The Library kicks off Black History Month with a new By the People crowdsourcing project -- transcribing the papers in the William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection.
Dozens of signs from the Black Lives Matter protest site across from the White House are being preserved at the Library and are now online. The protests, which lasted nearly a year from 2020 and into 2021, rallied against police violence toward African Americans after the police killing of George Floyd
Medgar Evers, the famed civil rights activist, was born 96 years ago this month in a small town in Mississippi. He was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963, but his legacy has only grown in the decades since his death.
The Library recently acquired courtroom artist Mary Chaney's sketches from the trials of Rodney King in Los Angeles from 1992-1994. The Black motorist was beaten viciously by white police officers after a high-speed chase in 1991. The acquittal of the officers in state court set off days of deadly riots and became a touchstone in American society.
The Feb. 2021 set of Free to Use and Reuse Photographs in the Library's collections highlights African American Women Changemakers. We highlight the careers of Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
Rosa Parks launched one of the most influential protests in American history, chronicled at the Library and featured in the exhibit, "Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words." You can explore it online, even while the Library is closed due to COVID-19. The Parks papers and exhibit are part of the Library's role in preserving and presenting the lives of revolutionary American changemakers.
In a National Book Festival Presents conversation that premieres tonight (June 5), Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie Bunch discuss the national protests that have roiled the nation after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Jesse Holland wears a lot of different hats: he’s an award-winning political journalist, he’s a television host, he’s a professor and he’s a comics aficionado — he wrote the first novel about the Black Panther for Marvel in 2018. African American history is yet another of his passions — in particular documenting long-overlooked contributions of …