Bill Russell, the legendary basketball player and civil rights stalwart who died Sunday at the age of 88, filmed an unforgettable conversation for the Civil Rights History Project, an oral history production by the Library and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History, in 2013. It's three hours and was conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch. What comes through strongest is the rock-solid voice of Bill Russell, American icon, who learned from his grandfather to "don't take nothing from nobody."
Historian George Chauncey, whose work has focused on LGBTQ issues for four decades, is the 2022 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. The Kluge Prize awards $500,000 to scholars for distinguished work in fields outside those covered by the Nobel Prize. Previous winners include political historian Danielle Allen, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, former president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and John Hope Franklin, the renowned scholar of African American history.
Rosa Parks, one of the most consequential Americans of the 20th century, was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her activism was galvanized decades before the Montgomery bus boycott by the sexualized violence of whites against Blacks in her native Alabama. This activism is featured in this short documentary by the Library of Congress, which holds her papers.
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.
