Digital Primary Sources
Civil Rights Movement Veterans Website (crmvet)
The Civil Rights Movement Veterans website is a non-commercial educational resource for students, academics, researchers, and people of all kinds who wish to learn more about the civil rights movement from the point of view of those who were a part of it. Features documents, photographs, and remembrances that emphasize the central role ordinary people played in transforming their lives through extraordinary courage.
Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS)
Freedom Summer Digital Collection
The Freedom Summer Digital Collection contains over 30,000 pages of official records of organizations, personal papers of Movement leaders, letters, racist propaganda, diaries, images, and newsletters documenting the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. Featured collections include the Amzie Moore papers, Ella Baker papers, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party papers, and more.
Duke University
SNCC Collections
Digitized civil rights collections at Duke include the Joseph Sinsheimer Papers, which features oral history interviews with activists from the Mississippi Movement; the SNCC 40th Anniversary Tapes, which document the SNCC 40th anniversary conference in 2000 at Shaw University; and the Faith Holseart Papers, which contain documents and correspondence related to SNCC’s organizing in Southwest Georgia; and the Judy Richardson Papers, which include materials regarding the SNCC national office and its organizing work in the Deep South.
Library of Congress (LOC)
Civil Rights History Project
The Civil Rights History Project features video-recorded oral history interviews and transcripts with activists who participated in the struggle to obtain justice, freedom, and equality for African Americans. Interviews record recollections of a wide variety of topics within the civil rights movement, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists. Many interviewees participated in national organizations, such as the NAACP, SNCC and CORE, and the interviews cover a broad geographical area.
University of Southern Mississippi (USM)
The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes digitized photographs, oral history transcripts and audio, letters, diaries, and other documents focusing on local struggles for civil rights in Mississippi. Featured collections include Herbert Randall Freedom Summer photograph collection and an extensive selection of oral history interviews by USM’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage.
Trinity College
1988 SNCC Conference “We Shall Not Be Moved“
A ten-part series of videorecordings of a conference held at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, Apr. 14 – 16, 1988, titled, “We Shall Note Be Moved: The Life and Times of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960 – 1966.”
Washington University
Eyes on the Prize Interviews
Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series, which debuted on PBS stations in 1985 and 1988 and is considered to be the definitive documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. The Eyes on the Prize collection contains footage and transcripts of the interviews conducted by Blackside, including sections which appeared in the final program and the outtakes.
Take Stock
Take Stock features images made by activist photographers dedicated personally to the cause of social justice, including Matt Herron, George Ballis, and Maria Varela. The Civil Rights Collection contains some 27,000 images taken by several photographers in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia in the mid-sixties. The collection includes movement photography, photojournalism, and social documentary photography.
Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH)
Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection
The Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection contains 11,000 photographs documenting the civil rights movement and social conditions in Central Alabama. Jim Peppler was a staff photographer of The Southern Courier, a weekly paper based in Montgomery that sought to provide objective reporting on civil rights and social issues.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH)
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records contains approximately 133,000 pages of material from Mississippi’s official counter civil rights agency from 1956-1973. Material includes investigative reports, correspondence, speeches, and a large amount of published material.
Stanford University
KZSU Project South Interviews
The KZSU Project South Interviews are a collection of transcribed meetings and interviews with civil rights workers and local activists in the South recorded by several Stanford students affiliated with the campus radio station KZSU during the summer of 1965. Includes interviews of members of CORE, the MFDP, the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC; transcripts of formal and informal remarks of persons working with smaller, independent civil rights projects, of local Blacks associated with the Movement, and other people, including Ku Klux Klansmen; and transcribed action tapes of civil rights workers canvassing voters, conducting freedom schools, or participating in demonstrations.
University of Florida
Mississippi Freedom Project
The Mississippi Freedom Project (MFP) is an award-winning archive of 200+ oral history interviews conducted by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida with veterans of the civil rights movement and notable residents of the Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta including individuals such as Lawrence Guyot, Margaret Block, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, John Due, and many others. A substantial part of the collection centers on activism and organizing in partnership with the Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization in Sunflower, Mississippi and includes the oral history booklet, “I will Never Forget: Memories from Mississippi Freedom Summer,” in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer in Indianola.
University of Georgia
Civil Rights Digital Library
The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational material from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. Includes a digital video archive of historical news film and serves as a civil rights portal by connecting related digital collections.
McComb Legacies
The McComb Legacies website shares the history of McComb, MS, with an emphasis on the stories of working people of all races, women, and young people and how they have strived for equity in labor, civics, education, economics, and the arts. The site is designed by students with an emphasis on oral histories conducted by students in an effort to understand, preserve, and share their local history.
More Digital Sources
University of North Carolina, Southern Oral History Program Collection
Brown University, Choices Program, Civil Rights
