The Beecher-Stowes were prominent New England family noted for its contributions in the fields of education, religion, humanitarianism, and literature. Members of the family were abolitionists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The collection is mostly correspondence, much of which contains family news, stories, and comments about the times. Digital material is available in the online finding aid for the Papers of the Beecher-Stowe Family, as well as the Beecher Stowe Family Papers Digital Collection.

Under the auspices of the Schlesinger Library, the Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African-American women between 1976 and 1981. The project sought a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society in the first half of the twentieth century. Digitized transcripts, audio recordings, and biographies for each interview are available in the Black Women Oral History Project research guide, including those of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, civil rights activist, Dorothy Height, national president of the National Council of Negro Women and director of Center for Racial Justice at the YWCA, and famed civil rights leader Rosa Parks.

Educator and founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Brown was active in the National Council of Negro Women, the North Carolina Teachers Association, etc., and was the first black woman to serve on the national board of the YWCA. She lectured and wrote about black women, education, and race relations. Digital material is available in the online finding aid for the Papers of Charlotte Hawkins Brown.

Scholar, author, and black feminist philosopher Angela Yvonne Davis is one of the most recognized political activists of the 1960s and 1970s. She rose to national attention in 1969 after being removed from her teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles for her membership in the Communist Party at the urging of then-California Governor Ronald Reagan. In 1970 Davis was charged as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping and murder. Her arrest sparked an international campaign to gain her release. In 1972, after a high-profile trial, she was acquitted of all charges. Much of her work focuses on racial equality. Digitized material is available in the online finding aid for the Papers of Angela Y. Davis.

Catharine Deveney Dunham was a delegate-at-large of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who delivered speeches at women's and other clubs in Michigan. This collection includes handwritten and typed speeches intended to rally support for such Women's Christian Temperance Union causes as Prohibition, abstinence from tobacco and narcotics, purity of sexual conduct among both men and women, and, in later years, woman's suffrage. Dunham also argued for legal reforms that would give married women a larger share of property and child custody rights, recognize women's unpaid domestic labor, and emancipate African Americans. Her speech "The Rights of the Black Man," among others, has been digitized and made available in the online finding aid for the Papers of Catharine Deveney Dunham.

Hundley was an educator and civil rights activist. She taught French, English, and Latin at Dunbar High School, the first college preparatory school for Black students in the United States, from 1920-1955. She also wrote The Dunbar Story, 1870-1955 (1965) about the school's history, and campaigned (unsuccessfully) to prevent the demolition of the school's building. In 1941, Hundley purchased a home with her husband and moved into a neighborhood with a restrictive covenant (an agreement limiting the free use or occupancy of property, usually based on race or religion). By the end of that same year, the Hundley's white neighbors won a lawsuit against the Hundleys, and they were evicted in July, 1942. The Hundleys won their appeal in 1942. Their case was later cited in Shelley v. Kraemer (1947), which established that covenants restricting use and ownership of property to whites violated the 14th Amendment. Hundley related the experience in a 1947 radio broadcast of the program "Americans All." An audio recording of "Americans All" is available online via Harvard Library Audio, as well as a transcript [PDF] of the full program.

She was a teacher in Ohio, North Carolina, and Kansas City, Kansas, and dean of women at Shorter College in Little Rock, Arkansas (1906). While in Kansas City, she helped establish a Young Women's Christian Association for African Americans. In 1913 she began to do field work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, selling Crisis magazine, traveling widely through the South, and organizing branches in Kansas City, Topeka, and in Oklahoma. During World War I, Johnson went to France with the American Expeditionary Forces, an experience she described in Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920), co-authored with Addie D. Hunton. After the war, Johnson traveled widely, lecturing on African-American history. Her pamphlet, The Dark Race in the Dawn, is available online via Harvard Mirador Viewer. Also digitally available is Johnson's autobiography, also via Harvard Mirador Viewer.

Pauli Murray was a lawyer, activist, and the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. Murray increasingly participated in protests as a law student during the 1940s, and would continue as a civil rights activist throughout her life. The collection consists of correspondence with fellow activists; clippings, pamphlets, and other published materials collected by Murray; photographs; drafts of Murray's speeches, sermons, and writings; and student protests in which Murray participated while she was at Howard University. Digital material is available in the online finding aid for the Papers of Pauli Murray.

Rebecca Primus, an African American educator and member of the Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society, was the eldest of four children in the prominent free black family of Holdridge and Mehitable "Hettie" Primus in Hartford, Connecticut. Primus traveled to Royal Oak, Maryland, toward the end of the Civil War to teach newly liberated black people. The collection includes letters addressed to Rebecca Primus primarily from her friends and family located in Connecticut, Maine, and Maryland. Letters discuss daily activities, health and sickness, community events, and local race relations including lack of entertainment opportunities for people of color and prejudice among whites. Of note is a letter from her friend Eliza of Springfield, Connecticut, noting that Frederick Douglass would be giving a lecture following the Dred Scott decision. The collection has been digitized, and the Papers of Rebecca Primus are available online via Harvard Mirador Viewer.

Reeves was the daughter of George Read, III, and came from a prominent family in Delaware. She married Isaac Stockton Keith Reeves, who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in the class of 1838 and served in the army until his death in 1851. Her pro-Southern sympathies led her to move to Arkansas during the Civil War. She traveled by boat to Virginia, by train to Tennessee, and then settled in a home near Lake Chicot, near the Mississippi River with her children. The collection consists of a bound manuscript diary recording Ann Dorsey Read Reeves's thoughts and feelings, travels, local customs, neighbors and friends, attitudes towards politics, wartime scarcities, interactions with soldiers, housekeeping concerns, etc. The diary has been digitized and is available online via Harvard Mirador Viewer.

Alternatively titled Record of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, the 1883 issue of The Abolitionist is available online via Hathi-Trust.

Published by the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1981, the Civil Rights Directory was intended to visualize the organizational structure of the field of civil rights. It lists both governmental and private organizations engaged in program activities that pertained to civil rights. The Directory is available online via Hathi-Trust.

Published by the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the 1999 Civil Rights Update is available online via Hathi-Trust.

Independent Voices began as a four-year project to digitize over 1 million pages from the alternative press archives of participating libraries. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection continues to grow, adding small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and right-wing press. Independent Voices is an open-access online database that contains many civil rights-focused publications.

Little Eva is a pro-slavery children's book based on the characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Little Eva is available online via Hathi-Trust.

The Report began with the Annual Meeting of the Society of 1835, and ceased publication with the 1844 issue. One issue, Ten Years of Experience, 1842, is available online via HathiTrust.

Created by the American Anti-Slavery Society and presented to the general anti-slavery convention in London in 1840, Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade is available online via Hathi-Trust.