Started by Confederate veterans in 1866 and led by prominent planters, the Ku Klux Klan grew quickly during Radical Reconstruction. Hooded Klansmen terrorized individuals and freedpeoples organizations, breaking up meetings, shooting and lynching Union League leaders, and driving people away from the polls across the South. In its nighttime whippings, killings, and rapes, the Klan targeted freedpeople who showed signs of independence, such as those who bought or rented their own land, or community leaders, such as teachers. The criminal, terrorist nature of the organization was later glossed over. By the turn of the century, popular novels like Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s The Traitor, published in 1907, transformed the bloody record of the Ku Klux Klan (here softened by the euphemism Invisible Empire") into tales of gallantry

The post-World War I period in the United States saw devastating race riots around the nation: in small cities and in larger ones. But the Tulsa race riot in 1921 was perhaps the worst. Sparked by the supposed sexual assault of a white woman by a young black man, white Tulsa residents went on a twenty-four-hour rampage which resulted in the death of anywhere from 75 to 250 people and the burning of more than 1,000 black homes and businesses. Yet the African-Americans of Tulsa were not passive victims: when armed whites congregated at the Tulsa courthouse planning to lynch the young black imprisoned for the rape they were met by a crowd of equally angry blacks determined to prevent the lynching. In this interview with historian Scott Ellsworth, W. D. Williams proudly remembered the self-assertiveness of local black citizens, including his father, who took up arms to defend home and community.

The riots that broke out between 1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that included several hundred lynchings each year. One of the most savage race riots in these years erupted in Atlanta on September 22, 1906 after vague reports of African Americans harassing white women. Over five days at least ten black people were killed while Atlanta's police did nothing to protect black citizens, going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while allowing whites to remain armed. In this selection from his memoirs, Walter White, the future head of the NAACP recalled how, at age 13, he and his father defended their home from white rioters.

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. In the follow 1954 testimony to a House committee hearing on proposed legislation to end segregated travel, an attorney for the National Council of Negro Women argued that discriminatory practices were contrary to foundational American principles and recounted the humiliating arrest of a member of the WACS for disobeying a bus driver's order to move from her seat. 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.

The Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, helped middle-income families buy new homes and improve existing ones. Federal loans for low-cost housing, however, became available only after passage of the Wagner-Steagle Housing Act of 1937, and then only in modest amounts. To address a growing crisis, President Harry S. Truman, as part of his "Fair Deal" initiative, called for new slum clearance and housing legislation. Despite accusations of "socialized housing" and opposition from the real estate and construction industries, on July 15, 1949, Truman signed into law a bill providing $1.5 billion in loans and grants.Available to localities, this money would, in the President's words, "open up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome surroundings for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums." In the following article published just prior to the bill's passage, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, a professor of economics and former New Deal supporter, argued for effective legislation. Despite the law's progressive intent, urban renewal programs ultimately destroyed formerly vibrant neighborhoods. These programs were also used throughout the South and in Northern cities to strengthen segregation by relocating African-Americans away from white school districts.

This cover of the December, 1942, issue of Collier''s magazine commemorated the first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The vampire-bat portrayal of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo indicates one way in which American popular media and war propaganda presented the Japanese. Unlike images of the European enemy, the Japanese were depicted as vicious animals, most often taking the form of apes or parasitic insects. The same racial stereotypes were also applied to Japanese living in America. Suspecting their loyalty, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese Americans living on the west coast citizens and non-citizens alike and transported them to detention centers in the West. Forced to abandon their homes, jobs, and businesses, Japanese Americans remained detained in camps for the duration of the war.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930's the Beuschers--he was a sixty-two-year-old railroad worker; she was the mother of their eleven children--had been fairly prosperous: they owned their home and had several life-insurance policies serving as savings. But by the time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewed them in 1937, their lives had dramatically changed: the father had lost his railroad job and the mother was taking in sewing. This interview summary, published by the WPA, showed how they struggled to make ends meet during The Great Depression.

John Dane, a tailor, was born in Berkhampstead, England, around 1612. In the late 1630s, which he recollects here as a period of "a great coming to New England," he and his family emigrated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. He died in Ipswich in 1684. Dane's parents, like many Puritan parents, raised their children to carry what historian Philip Greven calls an "inner disciplinarian" within their own consciences at all times. Dane's mother reminded him: "Go where you will, God will find you out." In this narrative, Dane, who always remembered her warning, related the temptations he faced over the course of his life--to steal, to accept the advances of women, to avoid church--and the prices he negotiated with an all-seeing God. (The spelling of this selection has been regularized to make it easier to read.)

The interwar peace movement was arguably the largest mass movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a mobilization often overlooked in the wake of the broad popular consensus that ultimately supported the U.S. involvement in World War II. The destruction wrought in World War I (known in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Great War") and the cynical nationalist politics of the Versailles Treaty had left Americans disillusioned with the Wilsonian crusade to save the world for democracy. The antiwar movement drew on many tactics honed in earlier suffrage campaigns, including the use of pageants and plays. Circulated by the New Deal-sponsored Federal Theatre Project (FTP), these play synopses suggested the range and diversity of antiwar sentiment in the 1930s. The FTP vetted hundreds of scripts and prepared lists of plays for the use of community theaters. Antiwar dramas were among the most popular, with themes of religious pacifism, moral motherhood, and condemnation of war profiteering.

