Municipal workers led a wave of strikes that made the 1960's and early 1970's a highpoint for organized labor militancy in New York City. Teachers, social workers, sanitation workers, and parks employees all fought to improve work conditions, low-paying wage scales, and to reform the city's social services. Lillian Roberts arrived in New York in 1965 to organize low-paid and often disrespected hospital workers for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). At the time, AFSCME was competing with the Teamsters to represent the health workers, and the struggle was intense enough for Roberts to carry a brick in her purse. An African-American woman who had grown up on welfare in Chicago, Roberts proved adept at organizing hospital workers, many of whom were African-American women. She and AFSCME prevailed, paving the way for their local D.C. 37 to become the dominant New York municipal union.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. This seventeen-year-old African American used his motion picture autobiography to describe how films not only led to dreams of fast cars but also made him "feel the injustice done the Negro race."

In 1960, following student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the South, George E. McMillan, a reporter from Knoxville, Tennessee, traveled the region and analyzed its "current raw, ugly temper." Six years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and five years after the Court declared that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed," only a small percentage of Southern schools had been affected. African Americans faced disenfranchisement, severely limited economic opportunities, prejudicial treatment in the criminal justice system, and attacks from mobs and police. McMillan contrasted black outrage at the philosophy of "gradual" change with white insistence on retaining the status quo, and also looked at the role of the military and business communities in fostering change. The Raleigh, North Carolina, meeting McMillan mentioned in passing marked the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent activist group intent on achieving racial equality.

This 1903 police department arrest record reflects the faith in data and science espoused by some Progressives. The reputedly scientific measurements instituted by French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon claimed to detect innate criminality and other character flaws, many associated with particular ethnic and racial groups, through physical evidence. Although it bore the stamp of scientific approval, this and other contemporary techniques for differentiating people based on race or physical characteristics incorporated widely held beliefs that Southern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were inherently and biological different from and inferior to white Anglo Saxons. These beliefs, in turn, lent credence to the rise of Jim Crow and immigrant exclusion.

From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term "lynching" did not have any racial implications. Targets included Tories, horse thieves, gamblers, and abolitionists. But starting in the 1880s, mob violence was increasingly directed at African Americans. Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. Lynchings, which were often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. In April 1898, the Cleveland Gazette, a black newspaper, reported on the lynching of the black postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, who was burned out of his home and shot by a white mob incensed by his appointment to a federal post. The murder of Postmaster Baker galvanized the anti-lynching movement to seek federal intervention.

One of the principal tragedies of slavery was family separation. In this letter, written in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1852, a woman writes to her husband about the sale of their son, Albert, to a slaver trader. Maria and Richard Perkins, who were owned by different masters, were already separated, but now Maria Perkins was witnessing the complete dissolution of her household, both people and possessions. She attempts to salvage at least her marriage by asking her husband to convince his owner buy her. Most slaves did not know how to read and write and this letter, in Mrs. Perkins' own handwriting, is unusual. This letter first came to light in 1929 when Yale historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published it in his Life and Labor in the Old South, and it remains in his papers.

While white southerners briefly considered the idea of emancipating slaves in the years following the American Revolution, by the early-nineteenth century that sentiment had been replaced by a systematic campaign to restrict possibilities for emancipation. After the Nat Turner rebellion of 1832, whites viewed the presence of free blacks among the slave population as dangerous and began to limit their rights. The growth of the southern free black population slowed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and became concentrated in urban areas where they worked as manual laborers, domestics, and artisans. In this 1863 interview, Washington Spradling, 63, the son of an overseer, described how he purchased his family's freedom yet still faced growing restrictions under Kentucky laws that severely hampered free blacks' movements and efforts to achieve justice. Samuel Gridley Howe, an abolitionist and educator of the blind, interviewed Spradling for the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, a body created to make recommendations about the plight of freedmen after the war.

The Birth of a Nation, which opened in March 1915, was simultaneously a landmark in the history of American cinema and a landmark in American racism. The film depicted the South, following the assassination of President Lincoln, as ruled by rapacious African Americans, who by the film's end were heroically overthrown from power by the Ku Klux Klan. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to mount boycott of the film, but it failed to stir significant white opposition. The NAACP changed its tactics; this April 17, 1915, letter from NAACP national secretary Mary Childs Nerney described the organization's efforts, largely in vain, to get local film censors to remove particularly racist scenes. The NAACP's ongoing national campaign to censor the film produced decidedly mixed results. Despite success in Boston and Chicago in securing several minor cuts in the film's release print, by year's end distributors could show The Birth of a Nation almost anywhere in the country.

In 1831 a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia. A religious leader and self-styled Baptist minister, Turner and a group of followers killed some sixty white men, women, and children on the night of August 21. Turner and 16 of his conspirators were captured and executed, but the incident continued to haunt Southern whites. Blacks were randomly killed all over Southhampton County; many were beheaded and their heads left along the roads to warn others. In the wake of the uprising planters tightened their grip on slaves and slavery. This woodcut was published in an 1831 account of the slave uprising.

