Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.

Archival materials including: digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and more.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a 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. This collection includes correspondence plus financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items.

The 44,000-page case file of the Federal Bureau of Investigation documents the bureau’s role in finding James Earl Ray and obtaining his conviction. The file also includes background information amassed by the FBI on Dr. King’s social activism.

This archive details Operation Oak Tree, the code name for the Army's plans to intervene in Alabama in the event of civil disturbances related to school integration in May 1963. Operation Palm Tree extended the operation over a wider area. The documents in this collection are sourced from the Records of the Department of the Army, in the custody of the National Archives of the United States.

This collection is from the Records of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations (ODCSOPS) relating to the use of Federal marshals, U.S. Troops, and the federalized National Guard in Oxford, Mississippi, 1962-1963, on the occasion of James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi. The files detail the extensive Federal involvement, including preparations for the military operation, Executive Orders, after action reports on the costs and lessons of Federal involvement, congressional correspondence on the military’s involvement, and effects on the media, public, and in particular, students and staff at Ole Miss.

This collection reveals details of the Federal Government's plans to militarily intervene in the 1963 March on Washington (codenamed Operation "Steep Hill") in the event the march became disorderly. Records include Army staff communications and memos tracking plans of March organizers, contingency plans for cooperation with District of Columbia police, intelligence reports and estimates, congressional correspondence, press articles, and maps planning the route of the March.

Primary source documents related to the Freedom Riders, 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.

Find hearings and committee prints, legislative histories on the landmark legislation, Congressional Research Services reports, briefs from major Supreme Court cases, and publications from the Commission on Civil Rights.

Contains a collection of materials for the study of the early development of the Civil Rights Movement-concerned with the issues of lynching, segregation, race riots, and employment discrimination. This collection from FDR’s Official File provides insight into his political style and presents an instructive example of how he balanced moral preference with political realities.