Contemporary Issues

Civil Rights Heritage Center
A great starting place for anyone interested in learning basic information about the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Compiled and maintained by students from Indiana University's Civil Rights Heritage Center, this index directs you to a timeline, key events, grassroots organizations, oral history archives, and teaching tools.

James Chaney Foundation
To honor and remember the three young civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi while participating in the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration project, this site seeks to empower citizens to register and vote and become educated about public policy.

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
LCCR, a national umbrella organization of 180 national civil rights groups, hosts this extensive site on contemporary civil rights issues and organizations. It includes a national directory of civil rights organizations, research center and action center showing how citizens can get involved in various causes. Includes details on ongoing civil rights campaigns, including those dealing with housing discrimination and hate-crimes.

The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University
One of the nation's leading organizations devoted to civil rights research. Focusing initially on education reform, it has convened dozens of national conferences and roundtables and conducts research, policy studies, and major reports on contemporary civil rights issues.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
This site, maintained by the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Religious Action Center, features a brief history of the Jewish community's civil rights activism and background on civil rights legislation, plus current information on race relations, gay and lesbian rights, and other rights issues.

Education and Research

Greensboro Sit-Ins: Launch of a Civil Rights Movement
On February 1, 1960, four black North Carolina college freshmen sat down at a whites-only lunch counter. With this site, the Greensboro News & Record, in collaboration with the city's public library, commemorates their actions and the consequences. See original news articles and photos, and listen to recent audio interviews with the "Greensboro Four," as well as reporters and photographers who covered their story.

Howard University's Brown@50
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, this site is an extensive resource of civil rights cases, rulings, and laws. Includes a 2004 schedule of events marking the anniversary.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University
The King Papers Project, initiated by the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, has been developed to host a definitive collection of King's most significant correspondence, sermons, speeches, and unpublished manuscripts.

Pathfinder: African American Narratives
This online index to African American oral histories links to sites with accounts of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement that ended it.

Media Projects

Oh Freedom Over Me
Like the 2000 American Radio Works series on which it is based, this site documents the events of the 1964 "Freedom Summer" voter registration drive in Mississippi. Read or listen to transcripts from the series and interviews with Freedom Summer alumni, or click through the slideshow.

Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore
Charles Moore was a 27-year-old photographer with Alabama's Montgomery Advertiser when he found himself the lone photographer on hand for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1958 arrest in Montgomery. Moore went on to become one of the preeminent chroniclers of the civil rights struggle, capturing some of the players and events in the haunting black-and-white photos displayed on this site.

Strange Fruit
This PBS site is a companion to the film Strange Fruit, with a special section that explores the role of music in social protest. Includes audio and background about song writers and their songs, including Bob Dylan's "A Pawn in Their Game," a lament about the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Remembering Jim Crow
This 2001 American Radio Works documentary covers the pre-civil rights Jim Crow South. It's a mix of history, first-person narratives, slideshows, and reference material that draws heavily from "Behind the Veil," the oral history project from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
The four-part PBS documentary explores the "crushing subordination" for Southern blacks in an exploration of racial segregation from the end of slavery to the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.