LibGuides: HIST 215: Civil Rights Movement: Primary Sources

News Databases

Global Breaking Newswires This link opens in a new window
Global Breaking Newswires provides timely access to newswire content from around the globe as well as growing archive of news.
Historic North Carolina Digital Newspaper Collection This link opens in a new window
Newspapers.com North Carolina Collection. 3.5 million pages of digitized content from over 1,000 NC county newspapers.
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
International Newsstream This link opens in a new window
International Newsstream provides information from more than 660 of the world's top newspapers, including The Times (London), The Bangkok Post, El Norte, Financial Times, The Guardian, Jerusalem Post, South China Morning Post, The Daily Telegraph, Asian Wall Street Journal, and the BBC Monitoring series of publications.
Library of Congress Historical Newspapers Online This link opens in a new window
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window
Includes more than 700 full-text newspapers, providing nearly than 31 million full-text articles. In addition, the database features more than 677,000 television and radio news transcripts.
New York Times This link opens in a new window
Full access to NYTimes.com and NYTimes mobile apps, as well as their international editions. Current Guilford students, faculty, and staff may register for a free account.
North Carolina Newspapers This link opens in a new window
This collection includes a selection of student and community newspapers from schools and towns around North Carolina.
Proquest Central This link opens in a new window
General reference database for over 175 subjects from magazines, journals and newspapers, including peer-reviewed and scholarly works.
US Newsstream This link opens in a new window
News content from many national and international newspapers, newswires and selected news magazines.
Wall Street Journal This link opens in a new window
WSJ provides you with a deeper understanding of current global news and probing analysis of markets, corporations, financials and technology. Current Guilford students, faculty, and staff may register for a free account.
Washington Post This link opens in a new window
Full articles from The Washington Post (1996-current).

Primary Sources

In the study of texts, a primary source is the text itself (the novel, essay, film, play, poem, television program, etc.), rather than critical works about the text.

U.S. Civil Rights Primary Sources

Amistad Digital Resource: Civil Rights Era
From Columbia University.
Has image, video, audio and document archives, plus much more.
Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive is an Internet-accessible, fully searchable database of digitized versions of rare and unique library and archival resources on race relations in Mississippi.
Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky
This online database/catalog provides access to audio and video excerpts, and over 10,000 pages of transcriptions, all of which are full-text searchable and can be sorted by county, by subject or by decade. At present 122 interviews are represented in this database.
Crossroads Home
Crossroads to Freedom connects the world with Memphis history through an archive of documents, newspapers, images and oral histories. Our goal is to empower Memphians to tell the stories of our city and region as a vital aspect of participation in the future of our community.
Freedom House Collection -- Roxbury, Massachusetts
This collection, featuring images from 1950-1975, highlight the group's efforts to integrate the neighborhood and desegregate the local schools. People appearing in the images include Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Edward Kennedy, and Kitty Dukakis.
Freedom Riders
Part of the American Experience series developed by PBS, this site provides extensive information about the civil rights activists who rode interstate buses from May until November 1961 in order to challenge segregation in America. Includes full episode and biographies of individuals involved.
Library of Congress' Civil Rights Resource Guide:
External Web Sites (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress). MORE websites!
Martin Luther King Papers Online
From the The Archive of The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
Rochester Black Freedom Struggle Online Project
The University of Rochester Libraries has created this fine online project to bring together organizational papers, images, oral histories, and ephemera related to Rochester's black freedom experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Visitors can click on the "Oral Histories" area to look over and listen to snippets from some of the interviews conducted in 2008, including talks with police officers, businessman, and local religious leaders.
Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project
The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is based at the University of Washington.
Television News of the Civil Rights Era
University of Virginia Library. Virginia Center for Digital History. “An archive containing film footage from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia. Included are clips of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as segments documenting school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens.”
Wednesdays in Mississippi: Civil Rights as Women's Work
Northern women of different races and faiths traveled to Mississippi to develop relationships with their southern peers and to create bridges of understanding across regional, racial, and class lines.

Online Sources

American Rhetoric
An excellent online speech bank, with 5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, and other recorded media events.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas
Collection of digital images organized by category.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938
From the Library of Congress American Memory, the site contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 photographs of former slaves.
Civil Rights Documentation Project
Includes oral histories, history transcripts and civil rights timeline.
Freedmen and Southern Society Project
Documents drawn from resources from the National Archive of the United States addressing the transition from slavery to freedom from the beginning of the Civil War to the beginning of Reconstruction 1861-1867.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
North American Slave Narratives
"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920." (website description)
Say it Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches
This site is sponsored by American Public Media, and includes text excerpts and audio links.
Slaves and the Courts 1740-1860
Library of Congress collection "... Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States." 9website description)
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Database with information relating to almost 35,000 slaving voyages.
UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party
Digital collection of sound recordings documenting social activism in California in the 1960s and 70s.
Virginia Runaways
"The Virginia Runaways Project is a digital database of runaway and captured slave and servant advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers." (website description)
Voices from the Gaps
Essays and criticism on female writers of color. Premier source.

Civil Rights Online Collections

Civil Rights Collection from the Library of Congress
Civil Rights Digital Library represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web.
University of Souther Mississippi - Contains Civil Rights Documentation, Oral History Bibliography, Transcripts and Timeline. Civil Rights Documentation Project
The National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP) - Oral History Archives
Civil Rights Movement in Florida -Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Florida
Freedom Summer Digital Collection -From Miami University Library
Civil Rights Collection of the Nashville Public Library

Project Websites, Blogs, Wikis

African American Multicultural Museum
The AAMM's quarterly exhibits keynote multiculturalism by emphasizing the positive contributions of many races and cultures while incorporating the African American segment.
Native Out Blog
The Native Out vision is to create social change in rural and urban communities that benefit Indigenous Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two Spirit people.
Sojourner Truth Multicultural Art Museum
The mission of the Sojourner Truth Multicultural Art Museum & Development Center is to foster personal and civic well-being in our community through fine, applied, and performing arts.
Teaching Tolerance
A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Birmingham, Alabama