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Remembering Jim Crow (American Radioworks)
A companion site to the NPR radio documentary on segregated life in the South (broadcast in February 2002). Presents 28 audio excerpts, ranging from one minute to ten minutes in length, and approximately 130 photographs, arranged in six thematically-organized sections. Covers legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community life, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life. As anthropologist Kate Ellis, one of the site's creators, notes, the interviews display a "marked contrast between African American and white reflections on Jim Crow." Many of the photographs come from personal collections of the people interviewed. The site also includes 16 photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in New Iberia, Louisiana. The site provides audio files and transcripts of the original radio documentary, more than 70 additional stories, a sampling of state segregation laws arranged by topic, links to eight related sites, and a 41-title bibliography. The project creators—Ellis and personnel from American RadioWorks, the Minnesota Public Radio documentary producers—used interviews selected from more than 1,000 oral histories compiled by Duke University's "Behind the Veil" project, in addition to conducting new interviews. The short 100-word introductions to each section succinctly provide a contextual framework to the documentary material. Valuable for those studying the American South, race relations, and African-American history.
"With an Even Hand": Brown v. Board at Fifty (Library of Congress)
This exhibition commemorates the 50th anniversary of the pivotal 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case. It offers 116 images, including book covers, letters, political cartoons, and photographs. "Exhibition Overview" is a 300-word introduction to the exhibit and its significance. The website is divided into three sections: "A Century of Racial Segregation," "Brown v. Board of Education," and "The Aftermath," all of which consist of links to documents, detailed paragraphs on selected documents, and events related to that section. "Discover" buttons are dispersed throughout these exhibit sections that, when clicked, reveal more information and answer a particular question, such as "What is 'separate but equal?'" The "Exhibition Checklist" includes links to all images used on the site. The site is an ideal resource for students interested in the historical developments that led to the Brown v. Board decision.
Freedom Now! An Archival Project of Tougaloo College and Brown University (Susan Smulyan, Brown University)
This searchable archive offers more than 250 documents from the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the struggle to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi in the early 1960s, and the continuing Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange that grew out of it. The Freedom Movement was "one of the most inspiring and important examples of grass-roots activism in U.S. history." The archive includes books, manuscripts, periodicals, correspondence, interview transcripts, photographs, artifacts, and legal, organizational, and personal documents. The collection can be searched by document type, keyword, or topic, including black power/black nationalism, college students, gender issues, incarceration, labor issues, legislation, media, non-violence, protest, segregation, and state government. The site offers two lesson plans on the Mississippi Freedom Movement based on documents in the database, one focused on the experiences of college-aged civil rights workers during the Freedom Movement and the other on voter registration. Other teaching resources include links to five websites on teaching with primary documents, six sites related to the African-American civil rights movement, and eight related books. This site is a useful resource for researching the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the history and people of the civil rights movement, or African-American history.
Race & Place: An African-American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA (Virginia Center for Digital History and Carter G. Woodson Institute of African and Afro-American Studies)
This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century focusing on the town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Material include maps, census databases, city records, political materials, personal papers, newspaper articles, and images, as well as a guide to various research projects and exhibitions. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. "Political materials" includes seven digitized copies of political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. "Census data" includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. "City records" includes a database of individual African Americans searchable by name, gender, occupation, and year. It also offers an African-American business directory database that includes churches, schools, clubs, and organizations searchable by first and last name, name and type of business, and year. "Oral histories" includes audio files from over 35 interviews. "Personal papers" contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. "Newspapers," still in progress, includes over 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African-American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. The articles are indexed and searchable by keyword. "Images" has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections. Image collections are either searchable or easy to browse. The website is a valuable resource for placing Jim Crow in the context of a specific locality and the individual lives of African Americans.
Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive (University of Southern Mississippi Libraries and Center for Oral History)
This website currently offers 150 oral histories relating to the civil rights movement, drawn from the University of Southern Mississippi Center for Oral History Collection. The site features interviews with civil rights leaders like Charles Cobb, Charles Evers, and Aaron Henry. It also offers oral history information about prominent figures on both sides of the civil rights movement, such as "race-baiting" Governor Ross Barnett, national White Citizens Council leader William J. Simmons, and State Sovereignty leader Erle Johnston. Approximately 25 of the interviews also offer audio clips from the original oral history recordings. The alphabetical interview index offers a 50-100 word biography of each subject, as well as information on the date and place of the interview. Each interview file includes a longer (250-300 word) biography, a list of topics discussed, a transcript of the interview, and descriptive information about the interview, the interviewer, interviewee, and topics, time period, and regions covered. The site also offers 16 collections of documents that are in the process of being digitized. At present, hundreds of pages of letters, journals, photographs, pamphlets, newsletters, FBI documents, and arrest records are available. Users may browse a collection's finding aid for links to digitized materials or search by keyword. Six collections pertain to Freedom Summer, the 1964 volunteer initiative in Mississippi to establish schools, register voters, and organize a bi-racial Democratic party. One collection is devoted to the freedom riders, who challenged segregation in 1961. Short biographies are furnished on each interviewee, in addition to a list of topics addressed. Thirty links to other civil rights websites are also offered, and each page is keyword searchable. This is a good site for studying the personalities behind the civil rights movement in southern Mississippi.