Rosa Parks: Bibliography
The History of Jim Crowhttp://www.jimcrowhistory.org/
Richard Wormhiser, Bill Jersey, Sam Pollard, WNET.
This site for educators was produced as an online companion to The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, a four-part television series that tells the story of the African-American struggle for freedom during the era of segregation. The site consists of five sections, including television, history, geography, American literature, and teacher resources. “Television” provides teachers with guides to four part, from the end of the Civil War to the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The history section contains six historical essays (each between 5,000 to 7,000 words), including the introductory essay “Terror to Triumph,” and five themed essays focusing on creating, surviving, resisting, escaping, and transcending Jim Crow oppression from the late-19th-century to the Civil Rights movement. Additional shorter essays, most between 600 to 1,300 words, cover topics such as the lynching of Emmett Till and Jackie Robinson. “Geography” features ten interactive maps that give “a multi-layered look at the impact of Jim Crow on the social and political landscape of the nation.” The map themes include African-American press, Jim Crow laws inside and outside the south, and most gripping of all, the riots and lynching map that portrays a representative selection of the thousands of recorded acts of violence that occurred across the United States from 1889 to 1918. The American literature section presents interdisciplinary lesson plans designed to illustrate the connection between Jim Crow and 20th-century American writing. The final section, teacher resources, offers more than 25 lesson plans, an interactive encyclopedia, an image gallery with historical photographs, and first hand narratives from people who experienced life under Jim Crow.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Projecthttp://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
Stanford University.
Features texts by and about Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled as part of an effort to “publish King’s most significant correspondence, sermons, speeches, published writings, and unpublished manuscripts.” The site contains approximately 400 digitized speeches, sermons, and other writings, mostly taken from the four volumes the Project has published to date, covering the period 1929–1958. In addition, 16 chapters of materials collected from diverse sources and published by the Project in 1998 as The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. are available. Includes important sermons and speeches from later periods, including the 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington address; the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech; and “Rediscovering Lost Values,” a sermon from 1954. The site also provides an interactive chronology of King’s life, a 1,000-word biographical essay by project director and historian Clayborne Carson; 23 audio files of recorded speeches and sermons; 12 articles on King by scholars and others; 32 photographs; and 11 links to other resources. The site additionally offers a searchable inventory to King’s major papers and recordings. Regularly updated and expanded, this site is useful for studying the development of King’s views and discourse on civil rights, race relations, non-violence, education, peace, the war in Vietnam, and other political, religious, and philosophical topics.
The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenshiphttp://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html
American Memory, Library of Congress.
More than 240 items dealing with African-American history from collections of the Library of Congress, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings. The exhibition explores black America’s quest for political, social, and economic equality from slavery through the mid-20th century. Organized into nine chronological periods covering the following topics: slavery; free blacks in the antebellum period; antislavery movements; the Civil War and African-American participation in the military; Reconstruction political struggles, black exodus from the South, and activism in the black church; the “Booker T. Washington era” of progress in the creation of educational and political institutions during a period of violent backlash; World War I and the postwar period, including the rise of the Harlem Renaissance; the Depression, New Deal, and World War II; and the Civil Rights era. Each section includes a 500-word overview and annotations of 100 words in length for each object displayed. In addition to documenting the struggle for freedom and civil rights, the exhibit includes celebratory material on contributions of artists, writers, performers, and sports figures.
“With an Even Hand”: Brown v. Board at Fiftyhttp://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/
Library of Congress.
This exhibition commemorates the 50th anniversary of the pivotal 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case. It offers 116 images, including book covers, letters, political cartoons, and photographs. “Exhibition Overview” is a 300-word introduction to the exhibit and its significance. The website is divided into three sections: “A Century of Racial Segregation,” "Brown v. Board of Education,“ and ”The Aftermath,“ all of which consist of links to documents, detailed paragraphs on selected documents, and events related to that section. ”Discover“ buttons are dispersed throughout these exhibit sections that, when clicked, reveal more information and answer a particular question, such as ”What is ‘separate but equal?’“ The ”Exhibition Checklist" includes links to all images used on the site.
