By Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great [...]

By The Editors

This Saturday Glenn Beck, the conservative talk show personality, is leading a rally of conservatives at the Lincoln Memorial. He has declared it “divine providence” that it will occur on the forty-seventh anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and the famous “I Have A Dream” speech of Martin Luther King’s Jr.
His plans [...]

By Lee A. Daniels
There is no “battle for Dr. King’s legacy,” as one newspaper headline, intended to be attention-grabbing, put it this week. The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of the black freedom struggle was affirmed for all time at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

By The Editors
Jimmie Lee Jackson died at 26 on February 18, 1965 in the melee that erupted when Alabama state police brutally set upon nonviolent protest marchers who had just come from a mass meeting on voting rights in a Marion church.

By Doug Miller
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says it has concluded reinvestigations into 56 of 109 cold cases involving Civil Rights-related murders dating back to the 1940s, and acknowledges that for a variety of reasons – including the deaths of suspects and witnesses and the destruction of evidence – most of them are unlikely to result in prosecutions.

Today, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) commemorates the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a bill that remains a cornerstone feature of American democracy. The Act is widely considered one of the most successful and effective civil rights statutes ever passed by Congress and continues to play an important role in combating ongoing voting discrimination throughout our nation.

By Desiree Cooper
It’s interesting that while the black Civil Rights Movement looked to Gandhi as a model of social change, Dalits look to African-American militant movements.

By William L. Taylor
I have had the good fortune to be a participant, not just a spectator, in the enormous social transformations of American life that occurred during the last half of the twentieth century. I see the changes in my everyday life and in the status of people of color, women, and people with disabilities.

By Bruce Watson
In the summer of 1964, the civil rights movement was stalled.

A decade had passed since the team of attorneys from NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund had won Brown v. Board of Education, yet much of the South was still defying the landmark decision. Bombs, police dogs, and fire hoses had repelled marchers from Birmingham to St. Augustine, Florida. Martin Luther King, Jr. was reaching new heights of eloquence but he could not be everywhere at once. Something startling was needed to revive the movement. That something was Freedom Summer.

By John Payton
I realize when I say we’re a very racially diverse democracy, sometimes I say it in a way that makes it sound like a triumph; in fact, it’s a challenge.