Libraries

Major collections include Civil Rights records from the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush presidencies; the Martin Luther King FBI File and FBI Files on locations of major civil rights demonstrations like Montgomery and Selma, Alabama or St. Augustine, Florida; and the records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

These collections contain documentation from the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in the last decade of the 19th century to the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case in the last decade of the 20th century. In the intervening 100 years, researchers will encounter documentation on subjects like the Great Migration, the East St. Louis Riot of 1917, the activities of members of the Federal Council on Negro Affairs during the New Deal, the March on Washington Movement during World War II, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the protests in Selma, Alabama, that inspired the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the National Black Political Convention in 1972.