New Civil Rights Digital Library Provides Portal into History

“Civil rights is a human struggle to acquire, and hold and maintain the basic elements that we think about when we define freedom in this country.  It changes over time,” says Dr. Barbara McCaskill (left) co-founder of the Civil Rights Digital Library.

The new Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) provides first-hand footage from the Civil Rights movement, including footage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and FBI files on Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. 

Held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries, more than 450 raw news clips from WSB television in Atlanta and WALB-TV in Albany, Ga. cover a broad range of key civil rights events as well as activists. These include unaired and unedited footage of the Atlanta sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King Jr.’s reaction to President Kennedy’s assassination, his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and his funeral.

In addition to the digital videos, the CRDL aggregates original content from more than 85 libraries, public archives and museums from across the nation, including oral histories, letters, diaries, FBI files and photographs.   The easy-to-navigate site can be searched by key events, topics, educator resources, media type and places, using an interactive map powered by Google. From sound recordings to texts and photographs to editorial cartoons, CRDL’s rich video and multi-media content allows students to not only do research, but get a first-hand view of what it was like to participate in this pivotal moment in American history.

The project is the brainchild of Dr. Barbara McCaskill, Associate Professor and General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia.  Along with co-founder Dr. P. Toby Graham, Director of the Digital Library of Georgia, the pair want to connect students to pioneering civil rights documentation, teach students how to marry technical and research skills, and recruit and retain students of color at the University of Georgia.  “This would be a really good way to fulfill all of our goals,” said Dr. McCaskill.

Dr. Barbara McCaskill earned a Ph.D. from Emory University and currently teaches African American and Multicultural American Literature at UGA. She recently published Post-Bellum--Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919, along with two other books Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery and, with Suzanne Miller, Multicultural Literature and Literacies (State University of New York Press, 1993).

“I want students of color in particular not to be left out of the technological revolution,” says Dr. McCaskill on one of the reasons why she is excited to introduce the digital library, as well as its sister site, http://www.civilrights.uga.edu/.   Freedom on Film spotlights civil rights activities out of nine cities and towns in Georgia, from the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, to the anti-poverty and anti-war campaigns of the early 1970s. 

“When we envisioned the site, we envisioned something that was participatory and on-going,” Dr. McCaskill comments on the future of the site.  It is an interactive opportunity not only for students to add a new dimension to their class work, but to experience the civil rights movement through the eyes of pioneers, many of whom were of college age at the time. Visit the Digital Library online at http://crdl.usg.edu.