Atlanta in the Civil Rights Movement

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Logo, Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education
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This well-designed website explores the fundamental role of the churches, businesses, and institutions of Atlanta's Auburn Avenue, as well as the colleges and universities of the Atlanta University Center, in developing black leadership in the civil rights movement. The main section, "Atlanta's Story," is a timeline of Atlanta's civil rights movement between 1940 and 1970 with four essays: "Gradualism and Negotiation" covers the years 1940-1949; "Retrenchment and Redirection" discuses the events of 1950-1959; "Direct Action and Desegregation" examines the years between 1960 and 1965; and "The Quest for Black Power" explores 1966-1970.

Additionally, an extensive bibliography offers a list of more than 120 books and 50 articles both on the Atlanta Civil Rights movement and the movement in general. "Web resources" has more than 50 links to related websites. The site also provides a searchable inventory of special collections materials. Finally, the site offers a small photo gallery of 25 images. A useful starting point for anyone researching the civil rights movement or Atlanta.

Photographs
Images
Text
African American History Month
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Learn MLK Day
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
African Americans
Business
Cities & Suburbs
Education
Ideas & Ideologies
Politics
Radicalism
Reform
Religion
Southern States

African-Americans--Biography, Autobiography, and History

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Logo, The Avalon Project
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This section, recently added to the Avalon Project, contains complete copies of Martin Luther King Jr.'s August 28, 1963, "I Have A Dream" speech; Frederick Douglass' 1855 My Bondage and Freedom; The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated by Sojourner Truth and edited by Olive Gilbert; W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 The Souls of Black Folk; and Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington. All of the transcripts are legible and available in HTML format.

Speeches
Text
African American History Month
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Expansion & Reform, 1801-1861
Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
African Americans
Ideas & Ideologies
Radicalism
Reform
Women

African Americans in Massachusetts

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Image, African Americans in Massachusetts: Case Studies of Desegregation in...
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This site features primary documents related to the 19th-century desegregation of the Boston and Nantucket, MA school systems. It includes a timeline with links to 71 expandable and downloadable primary sources. The documents consist of census records, maps, reports of the local school committees, and articles from William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. The site also contains a bibliography with more than 30 items. Designed to develop student critical thinking skills, materials encourage middle and high students to understand different points of view. For example, students can study petitions from those supporting desegregation and petitions from those in opposition. In addition students will better understand the relationship between Massachusetts' early desegregation cases and the 20th-century Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Complete with primary sources and lesson plans, the site not only offers useful curriculum for lessons in America's long march to free and integrated public education but helps students identify how contemporary debates about education parallel the 19th-century Massachusetts desegregation cases.

Maps
Newspapers and Periodicals
Official Documents
Quantitative Evidence
Data
Text
African American History Month
Splash Pullout AAH Month
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Civil War & Reconstruction, 1850-1877
Devel. of the Industrial US, 1870-1900
African Americans
Education
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Legal History
New England
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Reform

National History Day Project: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

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Print, The Bird of Freedom and the Black Bird, 1863, F.P., NYPL Digital Gallery
Question

I'm an 8th-grade student currently looking for information for my National History Day project on the topic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It would be very helpful if some of these questions would be able to be answered.

  • What groups of people, if any, were negatively affected?
  • What were some consequences because of the passing of the act, good or     bad?
  • Were there any important events or political ideas that were led up by the     Act passing?
  • What were some key leaders and other people that led up to the Act?
  • What might be some successes because of the Act passing?
  • Lastly, what are some failures that the Act was unable to address?
Answer

It is great to hear that you are participating in the National History Day program at your school. I really hope that this project allows you to experience what it is like to work as a historian, analyzing and interpreting primary sources and secondary sources to draw conclusions about the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Your questions about the Act are a good jumping-off point for starting your research. It sounds like you want to analyze the effects and consequences of the legislation on "groups" of people. However, the questions did not specify whom you might be thinking about. So, a good place to start is with the particular groups affected by the legislation. What was the goal of the act? How, for instance, did it affect people experiencing workplace discrimination and school segregation in the United States prior to 1964?

After you establish the aims and audiences of the act, you can move on to looking at important events, political ideas, and key leaders. The act was a part of the broader Civil Rights movement, so consider how the push for civil rights led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as how the act pushed the movement forward. There are lots of great resources on the web for this kind of research and our Website Reviews section is a good tool for this. It allows you to browse sites by keyword, topic, and time period to locate information pertaining to the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This feature will also help you bypass the millions of websites that a regular search engine will provide, and only return legitimate websites about historical research.

For example: Using the search box, try entering keyword terms that are critical elements of the legislation (i.e. segregation and discrimination).

