Exploring the Black Experience through the Harlem Renaissance

On April 14, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the lower court decision in Mendez v. Westminster, which required the school to integrate and set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education.

In this excerpt from his book, Walking with the Wind, John Lewis describes his involvement in the sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., in the spring of 1960.

A white man writes about his journey to understanding his racial privilege and the “benefit of the doubt” that life has afforded him.

One of the earliest assaults on segregated transit in the South occurred in Louisville, Ky., in 1870-71. There, the city’s black community organized a successful protest that relied on nonviolent direct action, a tactic that would give shape to the modern civil rights movement nearly a century later.

In this segment from 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, the viewer gets multiple perspectives about the murder of Jordan Davis. This transcripts focuses on his parents’ reflections on his birth, their reactions to his murder and testimony from the trial of Michael Dunn.

In this poem, the speaker traces the senseless killings taking place abroad and at home, with a particular focus on the African-American community. The speaker also calls communities to action to "grow our hope and heal our hearts" in order to live together in peace.

Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.

Undercover, Walter White investigates an African-American woman's lynching in a rural Georgia town. White uses his Southern accent to keep suspicion at bay during a conversation with a general manager, whom he believes to be the lynch-mob leader.

Paula Gidding, a professor of Africana studies at Smith College, discusses the history and origins of lynching.

In this transcript, David Cunningham, a prominent professor of sociology, discusses the emergence of Jim Crow laws and their legal and cultural power.

This poem features two speakers, a person and God. The person questions why God made him/her black and lists the negative associations with the color. God answers by showing all the beautiful ways humans are created.