class as a whole. Bond criticizes current abuses and denials of civil rights and quality-of-life issues, and considers the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases on affirmative action.
Economist and author Dr. Julianne Malveaux delivers the keynote address for MIT's Annual Breakfast Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., contrasting the values and goals of the civil rights movement with enduring direct and indirect abuses and denials of civil rights.
This year, Martin Luther King Jr. Day falls on January 16. Created and first observed in the 1980s, this holiday honors the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and the philosophy of nonviolent protest. Do you teach the day in your classroom? How do you teach it? Do you focus on King's life and work? Do you look at the Civil Rights Movement as a whole? Do you talk about citizenship and social action? Do you encourage students to participate in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service?
No matter how you approach the day, our Martin Luther King Jr. Day spotlight page can help. Browse the page to find teaching strategies, quizzes, website reviews, online lectures, and more on Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Movement, and active citizenship.
Explore materials on other websites as well:
This site features two "special presentations" and presents hundreds of primary materials relating to baseball in America. Materials include letters, manuscripts, trading cards, lobby cards, newspaper images, photographs, advertisements, sheet music, and transcripts of interviews, speeches, and television broadcasts. The first presentation, "Baseball, the Color Line, and Jackie Robinson, 1860s-1960s," furnishes approximately 30 documents and photographs in a 5-section timeline that examines the history of Jackie Robinson's entry into the major league baseball. It includes material on the Negro Leagues, the nature of baseball's color line, Robinson's career as a Brooklyn Dodger, and his role as a civil rights activist.
A second presentation, "Early Baseball Pictures," presents 34 images dealing with baseball from the 1860s to the 1920s divided into five sections. The site also includes an annotated bibliography comprised of 82 titles and a list of six links to related resources. While limited in size and focus with regard to general baseball history, this site is valuable as an introductory look at Jackie Robinson's life and the topic of race in American sports history.
This searchable archive offers more than 250 documents from the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the struggle to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi in the early 1960s, and the continuing Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange that grew out of it. The Freedom Movement was "one of the most inspiring and important examples of grass-roots activism in U.S. history." The archive includes books; manuscripts; periodicals; correspondence; interview transcripts; photographs; artifacts; and legal, organizational, and personal documents.
The collection can be searched by document type, keyword, or topic, including black power/black nationalism, college students, gender issues, incarceration, labor issues, legislation, media, non-violence, protest, segregation, and state government. The site offers two lesson plans on the Mississippi Freedom Movement based on documents in the database, one focused on the experiences of college-aged civil rights workers during the Freedom Movement and the other on voter registration. Other teaching resources include links to five websites on teaching with primary documents, six sites related to the African-American civil rights movement, and eight related books. This site is a useful resource for researching the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the history and people of the civil rights movement, or African-American history.
Did individual African American activists spark the Civil Rights Movement?
Textbooks are silent about defining race and racism, even though the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements were efforts to challenge and eliminate racism. Rather than addressing the outrage of systematically being denied basic human rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, while citizens in a democracy, textbooks suggest that individual African Americans were merely sad or angry because individual white people did not want to fight wars, play baseball, learn, ride public transportation or eat lunch with them.
The most important lessons of the modern Civil Rights Movement will not be gained from passively reading textbooks. Examining primary sources will place students closer to the scenes of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements. Too often Dr. King is represented in textbooks as the person who was sent to save African Americans from racism, or the most powerful leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement, or as a political moderate. Instead, he was one of many powerful leaders.
Textbooks define segregation benignly with little reference to the ways in which northern and southern state governments and businesses systematically – and over the course of several decades -- reinforced an ideology of white supremacy through violence. Other groups of people affected by these same laws and practices – including American Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Jews and Arabs – are seldom included in textbook discussions of racism. These absences strip away the underlying motivation for collective anger and social action.
Textbooks present the modern Civil Rights Movement in the same way as other U.S. social movements -- a spontaneous, emotional eruption of saintly activists led by two or three inspired orators in response to momentary aberrations in the exercise of democracy. In particular, textbooks imply that, until World War II, African Americans had been relatively content with social, economic, and political conditions in the U.S. Then, suddenly, African Americans were angered that they could not fight on battlefields, play baseball, attend schools, or sit on buses with whites. Further, African Americans were the only people to observe and protest these conditions. Finally, to act on their discontent, African Americans required instructions from a benevolent federal government, or a single charismatic or sympathetic leader. A more accurate telling of the story of the modern Civil Rights Movement indicates that the “river of purposeful anger” has been long, wide and well populated.
The modern Civil Rights Movement is often marked as beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation or the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in Montgomery, AL and ends with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (Or, more recently, with the election of President Barack Obama). In some textbooks, the context for this movement are the years following the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy V.
