“We were willing to be beaten for democracy,” says Rev. C.T. Vivian, recalling the freedom movement and voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. It was, he says, “the beginning of the transformation of America.” More →

March 20, 2015

“The church had been waking up to the need for race reform in the post-war era,” says Georgia State University history professor Glenn Eskew. “The change had been slow among the establishment within the churches from the top down, but from the seminarians, the young people from the bottom up—they embraced the movement. They embraced the idea of racial change.” More →

March 20, 2015

The civil rights movement was both “the work of the Lord and the work of freedom,” says author Taylor Branch. “It took redemption, and it took faith and tenacity, not just an empty, simple hope.” More →

November 27, 2013

“Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon,” says Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow.” More →

June 7, 2013

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, local students are on a field trip, learning how 50 years ago, kids around their age played a pivotal role in the struggle against segregation. One of them was … More →

April 26, 2013

Watch an extended interview with Freeman Hrabowski, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who in 1963 was one of many children who was placed in jail for marching in Birmingham. More →

April 26, 2013

Her letters, papers, photographs, and library all remain inaccessible to the public, so historians and scholars are unable to tell her story in full. More →

February 1, 2013

If the right to vote is sacred, and depriving someone of that right is morally wrong, then what to make of the tough new voter identification requirements being proposed across the country? More →

February 17, 2012

The president of Morehouse College speaks about Martin Luther King Jr.’s religious maturation as well as the need for contemporary Americans to have “the moral will to act” in the face of persistent economic disparities between blacks and whites.
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August 26, 2011

We ask some of the first visitors to the MLK Memorial on the National Mall to share their thoughts on its significance and on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. More →

August 24, 2011