The colonists 'revolutionary struggle against British political authority also raised issues about equality and human rights at home. Enslaved people throughout the colonies seized upon the rhetoric of liberty and equality to point out the contradiction of fighting Great Britain over principles not fully followed by the colonies themselves; they also appealed to Christian precepts. Scores of petitions flooded the newly established state legislatures. This one, submitted to the Massachusetts General Court in 1777, linked the cause of American freedom with the struggle of African Americans for liberty. Several lawsuits seeking freedom were successful. When Quok Walker sued for his freedom and back wages in 1781, the Massachusetts Chief Justice ruled that his enslavement violated the new state constitution's statement that "men are born free and Equal." His case effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts and other New England states.

Whether attempting to escape or simply traveling at night to visit friends or family in neighboring plantations, African-American slaves were threatened by the slave patrols. These squads, often including non-slaveholders who were required to serve under state law, were notorious for their brutality. Most feared were the dogs the pattyrollers" used to track down fugitive slaves. This 1856 advertisement promoted the sale of dogs trained expressly to hunt human beings."

This collection uses primary sources to explore Negro League Baseball. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Journalist Theodore H. White received widespread acclaim for his "The Making of the President" series that analyzed election campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. As White points out in the following Collier's article, African-American migration to Northern cities from the South made the black voter an important player in national politics by the mid-1950s. From 1910 to 1970, more than 6.5 million African Americans came North, with 3 million arriving in cities between 1940 and 1960. During the 1956 presidential campaign, Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson attempted to win this black vote by voicing support for the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing segregated schools, a ruling incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower had refused to approve. Stevenson's appeal to black voters, however, was muted by his opposition to using Federal funds or troops to enforce desegregation, a position he adopted to avoid alienating southern voters. In addition, in the 1952 race, Stevenson had selected as his running mate a segregationist Senator from Alabama, John Sparkman. In October, African-American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., announced his support of the President, and on election day, more than 60 percent of black voters also chose Eisenhower. This marked a shift in party allegiance by blacks who had voted overwhelmingly Democratic since the 1930s, when many changed from the party of Lincoln to support Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although Eisenhower's rout of Stevenson was attributed more to foreign affairs than domestic, the black vote continued to be a major factor in national politics.

World War I wartime production demanded the mobilization of thousands of workers to make steel and rubber, work in petrochemical industries, and build ships. Few immigrants left Europe for the United States, and workers were desperately needed to replace those who had left for military service. The following excerpts from African-American newspapers described the new opportunities and continuing struggles that black workers confronted, noting both interracial conflict and cooperation during wartime. "Organized Labor Not Friendly?" exemplified a widely held suspicion of unions among African Americans, who had previously been excluded from organized labor's ranks. "Negro Workers Are Organizing" described one response: the formation of alternative unions organized for black workers on a city-wide basis. "Big Labor Day Celebration" reported on a parade and baseball game that included black and white unionists. In "The Negro and the War," the writer found reason for optimism that President Woodrow Wilson's war aims--"to make the world safe for democracy"--might also find expression in the realization of democratic ideals at home.

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 interviewed students, government officials, NAACP members, church leaders, and soldiers in Washington, D.C., and in the Deep South around the time that the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruled segregated "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional. Like earlier visitors from abroad--such as St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Gunnar Myrdal--Paton offered a uniquely comparative perspective as he searched for answers on the current state of segregation and future prospects for the integration of American institutions.

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. For this second of two articles, Paton, a co-founder and president of the Liberal Party of South Africa, traveled to urban areas in the West and North in order to relate personal stories behind practices such as the restrictive covenant in housing markets, mob violence against blacks in housing projects, and discrimination in employment. Despite the widespread racial injustice he found, Paton predicted that "segregation is dying" in the U.S. due in large part to the struggles of blacks themselves. He concluded that Americans could find hope in the "advance of the Negro" and the recent Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

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." Many black leaders, including religious figures, embraced racial pride and militancy. This 1921 article by Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, captured well what was "new" in the New Negro: an aggressive willingness to defend black communities against white racist attacks and a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of African-American communities in the North.

The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" laws when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana statute requiring "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment clause guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the laws. (Jim Crow, the colloquial term for segregation, referred to a blackface character popular on the minstrel stage.) Jim Crow legislation extended throughout the South to schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theaters, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, Jim Crow travel laws remained in effect in the South. The following letter submitted to a House committee holding hearings in 1954 on legislation to end segregated travel attested to the substandard condition of railroad cars for blacks. The bills under consideration never made it to the House floor for a vote. In 1956, following a boycott by the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, against the city's segregated bus system, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

In this excerpt from Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson told the story of black soldiers and canteen workers. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. Their account commemorated and celebrated African-American participation in the war, even as it noted segregation and discrimination within the effort to "save the world for democracy." The YMCA was one of a very few examples of interracial effort and cooperation during this period; nonetheless, Hunton and Johnson note that some workers of the organization failed to live up to its ideals. German propaganda directed to African-American soldiers used such examples of racism to decry the hypocrisy of the United States and to exhort black soldiers to surrender to the German army.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from a 1969 Senate hearing, Frank Pebeahsy, a Comanche Indian from Oklahoma, presented his experiences as a migrant farmworker. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.