Civil Rights Law Research

An extensive list of online and offline archival collections relating to civil rights.

A complete electronic record of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications held at the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland.

The digital archive contains over one million items.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries is the largest repository of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) materials in the world. Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records, and personal papers. ONE Archives has been a part of the University of Southern California Libraries since 2010.

When the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed in 1966, its statement of purpose read “the time has come to confront, with concrete action, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the quality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right, as individual Americans, and as human beings.”
Since its founding, NOW has grown to become the largest organization of feminist activists in the US, with more than 500,000 members and more than 500 local and campus affiliates. Since 1972, when NOW chose the Schlesinger Library as the archives for its records, the collection has grown to be one of our largest (300 linear feet of manuscripts and growing) and most heavily used by researchers to explore a wide variety of topics.

The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000. The collection, which contains approximately 7,500 items in the Manuscript Division, as well as 2,500 photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division, documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. The collection is on loan to the Library for ten years through the generosity of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The Library received the materials in late 2014, formally opened them to researchers in the Library’s reading rooms in February 2015, and now has digitized them for optimal access by the public.

The SNCC Legacy Project is collecting and digitizing material related to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.