Rights

As far back as the 19th century, African American women fought for civil rights. They resisted slavery. They spoke out against racism. In the 20th century, they formed the backbone of the modern Civil Rights Movement. 

Explore this Exhibit from the National Women's History Museum

Discover Early Black Suffragists in Connecticut

Drawing upon the theme of Langston Hughes’ 1936 poem, Let America be America Again, this exhibit at the Beinecke Library introduces us to Carl Van Vechten's portraits of artists, activists, and powerful voices from the Harlem Renaissance era. These visionaries created a legacy of social consciousness expressed through literature, poetry, music, and lives lived in pursuit of justice. Their work formed a foundation of self-determination and racial identity that helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Explore the Beinecke Exhibit

A timeline of African American culture from 1910-1940: Critics throughout the Harlem Renaissance called for art that would make a point....intellectual leaders such as James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, Alain Locke, and W. E. B. Du Bois all insisted that African American art would serve as a front in the fight for racial equality.

Explore the Beinecke Exhibit

Article: What Was the Harlem Renaissance and Why Does it Matter?

Black radio was a vital method of communication during the Civil Rights era, with deejays spreading the news of local and national events while advocating for social justice. At the same time, Black women radio personalities advanced the push for gender equality. This exhibit chronicles the personalities and the ubiquitous presence of Black radio during the Civil Rights era.

Explore this Exhibit from the Archives of African American Music and Culture

African Americans have served in every major military conflict in U.S. history. Prior to WWII, Black soldiers in each war hoped that their loyalty and patriotism would be rewarded with freedom and equality. Following WWII, winning freedom abroad while not having it at home fostered deep-rooted discontent, paving the path toward the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Explore this Exhibit from Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center

On the eve of WWII, President Roosevelt commissioned a program to train African American aviators for the US Army Air Corps at the historically black college, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. These “Tuskegee Airmen,” also known as “The Red Tails” became famous for their heroic military legacy during the war and were a major influence in the eventual integration of the U.S. armed forces.

Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site

Meet Tuskegee Airman, Charles McGee

Lt. James L. McCullin Jr.: A Memorial to a Fallen Hero

"On January 8th, in a ceremony in the National Cathedral, Murray became the first African-American woman to be vested as an Episcopal priest. A month later, she administered her first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross—the little church in North Carolina where, more than a century earlier, a priest had baptized her grandmother Cornelia, then still a baby, and still a slave."

Read The New Yorker Article

Watch Sundance Film Festival Premiers New Documentary on Pauli Murray

The Smithsonian multi-media exhibit, Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes: A Classic in African American Genealogy, based on Murray’s memoir, Proud Shoes, explores Murray's family history. “If Grandfather had not volunteered for the Union in 1863 and come south three years later as a missionary among the Negro freedmen, our family might not have walked in such proud shoes and felt so assured of its place in history.”

Exhibit at Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture

Watch: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Pauli Murray

The Pauli Murray Family Home was designated a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2015 and a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 2016. Only 2% of the 95,000 entries in the National Register of Historic Places focus on the experiences of African Americans. To help to shatter this pitiful statistic, the Pauli Murray Center will be a leader and model to other communities who want to know, share and lift up the accomplishments and struggles of women, people of color and queer folk.

Visit the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first attempt at civil rights legislation after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. Its landmark language attempted to put African Americans on equal footing with whites. It guaranteed basic economic rights to contract, sue, and own property; and it paved the way for the 14th Amendment.

View the original Civil Rights Act of 1866

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, sometimes called the Enforcement Act or the Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction era in response to civil rights violations against African Americans.

View the original Civil Rights Act of 1875

View the original Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with 13 featured documents from President Herbert Hoover through President George W. Bush related to civil rights.

View these documents in the National Archives

As Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Burke Marshall was a crucial influence to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also became the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor Emeritus of Law and George W. Crawford Professorial Lecturer in Law.

Explore Burke Marshall's Civil Rights Archives at The JFK Library

Learn More About Burke Marshall

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.  It prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. 

Explore the exhibit from the US National Archives

On the one-year anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, panelists Roy Wilkins, Leroy Collins, and Sterling Tucker discussed the historic significance of the legislation and the future of civil rights in America.

Watch on the 1965 Panel on C-SPAN

14-year old Emmett Till, was savagely lynched in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His killers were acquitted. This racist attack shocked the nation and incited scorn from around the globe at the ruthless cruelty of the Jim Crow South. His murder, along with his mother's decision to display his mutilated body in an open-casket funeral, is widely considered one of the main events that launched the Civil Rights Movement. 

Watch Now: 65 years after Emmett Till's death, still no federal law against lynching

Watch Now: Historian on Emmett Till's Accuser Recanting Story

This little known event took place on May 17, 1957 to commemorate the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Brown vs. The Board of Education. 30,000 people march to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC to advocate for the federal government's continued dedication to desegregating public education. Speakers included A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Mahalia Jackson, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Watch the Documentary at the Library of Congress

Read the Life Magazine article

At the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Lee Friedlander was given full access to photograph the participants including everyday people as well as luminaries like Mahalia Jackson, A. Philip Randolph, Harry Belafonte, and Ruby Dee among many others. Representing some of Friedlander’s earliest works, the complete (and only existing) set of the 58 prints, was acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery, and exhibited in 2017 in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Prayer Pilgrimage.

Explore the Yale University Art Gallery Exhibit

Read the Article: The American Experience at Yale University

Reckoning with “The Incident”: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural is the subject of this exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery. Wilson’s mural stands out for its size, the ephemerality of its form, and its representation of African American resistance and physical defense of their families. In tandem with the show, the Gallery brought together five Yale faculty for a discussion called, "The Legacy of Lynching: Artistic Confrontations of Racial Terror."

Watch this Lecture: The Legacy of Lynching

Explore this Exhibit at The Yale Art Gallery

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947, but it took another generation of Black and Latinx players to make the sport truly open to all. Playing in remote minor-league towns where racial segregation remained a fact of life well into the 1960s, these were the men who, before they could live their big-league dreams, first had to beat Jim Crow. 

Watch the Desegregating Baseball Documentary

Read Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Advocate at the National Archives

Former Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale, Jonathan Holloway’s Open Yale Course examines the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath.

Explore the Lectures

The Civil Rights Movement that looms over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. In a dramatic narrative, Yale Professor of History, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights.

Professor Glenda Gilmore's Book

Professor Matthew Jacobson's book tells the story of 20-year-old Odetta Holmes, a classically trained vocalist who could have become “the next Marian Anderson.” When she veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s coffee houses, she was making one of the most portentous decisions in the history of both American music and Civil Rights.

Professor Matthew Jacobson's Book

In this incisive study, Professor Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity.

Professor Jacqueline Goldsby's Book