Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in 1962 to address issues of poverty, as well as feelings of helplessness, alienation, and indifference in African-American and working class communities. The group, which focused initially on community organizing, quickly became a leader of the anti-war movement when President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965. A graduate student in 1965 at the University of Michigan, Carl Oglesby worked as a writer for a defense contractor. He was horrified at what he began to learn about Vietnam, and when SDS members found him he quickly joined the group. Oglesby quit his job, spoke at the first teach-in against the Vietnam War at Michigan, and was elected president of SDS in 1965. He then spent years traveling around the country speaking against the war.

The slave auction was one of the most barbaric practices of the harsh system of slavery. The slave trade within the United States destroyed families and tore apart communities, especially after 1840 when slavery was extended into the newer lands of the lower South and Southwest. Planters in the older settled areas of the upper South could realize substantial profits selling enslaved people, and New Orleans became the center of the trade. The resulting forced migration involved hundreds of thousands of African Americans. Some moved with their masters, but the migration also tore apart slave families residing on different plantations. Others were sold on the block, as Solomon Northrup described in his Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded "Long John," a work song, sung by a man identified as "Lightning" and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. "Long John" mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners.

As the Civil Rights movement began to dismantle formal racial segregation, African-American union activists such as James Houghton sought to integrate the workplace by challenging racial segregation in industrial unions. Houghton was active in the Negro American Labor Council, founded in 1960, before Cold War fears of communist infiltration disbanded the organization. Frustrated by what he saw as a lack of militancy to combat discrimination within the labor movement, Houghton founded the Harlem Unemployment Center, which later became Harlem Fight Back, to challenge racial discrimination in the skilled building trades. The organization played an important role in creating equal employment opportunity programs, increasing minority hiring at construction sites, and forcing unions to open their membership rolls.

The Underground Railroad was a network of free African Americans and sympathetic whites that concealed, clothed, and guided fugitive slaves to the North and freedom. The "railroad" comprised a series of stops often tended by local vigilance committees in northern communities. John P. Parker was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, but became a freeman by 1845. He moved to Rowley, Ohio with its active abolitionist community and followed his trade as an iron master by day while rescuing fugitive slaves by night. Free blacks such as Parker supplied most of the needed labor and finances to help escaped slaves. Parker, it is believed, helped hundreds escape to freedom across the Ohio River from Kentucky along the busiest segment of the railroad. He then passed them on to another "conductor," braving significant dangers, as related in this excerpt from a recently published autobiography compiled from newspaper interviews with Parker in 1885.

At the Civil War's end, enslaved people responded in a variety of ways to take their freedom. One meaning of freedom can be glimpsed in the following report from Charleston, South Carolina, published in the New York Daily Tribune on April 4, 1865, just a few days before General Robert E. Lee's surrender in Virginia. Charleston boasted one of the largest and most important African-American communities in the antebellum South. Two months after the Confederate Army fled, the city's black men and women organized a parade to celebrate their emancipation. The parade numbered thousands of marchers and included dramatic tableaux, banners, and songs. African Americans used such public celebrations to symbolize their deeply held beliefs and feelings, in a manner that paralleled the public displays of their white working-class counterparts in the decades before the war.

The rising tide of lynchings of African Americans across the South launched a national anti-lynching crusade, led by Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper editor Ida Wells-Barnett, an outspoken advocate for the area's African-American citizens. As the leader of the national anti-lynching movement, Wells-Barnett joined a group of Illinois congressmen who visited the White House in March, 1898, to protest the murder of the newly-appointed Lake City, South Carolina Postmaster Baker, who was black. Wells-Barnett penned this petition to President William McKinley to urge punishment of those responsible for shooting.

