Civil rights protesters march down a Raleigh street in 1963. This image was taken by the New & Observer and is part of the Civil Rights Movement Collection
As Black History Month winds down, the State Archives of North Carolina has two great new resources related to African American history that you won’t want to miss.
- The African American Education Collection of the Archives’ digital collections has actually been around for a while, but what’s new are a whole host of materials related to Rosenwald Schools. The Rosenwald rural school building program was a major effort to improve the quality of public education for African Americans in the early 20th century South. You can learn more about the movement here and see those cool new resources here.
- The Archives’ Civil Rights Movement Collection is totally new. This group of materials includes letters, speeches, reports, booklets, photographs, news clippings and more related to a number of topics associated with the Civil Rights movement in North Carolina 1950s to the 1970s. Though the emphasis is on state agency records, there’s much be discovered and you can start taking a look around here.
If this is your first exposure to the North Carolina Digital Collections, a joint project of the State Archives and State Library, don’t let it be your last. The collections house an endless amount of cool stuff from our state’s past from audio recordings of the General Assembly’s debates on the Speak Ban Law to letters from the Civil War. You can browse all of the digital collections here.