Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

This 1994 documentary brings the passions and agonies of Mississippi’s voter-registration drive into the present tense.

Bayard Rustin tried to forge a mass coalition to deliver progressive change. His failure to do so in the 1960s tells us much about building one today.

Rustin’s assessment of the lay of the political land was predicated on a no-nonsense understanding of the radicalism of the moment.

The activist did not learn about her right to vote until she was 44, but once she did, she vigorously fought for black voting rights

Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the most important civil rights icons. But her health issues show that racism isn't just a social disease, it's a physical one.

Freedom Summer in the segregationist heart of the Deep South.

An online roundtable on a new biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

She’s mostly remembered for one famous speech. Her actual legacy is far greater than that.

The human rights activist and former sharecropper once said that “you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free.”

Fannie Lou Hamer is among the sharecroppers interviewed in this unauthorized documentary about the plantation of Dixiecrat James Eastland.

Black civil-rights activists—and especially Black women—delivered on the promise of the Founding. Their victories are in peril.

Clinton disparaged Carmichael at John Lewis’s funeral. But Black radicalism speaks more to the present moment than Clinton’s centrist politics.

Hubert Humphrey and the unmaking of Cold War liberalism.

A documentary website that tells the story of how young activists united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement that transformed the nation.

A field secretary of SNCC discusses the importance of maintaining political power inside communities at the county level.