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor convened in Richmond, Virginia, a region divided by racial and political conflict, on October 4, 1886. In the 1880s, Southern politics was split between southern Democrats who sought to "redeem" the old order and a progressive (and in some places interracial) political movement that sought to extend the gains won by ordinary black and white southerners during the Reconstruction era. As more than one thousand delegates gathered from across the country in the former capital of the Confederacy, the labor and political reform movements hoped the convention would be a launching pad for their message of racial peace and political reform. But the convention and the Knights of Labor were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization's attitude toward the question of social equality between the races. Black Knight Frank J. Ferrell faced an uproar when he was invited to socialize with fellow white Knights at the convention. The attitude of an anonymous Knight of Labor, interviewed here, typified the not-in-my-neighborhood reaction of many white Knights to Ferrell's crossing of the color line.

Following the Civil War, the federal government brought newly freed people into the political and economic sphere through a variety of efforts known as Radical Reconstruction. But planters, unwilling to lose control over African-American laborers, attempted to rule the South through violence and legal and economic intimidation. The secret terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan was part of the violent white reaction to Reconstruction. Founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1866, Klan nightriders targeted black veterans and freedmen who had left their employers and those who had succeeded in breaking out of the plantation system. African Americans who transgressed local norms of white supremacy were in particular danger as the testimony from Maria Carter and others at these 1871 Congressional hearings about the Klan made clear. Klan leaders often were prominent planters and their family members while poorer men made up the rank and file.

In the years immediately following World War I, tens of thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers flocked to the nation's Northern cities looking for good jobs and a measure of respect and security. Many white Americans, fearful of competition for scarce jobs and housing, responded by attacking black citizens in a spate of urban race riots. In urban African-American enclaves, the 1920s were marked by a flowering of cultural expressions and a proliferation of black self-help organizations that accompanied the era of the "New Negro." Debates raged over the best political and organizational path for black Americans, and the Crisis, the national magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), offered one of the earliest and most powerful endorsements of the "New Negro." In an editorial immediately following the Chicago race riot of 1919, Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois argued in favor of acts of self-defense and armed resistance, despite the editorial's conciliatory title, "Let Us Reason Together."

After the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, a group of proprietors received a royal grant to establish the colony of South Carolina. They envisioned an agricultural economy based on mixed farming, cattle raising, and trade in deerskins with the local Indians, diverging from the Chesapeake's tobacco and slave economy to the north. The Carolina proprietors sought settlers from the Caribbean by offering inexpensive land for family farms. But conditions were harsh, work was heavy, and poor nutrition was common, as Oxford University-educated Thomas Newe made clear in this 1682 letter to his father. A small minority of wealthy colonists seized economic and political control of the colony. They concentrated in the town of Charleston, drove out the local Indians, and occupied huge tracts of land. Deviating from the society that had been planned, these planters established rice cultivation, thanks to the African slaves whose experience in West Africa formed the basis for the economy. By 1707 South Carolina had the first black majority population in North America. Thomas Newe died within a year of writing these letters, at the age of 28.

Alan Paton's first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), communicated the tragic dimensions of South Africa's system of apartheid to a world audience. In 1954, Paton was asked by Collier's magazine to observe and interview Americans about this country's system of racial segregation. In the first of two articles, Paton reported on race relations in Washington, D.C. and in the Deep South around the time that the Supreme Court declared that segregated "separate but equal" public schools were unconstitutional in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The following letters to the editor express a range of reactions to the Court' s decision and to Paton' s undisguised support for the ongoing "war against segregation."

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of The Making of African American Identity, Volume 2: 1865-1917. Primary source materials include paintings, sculpture, narratives, autobiographies, short stories, essays, songs, letters, poems, photographs, interviews, and more. Sources are divided into the topics: Freedom, Identity, Institutions, Politics, and Forward.

On September 18, 1895 Booker T. Washington, the noted African-American educator who was born a slave in 1858, spoke before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His Atlanta Compromise address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Acutely conscious of the narrow limitations whites placed on African Americans' economic aspirations, Washington stressed that blacks must accommodate white people's--and especially southern whites'--refusal to tolerate blacks as anything more than sophisticated menials. In this excerpt from his best-selling autobiography Up From Slavery (1901) Washington explained some of the circumstances surrounding the unprecedented invitation for him to speak before a biracial audience.

