The most basic right of citizenship has been equal access and protection under the law. The fight to extend this right to all began before the Declaration of Independence proclaimed “all men are created equal,” and continues today.
This 1960s organizing pamphlet from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) asks, “Where is Democracy?” Behind this question was a demand for equal representation for all who have felt excluded or marginalized by the electoral process and political institutions.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, transformed the civil rights leader into an icon of the struggle to fulfill the American promise of equality for all. This panel is from the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, a demonstration in Washington, D.C., which King helped to organize but did not live to see.
This poster was used at the April 1, 2003, rally at the Supreme Court supporting affirmative action. Brown v. Board of Education was the 1954 landmark case ordering the desegregation of public schools.
Founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan combated post-Civil War reforms and terrorized freed African Americans in the former Confederacy. Dormant for decades, by the mid-1920s a reconstructed Klan was again a powerful political force in both the South and the North, spreading hatred against African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. Klan membership plummeted after a series of scandals involving its leadership. Although never as powerful as it was in the 1920s, Klan organizations rose to oppose the growing civil rights movements of the 1950s and ’60s.