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, the following Jim Crow travel laws remained in force in 1954. That same year, the Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that separate public schools were "inherently unequal" and thus unconstitutional. In 1955, the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, organized a boycott of the city's segregated bus system. In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled Alabama's laws requiring segregated buses unconstitutional. The specific wording of these Jim Crow laws, crafted to maintain the status quo, revealed deep anxieties about race. By allocating to railroad and bus officials "police powers" to enforce segregated seating and in the case of Virginia, power to determine the race of passengers, state legislatures sought to ensure segregation. By exempting certain categories of persons, specifically nurses, servants, and prisoners, the laws also avoided disrupting ways of life that did not threaten tenets of white supremacy.

Richard L. Davis, the most important black leader of Ohio's miners, was called upon frequently in the 1880s and 1890s to serve as a spokesman for the many black miners in his home state, as well as the thousands more who labored in Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia. He was also called upon to serve as an intermediary between black rank-and-file miners and the white majority and white national leadership of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), dealing with such issues as black participation in the union, strike breaking by African Americans, and the racist attitudes of many rank-and-file white miners toward African Americans. (Davis was twice elected to the UMWA's executive board.) In this series of six letters submitted in 1891 to the National Labor Tribune, Davis reflected on the larger meaning and purpose of interracial unionism in an era of rising racial tensions and institutionalized discrimination.

The Digital Public Library of America is a free digital collection of artifacts gathered from libraries, archives and museums.  This great collection of primary source materials will continue to grow as new items are made digital. 

This website is a collection of various primary sources that have been digitized. This specific module looks at photographs, videos, posters, documents, etc related to activism in the United States. This includes the Civil Rights Movements, Civil Rights Demonstrations, Civil Rights Actions, Martin Luther King, Jr., Education Activism, Anti-War Activism, Women’s Activism, LGBT Activism. There are several other primary source sets as well.

From its inception, the Confederacy sought international recognition from European nations. Support from Europe would help persuade the North to accept Southern independence, and, more immediately, secure a source of manufactured goods needed for the war effort. Southern efforts to gain recognition focused on England, the largest purchaser of southern cotton. This 1862 cartoon from the northern satirical weekly, Vanity Fair, presented the Confederacy's president trying to gain diplomatic recognition from a skeptical Great Britain. I hardly think it will wash

In the article “Confronting Ableism on the Way to Justice,” activist Keith Jones remembers the bias and deficit-based approach he experienced in school: “Being Black and a child with cerebral palsy, or ‘crippled’ as I was called, neither I nor my classmates were expected to put forth any effort to learn. So, little effort was spent on teaching us.” Now, Jones, a leader within the disability rights movement, advocates for disability representation in the broader social justice struggle, including in education because “we can’t have inclusive schools without disability-inclusive spaces and accommodations for learning.”

Statistics on women's work in the early 20th century were invariably misleading: most women worked but only a minority were formally in the wage labor force. Nowhere was the discrepancy between the domestic ideal and the reality of women's work lives wider than in rural America. In 1913 the U. S. Department of Agriculture decided to investigate and document the lives of farm woman they discovered a vast reservoir of discontent. The report, reproduced here, was culled from letters responding to a questionnaire sent to the wives of farmers and commented on all aspects of rural life, especially the enormous burden of labor that these officially non-working women were expected to carry out.

The issue of race divided the Southern Populist movement. In some ways, it can be seen as uniquely interracial for its time, yet in other respects it was critically limited by racial divisions. Even in the heyday of Populism, not all members of the Southern Farmers' Alliance were equally committed to the interracial program that some leaders advocated. While white and Colored Farmers' Alliances joined at times in cooperative purchasing and marketing arrangements, the tension between black and white agrarians remained strong. In the late 1880s, African Americans, who were suspicious of the white Alliance, joined the Knights of Labor. Many southern whites--including members of the Farmers' Alliance--saw the growth of black locals of the Knights as a serious threat. This 1889 memorandum by white North Carolina plantation owner John Bryan Grimes recorded his efforts to infiltrate a Knights of Labor local that some of his black workers had joined. Although Grimes was himself a Populist, he viewed the Knights as a threat to his interests.

The 1920s and 1930s gave rise to new forms of popular humor, humor with a sophisticated edge drawn from a more prosperous, cosmopolitan urban experience. In New York, a circle of urbane humorists with a national audience rose around the New Yorker magazine and the famous "Algonquin Round Table," an informal group that met occasionally at the Algonquin Hotel. Ironic, witty, emphasizing word play and "in jokes," the New Yorker work of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, and Dorothy Parker satirized the pretensions of ordinary middle-class life. "Do Insects Think?," a 1922 essay by Robert Benchley, gleefully mocked the pretentious tone of American science, as well as the cult of pep, productivity, and activity that characterized the 1920s. Doing nothing, it suggested, offered the best evidence of intelligence.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, two representatives of labor unions voiced opposition to the ERA, arguing that it would threaten protective legislation based on gender difference.