This is a course intended to give students a broad overview of the management challenges of the non-profit sector. It is not a detailed management course but rather is aimed at students who will likely relate to non-profits in a variety of ways (on the boards, as volunteers, as fund-raisers, and occasionally as staff).

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the United States military. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. President Franklin Roosevelt quickly addressed Congress to ask for a declaration of war. In the wake of the attack and Roosevelt's speech, folklorists employed by the Library of Congress rushed out to the streets of Washington, D. C., to record public reaction. The selection of "man on the street" interviews showed a wide range of public responses to the attack and to FDR's speech. Young servicemen seemed most concerned about canceled furloughs, while a Polish immigrant swore his undying loyalty to the United States. African Americans in a poolhall insisted on their people's contribution to American history.

The state governments that came to power in the South in 1865 and 1866 passed harsh laws regulating the movement and conditions of work for newly freed slaves. Known as Black Codes, these laws sought to recreate slavery in all but name by preventing blacks from working outside of agriculture and domestic service, limiting their movement, and subjecting those without a contract for employment to arrest and forced labor. Local officials also gave tacit or overt support to intense racist violence. Rioting whites in Memphis killed forty-six African-Americans in May 1866. Two months later, thirty-four blacks and three white supporters were murdered by a white mob in New Orleans. In this picture, Thomas Nast gave his view of Andrew Johnson's role in the July 1866 New Orleans riot.

Camp meetings such as this one, held near Sparta, Georgia, in 1807, were a manifestation of the nationwide Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. The Second Great Awakening was an evangelical religious revival conducted by Baptists, Methodists, and other dissenting Protestant sects. Evangelical religion was often described as "enthusiastic," and people attending expressed their feelings through spontaneous movements and speech. Like the first Great Awakening of the 18th century, the Second Great Awakening was notably egalitarian, with men, women, blacks, and poor whites mingling together in worship.

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson probably received more black votes than any previous Democratic presidential candidate, but his administration proved to be a bitter disappointment to African Americans. Black voters had abandoned William Howard Taft, Wilson's Republican predecessor, in part because he had appointed or retained a mere thirty-one black officeholders. But Wilson made only nine black appointments, and eight of these were Republican carryovers. Worse still, Wilson extended and defended segregation in the federal civil service. Black workers were forced to use inferior and segregated washrooms, and screens were set up to separate black and white workers in the same government offices. African Americans protested Wilson's policies. One of the most famous protest delegations was led in 1914 by Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and Boston newspaper editor. Wilson found Trotter's manner "insulting" and dismissed the delegation. The encounter made front-page news, and subsequent rallies protested Wilson's poor treatment of Trotter. But the segregation of the federal service continued.

In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools segregated according to race were "inherently unequal." State laws requiring school segregation therefore conflicted with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling challenged traditional attitudes and threatened a segregated way of life in the South validated in 1896 by the Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. The 1896 ruling permitted "separate but equal" public accommodations. In 1955, the Court ordained that desegregation of public schools should proceed "with all deliberate speed;" yet in many parts of the South, reactionary forces resisted. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus challenged efforts by the school board to institute a gradual school desegregation process and ordered state National Guard troops to defy Federal law and stop nine African-American students from attending an all-white high school. As television spread images of the subsequent mob violence around the world, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the following radio and television address on September 24, 1957, announced his reluctant response. Despite his disapproval of the Brown decision, Eisenhower, couching his address in the language of law and order, Cold War propaganda, and national pride, became the first president since Reconstruction to send Federal troops to protect the rights of African Americans. Although the nine students enrolled, resistance to desegregation continued as Faubus closed Little Rock high schools the following year and the number of desegregated schools in the South dropped precipitously in the ensuing years.