Researching Black History at Elon and Beyond

Freedom Riders were civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia. Boynton had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines

The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.

Sixty-five year digital archive of all issues of Ebony Magazine.

Published in 1910, An Era of Progress and Promise documents topics discussed and explored at the Clifton Conference, held August 18-20, 1908 at the home of W. N. Hartshorn in Clifron, Massachusetts. Conference attendees came from thirty-four African American educational institutions, seventeen states, and nine missionary organizations. emancipation.

Fannie Lou Hamer was an voting rights activist and civil rights leader. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity.

Between the early 1920s and early 1980s, the Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in widespread investigation of those deemed politically suspect. Prominent among the targets of this sometimes coordinated, sometimes independent surveillance were aliens, members of various protest groups, Socialists, Communists, pacifists, militant labor unionists, ethnic or racial nationalists, and outspoken opponents of the policies of the incumbent presidents.

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was established in 1946 to, among other things, "combat all forms of discrimination against…labor, the Negro people and the Jewish people, and racial, political, religious, and national minorities." Date range 1940-1955

On November 3, 1979 a rally and march of black industrial workers and Communists was planned in Greensboro, North Carolina against the Ku Klux Klan. The "Death to the Klan March" was to begin in a predominantly black housing project called Morningside Homes.

African American newspapers from all over the country. Not all full text

Digital archive includes all issues from 1950 to 2005 of Jet Magazine.

Digital Archive of the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE magazine photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today.

The Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the only national civil rights organization led by young people. Organized in 1960 and mentored by the legendary Black organizer, Ella Baker, SNCC activists became full-time organizers, working with community leaders to build local grassroots organizations in the Deep South. There is a guide in print to the SNCC papers. SNCC Papers are available in Belk Library on microfilm.

Struggles for Freedom is a collection of more than 20,000 objects that relate to liberation movements in six southern African countries. The objects include oral histories, speeches, nationalist publications, fully digitized books, and pamphlets.

A glimpse in the lives of women in North Carolina during the 20th century as they changed history in our state and the nation.

World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The collection includes more than 50,000 photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler's accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research.