Voices of Civil Rightshttp://www.voicesofcivilrights.org/
AARP; Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Library of Congress.
This website represents the initial effort to create an archive of stories about the civil rights movement (both historical and contemporary), including essays, interviews, project updates, and special reports. While the site is under construction, currently there is already substantial material available, most of which is organized into one of five sections. An interactive “Timeline” serves as in introduction to the Movement, highlighting major events and accomplishments. “Stories” allows visitors to read more than 100 personal stories about America’s civil rights history (10 stories include audio excerpts). Visitors can peruse the section devoted to the contemporary civil rights movement and its historical legacy. Here visitors can listen to interviews about the promise of equal education with Wade Henderson, Executive Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, as well as many other activists. Students and teachers will find this site a convenient collection of primary accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Chicano Movement and the National Organization of Women.
Civil Rights Movement Veteranshttp://198.170.117.226/
Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.
This site celebrates the commitment and efforts of 243 veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Introduction provides 12 essays (1,000–1,500 words) on the Movement, including special coverage of the Freedom Rides. Visitors can take the Alabama Literacy Test to see whether they would have qualified to vote in Alabama before the 1965 Voting Rights Act took effect. Veterans Roll Call provides approximately 250–750 word biographies (in some cases, autobiographies) of almost 250 veterans. It includes dates of activity, organizational affiliation, states they worked in, and home states. Commentaries includes nine essays written by Roll Call veterans. These extensive (1,000 to 4,000 words) transcripts record frank discussions and interviews between veterans, covering the goals of the different organizations as well as the successes and failures of the Movement. Our Stories provides outside links to 85 oral histories housed at the Columbia University Oral History Archives. Particularly interesting is the FAQ section that provides veteran-written answers to visitors’ questions. In addition, the Bibliography includes age-specific book lists for further study. Between the interviews, the autobiographies, and the discussions, the site includes a wealth of primary sources, and would be invaluable for any student researching the human side of the Civil Rights Movement.
Freedom: A History of Ushttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/index.html
WNET New York, PBS.
This site complements the 16-part PBS television series of the same name. Based on Joy Hakim’s award-winning U.S. history textbook series, the site explores the theme of freedom chronologically from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights movement and concluding with the inauguration of George W. Bush. Designed to help teachers find lesson plans or design their own curriculum, the site includes sample activities and historical primers, each based on one of the 16 “Webisodes,” such as “Liberty for all?” or “Whose land is this?” Teachers can search for lesson plans by Webisode or by multiple subject matters, from mathematics to physical education. There is also an interactive timeline that links to photographs, paintings, biographies, and quizzes. The site is visually and textually rich, but most valuable for K-12 teachers and students.
Remembering Jim Crowhttp://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/remembering/
American RadioWorks.
A companion site to the NPR radio documentary on segregated life in the South (broadcast in February 2002). Presents 28 audio excerpts, ranging from one minute to ten minutes in length, and approximately 130 photographs, arranged in six thematically-organized sections. Covers legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community life, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life. As anthropologist Kate Ellis, one of the site’s creators, notes, the interviews display a “marked contrast between African American and white reflections on Jim Crow.” Many of the photographs come from personal collections of the people interviewed. The site also includes 16 photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in New Iberia, Louisiana. The site provides audio files and transcripts of the original radio documentary, more than 70 additional stories, a sampling of state segregation laws arranged by topic, links to eight related sites, and a 41-title bibliography. The short 100-word introductions to each section succinctly provide a contextual framework to the documentary material.
Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965–1982http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/Idealism/index.html
Data and Program Library Service, Michael T. Aiken, N. J. Demereth III, Gerald Marwell, Sociology Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Provides documentation collected for a study of the attitudes, backgrounds, goals, and experiences of volunteers participating in a 1965 Southern Christian Leadership Conference voter registration effort. Includes questionnaires submitted prior to and following the project, as well as a follow-up survey conducted in 1982. Participants were queried as to reasons 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. Includes a seven-title list of related publications.