Keyword: segregation
Topic: African Americans
Time Period: Post War US, 1945-Early 1970s
Resource Type: Any

The results of this specific search will generate ten different websites that vary in topic. Two might be of particular interest. Television News of the Civil Rights Era has the actual footage of African American students waiting to be picked up by the local school bus for the first time in four years. Other sites, like the Kellogg African American Health Care Project will provide first-hand accounts from African Americans during the era of segregated health care.

Information about the experiences of individuals will reveal how segregation and discrimination deeply influenced the lives of ordinary Americans. Finding clues to some of the answers to your questions should help you refine those questions and help you make your assessments about the failures and successes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I hope you find the answers to all of your questions.

Radicalism and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A.

Description

Dr. Simon Hall, Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, lectures on the shift of some activists away from nonviolent protest to radicalism during the Civil Rights Movement. He looks at activists' disillusionment with the federal government and the change in focus of organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, which became the Student National Coordinating Committee).

The Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A.

Description

From the History Faculty website:

"In recent years historians of the civil rights movement have moved their focus away from the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. to explore the role played by 'ordinary people' in the struggle for racial equality. While not denying King's importance as a tactician, figurehead and orator historians have argued that, at root, the civil rights movement was a people's movement and that the countless inspiring contributions made by local blacks was a critical component of the movement's success."

"After setting out the problems that the civil rights movement sought to tackle, the presentation charts some of the civil rights movement's major tactics—litigation, boycotts and direct action, and voter registration drives—emphasizing the importance of ordinary African Americans and their allies to these efforts. The presentation ends with a re-consideration of King's role, highlighting his importance as a 'bridge' between the local campaigns and national politics."

Dr. Simon Hall, Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, presents this lecture.

A Day On, Not a Day Off

Date Published
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Logo, Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service
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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Since 1994 and the signing into law of the King Holiday and Service Act, the holiday is a "day on, not a day off," a national day of service. According to the King Center, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, described the holiday this way:

Every King Holiday has been a national "teach-in" on the values of nonviolence, including unconditional love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation, which are so desperately needed to unify America. It is a day of intensive education and training in Martin's philosophy and methods of nonviolent social change and conflict-reconciliation. The Holiday provides a unique opportunity to teach young people to fight evil, not people, to get in the habit of asking themselves, "what is the most loving way I can resolve this conflict?"

Maybe you've given your students background on the holiday and prepared them to get involved in the local community today. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day shouldn't be the only day your students are ready to serve—and King isn't the only topic that can connect service and history education.

More Than One Day of Service

President Barack Obama's United We Serve initiative calls on citizens to come together to improve their communities. The government Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service website reflects that call, and provides resources you can draw on throughout the year.

Helping to preserve history can be service, too!

Use this site to familiarize yourself (and your students, depending on their grade level and readiness to organize projects) with service opportunities in your area. Search by city, state, or zip code; register your own project; or read up on planning a project with the site's detailed Action Guides.

Now consider your curriculum and your local community. Don't limit yourself to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, or to the third Monday of January. Think about the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the women's rights movement, the victory gardens and scrap drives of the World War II homefront, the Berlin Airlift. What sorts of projects might you guide students in initiating (or at least considering) for any of these topics or time periods that would also help them learn—and feel connected to—historical content?

Serving to Preserve

Helping to preserve history can be service, too! Listen to teacher James Percoco speak on teaching with memorials and monuments and think about your local history. Are there places that need young volunteers? Locations that students could research and then prepare their own interpretive materials?

Use Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a reminder not just to memorialize history, but to empower students to connect with, interpret, and preserve it in the service of the present!

Resources on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sounds good, you say, but maybe you need resources for teaching about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, before you head off onto wider projects. Last year, we recommended a variety of online resources in our Jan. 13 blog entry. Here are those recommendations again—and a few new ones! Remember to search our Website Reviews and try our Lesson Plan Gateway for even more links to great materials.

Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982

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Image for Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982
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These materials were collected for a study on the attitudes, backgrounds, goals, and experiences of volunteers participating in a 1965 Southern Christian Leadership Conference voter registration effort. Resources include questionnaires submitted prior to and following the project, as well as a follow-up survey conducted in 1982.

Participants were queried about why they volunteered, what they expected, their attitudes regarding race and politics, images they held of the South, expectations they had regarding the African American community, personal memories and effects of their participation, and subsequent attitudes regarding civil rights, violence, and social change. These resources offer insight into the Civil Rights Movement and some sociological aspects of American reformers.

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Christians
civil rights
Civil Rights Movement
race
race relations
social reforms
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
volunteer organizations
voter registration
voters
voting
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Text
MLK Day
Learn MLK Day
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
Contemporary US, 1968-Present
African Americans
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