When did the Jackson, Mississippi sit-in take place? Was it before or after Woolworth's ended its segregation?
The practice of segregated seating at Woolworth’s lunch counters gained national headlines after the Greensboro (NC) sit-ins of 1960. Woolworth’s declared it would continue to abide by its official policy of following “local custom” (i.e. segregated seating in the South). Even as they reported “progress” from time to time in the number of integrated stores in the Woolworth’s chain, they did not abandon the “local custom” policy.
On May 28, 1963, civil rights activists staged a sit-in at the Jackson, Mississippi Woolworth’s lunch counter to protest its segregated seating. There were, at first, two African American women and one African American man from nearby Tougaloo College who took a seat at the lunch counter. They were later joined five other Tougaloo students and professors, white and black. The protestors were attacked by a white mob that punched, spat, screamed obscenities, poured hot coffee, syrup, salt, pepper, and mustard over the protestors until the police, who had been standing idly by, moved in. The vivid pictures from the event turned a local protest into a mass movement against segregation in Jackson.
The sit-in galvanized Jackson’s black community and caught the attention of the Kennedy Administration. Two weeks later, one of the movement’s leaders, Medgar Evers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a World War II veteran, was murdered in Jackson by local Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith, putting even greater pressure on local leaders and the Kennedy Justice Department to ease tensions. The Kennedy Administration helped broker an agreement between local African American leaders and the mayor’s office to promote a few black city workers and to hire a small number of black police officers to patrol their own neighborhoods. In return, the local leadership of the black community agreed to call off protests and demonstrations, much to the chagrin of younger African American activists.
Hoping to avoid further disturbances, the owner of the Jackson Woolworth’s closed the lunch counter shortly after the sit-in. Public accommodations in Jackson remained segregated until passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. Woolworth officials at that time announced that the company would “now be able to serve all its customers in all its stores on a desegregated basis.”
Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.
International Civil Rights Center and Museum
Pitrone, Jean Maddern. F. W. Woolworth and the American Five and Dime: A Social History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007.
Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement *for iconic images of the sit in scroll to the bottom half of the page*
Civil Rights in America: Racial Desegregation of Public Accommodations. The National Historic Landmarks, Cultural Resources, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. (accessed December 1, 2010).
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
“Jackson Seizes 19 in Racial Protest.” New York Times, May 30, 1963.
“Woolworth Posts Sales Gain, Defends Exclusion of Negroes.” New York Times, May 19, 1960.
Wright, Gavin. “Southern Business and Public Accommodations: An Economic-Historical Paradox.” Paper presented at Business History Conference, Sacramento, California, April, 2008.
“3 In Sit-In Beaten At Jackson Store.” New York Times, May 29, 1963.
This site is dedicated to the study of the life and legacy of Malcolm X. Only one of three "initiatives" is publicly available (Columbia faculty, staff, and students may also access the site's "multi-media study environment" section). "Oral histories," "outreach," and "Malcolm X biography project" are under construction. A chronology traces Malcolm's life from his birth in May 1925 to his assassination in February 1965, with short entries on major events. "Government Documents" offers FBI files on Malcolm X—4,000 pages of surveillance reports—covering the period 1954 to 1964. A brief summary accompanies each report and the files can be searched by keyword. The site's project journal, focusing on particular themes and issues, has seven articles on Malcolm X and eight weblog postings. Additionally, the site offers an e-seminar "Life after Death: Malcolm X and American Culture" by Columbia professor Dr. Manning Marble for a fee (available free to Columbia faculty, staff, and students). When this site is completed, it will be a good starting point for researching the ideas and life of Malcolm X.
In 1968, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense established a chapter in Seattle, one of the first outside of California. This website, devoted to portraying the history and collecting the memories of that chapter, is "the most extensive online collection of materials" for any Black Panther Party chapter. It includes 13 oral histories and brief biographies of key Black Panther Party members, 53 photographs documenting Black Panther events in the late 1960s, more than 100 news stories covering Party activities from 1968 to 1981 (four years after the Party was dissolved), testimony and exhibits from the 1970 Congressional Hearings investigating the Party, and all five issues of the Seattle Black Panther Party "Bulletin." A "Slide Show" highlighting some of these materials is a good place to begin for those unfamiliar with Black Panther Party history.
This website is part of the larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which provides extensive materials that can serve as historical context, such as a guide to civil rights groups from the 1910s to the 1970s, 14 2,000-word essays on the ethnic press in Seattle, 13 other "Special Sections" on topics such as segregation in Seattle, and 37 in-depth essays on historical topics such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In addition, a "For Teachers" section provides eight lesson plans using the website's material for middle and high school students.