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This is a poster from 1946 showing the racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans were enforced in the US by state laws known as the Jim Crow laws. These regulations required that whites and blacks use separate restrooms, buses, and other public areas. They also limited black people's ability to vote, as well as their access to employment and other opportunities. This sign is telling people to help restore these laws, however they were abolished in the mid 1960s. -
Who Speaks for the Negro? by Robert Penn Warren was released in 1965. In early 1964, Warren traveled throughout the country and spoke with many men and women who were active in the American Civil Rights Movement in order to gather information. He used a reel-to-reel tape recorder to capture each conversation on tape. Sections of the transcripts of these conversations are included in the book along with Warren's views on the current state of the American Civil Rights Movement. -
Martin Luther King Jr was the most well-known leader in the country during the 20th century's civil rights movement. This is a painted poster of MLK jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that he helped plane, which helped demonstrate for the civil and economic rights of Black Americans. There he gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. -
This hand painted, wooden sculpture, is of Rosa Parks. Parks was a civil rights activist who was detained on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, while riding a public bus when she resisted the driver's request that she give up her seat to a white male passenger. Martin Luther King Jr. helped the boycott grow to endure 382 days, and it only ended when the US Supreme Court declared bus segregation illegal. -
To Marry by Elizabeth Catlett was influenced by a line from Margaret Walker's poem "For My People." The artwork, which is arranged like a family photo album, shows a couple on their wedding day over a picture of an African American man who has been lynched. The unsettling contrast is an allusion to Walker's poetry, which describes the horror of African Americans who "marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching."