History of Black Power Movements in 20th Century America

From 2010 to 2013, over one hundred interviews with one hundred thirty-nine participants were recorded in high-definition video. They are now available in their entirety as full-length video streams on the Library's site. The recollections of interviewees cover a wide variety of topics about the freedom struggle, such as the influence of organized labor, nonviolence and self-defense, and the importance of faith, music, family, and friendships. Actions and events discussed in the interviews include the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), the Albany Movement (1961), the Freedom Rides (1961), the Selma to Montgomery Rights March (1965), the Orangeburg Massacre (1968), local sit-ins, voter registration drives in the South, and the murder of fourteen-year old Emmett Till in 1955.

Joyce O’Neal can still hear horses’ hooves on the steps of her church on Bloody Sunday. Nelson Malden recalls Martin Luther King Jr. stopping by his barbershop for a weekly haircut. Valda Harris Montgomery remembers more than 30 beaten Freedom Riders finding sanctuary in her childhood home. Voices of Alabama tells these and other stories from 20 sites of worship, lodging, and civic engagement in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma/the Black Belt that played significant roles in the African-American struggle for freedom—not just during the Civil Rights Movement, but beginning in Reconstruction.

In 1995, Dr. Horace Huntley started the Oral History Project at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to collect the stories of individuals involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama.

Over the years, the project has grown to include smaller oral history collections focused on more specific topics. These include, but are not limited to, experiences of foot soldiers, the life of Judge Oscar Adams, and white allies to the Movement. The collection contains over 600 interviews housed on VHS and MiniDV tapes and is still growing (on digital now!).

The Civil Rights History Project (CRHP) provides faces and voices to many of the previously unknown individuals who made valuable contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. These members of The Freedom Movement were committed to eliminating racial segregation and inequality in the United States, sometimes at a great cost to themselves, their families, and their community. By organizing voter registration drives, providing, housing, food, and money among many other duties, they worked to transform America and make it a better place. These interviews bear witness to those efforts.

Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. While most research on American race relations has utilized a binary analytical lens - examining either "black" vs. "white" or "Anglo" vs. "Mexican" - the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project collects, interprets, and disseminates new oral history interviews with members of all three groups.

SNCC focused on voter registration and on mounting a systemic challenge to the white supremacy that governed the country’s entrenched political, economic and social structures.

Young activists and organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “SNICK”), represented a radical, new unanticipated force whose work continues to have great relevance today. For the first time, young people decisively entered the ranks of civil rights movement leadership. They committed themselves to full-time organizing from the bottom-up, and with this approach empowered older efforts at change and facilitated the emergence of powerful new grassroots voices. A rich website which includes links to other SNCC archives.

Primary source accounts by the United Farm Workers volunteers who built the movement. Includes extensive archives and documents, such as the Cesar Chavez Papers, and a Media section that contains Photos & Art; Music; and Videos.

This website contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom:

Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860)
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877)
Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932)
The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945)
The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975)
The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)

The documents presented here represent a selection of primary sources available in several ProQuest databases.

The SNCC Digital Gateway portrays how SNCC, alongside thousands of local Black residents, worked for Black people to take control of their political and economic lives. It also unveils the inner workings of SNCC as an organization, examining how it coordinated sit-ins and freedom schools, voter registration and economic cooperatives, anti-draft protests and international solidarity struggles.

SSDA holdings include more than 700,000 digital images drawn close to 2,000 unique volumes dating from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals. This collection contains the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and also includes valuable information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.

Hans Sloane's 1707 Voyage to the Islands, the earliest transcription of African music in the Caribbean, and indeed, probably in the Americas.

Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitives from North American slavery.
With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property.

Interviews with civil rights leaders

The Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings which date from the late-1960s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements.

Palante (1970 - 1976) was a bilingual newspaper published by the Young Lords Party. The group was founded in July 1969 as the New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization and renamed itself in May 1970 after separating from the Chicago Young Lords. In July 1972, the Young Lords Party became the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization. Palante focused on the Puerto Rican independence movement, the oppression of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the United States, and global struggles for liberation.

This digital edition reproduces the holdings of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. To contact the library, please email special.collections@nyu.edu.

Freedom (1951-55) was a newspaper founded in Harlem, New York by activists Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham during the Cold War and McCarthy eras. It openly challenged racism, imperialism, colonialism, and political repression and advocated for civil rights, labor rights and world peace. Its writers and contributors included W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry.

This digital edition reproduces the holdings of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. To contact the library, please email special.collections@nyu.edu.

Distributed between 1930 and 1937, Southern Worker was a regional newspaper produced by the Communist Party, USA. First edited by Solomon “Sol” Auberbach, who adopted the pseudonym “James S. Allen,” Southern Worker documents the Communist Party's attempt to unify Black and white laborers and farmers in a common struggle against capitalism, corporations, and inequality. In the inaugural August 16th, 1930 issue, the Southern Worker announces, “It is a paper of and for both white and black workers and farmers. It recognizes only one division, the bosses against the workers and the workers against the bosses. In this class struggle, the Southern Worker stands always, without exception, unflinchingly, for the workers. It is a workers' paper.”

While the paper addressed issues of labor broadly, it did reflect and speak to the concerns of Black laborers specifically, with an intentional focus on racist Jim Crow laws that prevented access to jobs to Black workers. Additionally, the Southern Worker maintained a prominently vocal anti-lynching stance and provided reporting and analysis on the Scottsboro Boys trials.

In 1937, the paper folded, with the September 1937 issue as the last publication of the Southern Worker. Represented here are 65 issues of the paper, from its first issue released on August 16, 1930 through March 5, 1932.

This digital edition reproduces the holdings of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. To contact the library, please email special.collections@nyu.edu.

From 1968 to 1971, The Black Panther Party Newspaper was the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States, with a weekly circulation of more than 300,000. It sold for 25 cents. Every Panther was required to read and study the newspaper before they could sell it. As it became nationally circulated, The Black Panther Party Newspaper national distribution center was located in San Francisco, with a distribution team led by Andrew Austin, Sam Napier, and Ellis White. Other distribution centers were in Chicago, Kansas, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.[5]

Blackworld is a bi-weekly student news/feature/information newspaper focusing on issues of interest to the SBU African-American community and beyond. ​

BAD published the newspapers at a time that was still an early stage in the integration of public universities in the American South. The newspapers illustrate both the challenges faced by African American college students in Arkansas and the significant organizational work students undertook in order to make the University campus and community of learning more accommodating and enjoyable for the University’s increasingly diverse student body.

Black Explosion staff strives to serve as the “black voice” for the University of Maryland and to bring particular attention to issues that affect the black community at UMD.

The Black Student Union began publishing an independent newspaper entitled the Black Explosion sometime between 1967 and 1970; the actual date is unclear, and the founding date is reported variously on the masthead of the paper itself. Maryland Media Inc. voted to accept this bi-monthly paper as a full member in September 1972, and the Black Explosion appeared under the MMI umbrella until fall 1985 when the Nyumburu Cultural Center took over sponsorship of the paper. The paper was also briefly known as simply “The Explosion,” from fall 1978 to March 1979, before resuming the name it bears today.