Primary Sources for 20th Century History-- U.Va. Library Databases

The project records and preserves the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South from the 1890s to the 1950s. It is the largest single collection of Jim Crow-era oral histories in the world: visitors to the site can listen to over 175 hours of recordings. Additionally, there are over 10,000 pages of transcripts from the interviews, which "capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making" that made up the African American experience in the South during this period.

Primary source documents from the National Negro Business League, a business organization founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington. The League included small African American business owners, doctors, farmers, craftsmen, and other professionals. Its goal was to allow business to put economic development at the forefront of getting African-American equality in America.

This collection contains materials on civil rights, the development of civil rights policy, and the debate over civil rights legislation during the administration of President George H.W. Bush and during his tenure as vice president. Contents of this collection includes memoranda, talking points, correspondence, legal briefs, transcripts, news summaries, draft legislation, statements of administration policy (SAP’s), case histories, legislative histories and news-clippings covering a broad range of civil rights issues.

Documents and information about civil rights cases in the United States. Topics include child welfare, school desegregation, election/voting rights, immigration, police profiling, conditions in public housing, jails prisons, mental health facilities.

The William Elwood Civil Rights Lawyers Project tells the legal history of the civil rights struggle through scores of digitized interviews made from 273 tapes left to the UVa Library.

Video, audio, and text of interviews with leaders in the black community, conducted chiefly by Julian Bond. These oral histories focus on leadership and the transformational role of the civil rights movement in America.

Primary source documents related to voting rights activist and civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer.
Fannie Lou Hamer was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The collection includes correspondence, financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items. The papers are arranged in the following series: Personal, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Freedom Farms Corporation, Delta Ministry, Mississippians United to Elect Negro Candidates, Delta Opportunities Corporation, and Collected Materials.

Throughout the twentieth century Black Americans of all political persuasions were subject to federal scrutiny, harassment, and prosecution. The Federal Bureau of Investigation enlisted black "confidential special informants" to infiltrate a variety of organizations. Hundreds of documents in this collection were originated by such operatives. The reports provide a wealth of detail on "Negro" radicals and their organizations. In addition to infiltration, the FBI contributed to the infringement of First Amendment freedoms by making its agents a constant visible presence at radical rallies and meetings. This archive is based on original microfilm.

Search over 56,000 pages of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) involvement in notable civil rights and civil liberties issues such as Willie McGee, the Trenton Six, Martinsville Seven and many others. The CRC also held many high profile protests in Washington DC and the UN. Due to its Communist Party affiliations, the Civil Rights Congress was cited as subversive by President Harry S. Truman’s Attorney General, Thomas Clark.

This series contains a collection of essential materials for the study of the early development of the Civil Rights Movement-concerned with the issues of Lynching, Segregation, Race riots, and Employment discrimination. This collection from FDR’s Official File provides insight into his political style and presents an instructive example of how he balanced moral preference with political realities.

This collection includes essential materials for the study of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement at a critical moment in its history. This archive details Operation Oak Tree, the code name for the Army's plans to intervene in Alabama in the event of civil disturbances related to school integration in May 1963. The documents in this collection are sourced from the Records of the Department of the Army, in the custody of the National Archives of the United States.

This collection contains extensive FBI documentation on Meredith’s battle to enroll at The University of Mississippi in 1962 and white political and social backlash, including his correspondence with the NAACP and positive and negative letters he received from around the world during his ordeal.

For most of the twentieth century the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was the principal defender of the rights that citizens can assert against government. These files cover numerous topics that resonate for contemporary research. Subjects include: the first “Red Scare” following the Russian Revolution of 1917; debates in the 1920s on immigration; the American Birth Control League; lynchings in the 1930s; debates on aliens and immigrants in the years immediately preceding the U.S. entry into the Second World War; and the ACLU’s involvement in two of the mid-century’s most important issues: the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.

The collection consists of rare works of poetry, organizational records, print publications, over one hundred articles, poems, plays, and speeches by Baraka, a small amount of personal correspondence, and oral histories. The collection has been arranged into eighteen series.

Digital collection of the NAACP’s archive of internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the U.S. It covers the organization’s involvement in crucial civil rights issues such as lynching, school desegregation, and discrimination in the military, the criminal justice system, employment, housing, etc.

The collection consists of records of the United Domestic Workers Union. It includes digitized Union correspondence, minutes, subject files, financial documents, membership records, and legal documents.

This collection is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.

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 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.

It includes:
• Historic materials including documents, photographs, oral history interviews, and audiovisual material hosted in digital collections at repositories across the country
• Profiles examining individuals’ contributions to the Movement
• Events tracing the evolution of SNCC’s organizing
• Inside SNCC pages unveiling the inner workings of SNCC as an organization
• Our Voices sections presenting aspects of SNCC’s history from the eyes of the activists themselves
• Map connecting users to the people who worked–and the events that happened–in a specific place

Primary source documents related to the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia. Boynton had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines.