civil rights Archives - Picturing Black History

A photograph of three African American women who were identified as domestic helpers waiting for a street car, all three women are wearing coats and hats, two men and a woman who are white are also waiting on transportation, Atlanta, Georgia. 1939. From the New York Public Library.

Black Women’s Work and Leisure in the Black Mecca

The everyday lives and struggles of Black women in Atlanta reveal the roots of their activism.

PARIS - JANUARY 1974; Black Panther and writer Eldridge Cleaver, an exile from American justice, and wife Kathleen sit in their apartment in Paris France during their exile circa 1974

The Life of Eldridge Cleaver

Author of Soul on Ice and one of the most recognized activists for Black internationalism, Eldridge Cleaver went from militance to obscurity.

Singer Mahalia Jackson speaking at the Illinois Rally for Civil Rights at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois. Over 70,000 persons attended the rally.

Mahalia Jackson and the Music of the Movement

A photograph of Mahalia Jackson in 1964 offers a window on the role of music in the civil rights movement.

Leaning on a porch rail, waiting for their turn at morning exercises are (l-r): 2nd Lts. Joan L. Hamilton, Marjorie S. Mayers, Prudence L. Burnes, and Inez E. Holmes. All are military nurses training to be sent to advanced posts on the Southwest Pacific.

The Integration of the American Military

Hoping to court Black voters in the 1948 Presidential election, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, an act that significantly changed the armed forces and the Black experience in America.

Aerial shot of some of the more than 100,000 people demonstrating in protest of racial discrimination, jam Woodward Avenue, from curb to curb in a huge, but orderly "Walk to Freedom." Most of the marchers entered and surrounded Cobo Hall and Arena to hear Martin Luther King Junior speak.

Dreaming in Detroit

For one day in June 1963 Detroit was the center of the civil rights movement.

Five of the 21 American soldiers who refused to return to America at the end of the Korean War. The sign on the truck reads: "We Stay for Peace." They moved to China; by the 1960s, all but two had returned home.

Black Soldiers After the Korean War

Some Black soldiers chose not to go home after the war, remaining in North Korea and China—behind the “bamboo curtain”—to escape racism in the United States.

Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, testifies before the Senate subcommittee on Executive Reorganization on the conditions of black American ghettos.

Manchild in the Senate Hearing

Claude Brown testifies about the urban crisis in 1960s America.

Freedom Riders in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

CORE’s Freedom Rides solidified its centrality to desegregation efforts during the Civil Rights Movement

The Rise of the Student Sit-In Movement

The Civil Rights Movement owes much to the students who boldly sat down at segregated lunch counters

African-American Boys in Mississippi Press Office

The Children of the Mississippi Freedom Summer

Black children played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement

Photographs and stories that changed the world

civil rights