Maxwell and the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Digital Library 
The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The initiative promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement through its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement, 2) a civil rights portal a seamless virtual library on the Movement by connecting related digital collections on a national scale, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources - such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities - to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process. The CRDL advances cross-disciplinary approaches, promoting a seamless-infrastructure for learning, professionals, archivists, humanities scholars, educators, university graduate and undergraduate researchers, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. 

The Civil Rights History Project - Survey of Collections and Repositories

The Civil Rights History Project Act was created by an act of Congress in 2009, sponsored in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Carolyn McCarthy (NY) and co-sponsored by Representatives Sanford D. Bishop (GA), William Lacy Clay (MO), John Lewis (GA) and Mike Quigley (IL). The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), and to record new interviews with people who participated in the Movement.  There are 1308 collections available in the database.

Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse collects documents and information from Civil Rights cases across the United States. It is available to scholars, teachers, students, policymakers, advocates, and the public, to allow greater understanding of historical and contemporary American Civil Rights Litigation. 

Mississippi was a focal point in the struggle for civil rights in America, and Hattiesburg, home of The University of Southern Mississippi, had the largest and most successful Freedom Summer project in 1964. The civil rights materials collected at the University document a local history with truly national significance. The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.

Transcriptions of documents pertaining to slavery in the U.S. from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition.

The database, which continues to grow, already includes 50 civil rights cases.  You'll find iconic campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycott and some that are less known, like the 1958-59 sit-ins in Kansas City, MO and the 1960 St. Paul's College student boycott of a segregated movie theater in Virginia. The database is sponsored by Swarthmore College with support from Tufts and Georgetown Universities.

Users worldwide can find, in this virtual Schomburg Center, exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Thurgood Marshall Law Library
In conjunction with the Thurgood Marshall Law Library's strategic plan to enhance its civil rights collection in support of the School's Law's teaching and research mission, the Library has worked since 2001 to create a complete electronic record of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications held in the Library's collection and available on the USCCR Web site. The publications are made available over the Internet as page image presentations in PDF format. Each item is linked from the appropriate bibliographic record in the Catalog. Publications are also searchable by keyword and accessible by date, title and SuDoc number.