CRMA
Civil Rights Movement Archive
Monthly Newsletter

June 1st, 2025

Table of Contents

News
Our Sister Sites
Announcements
Website Report
Top Ten Most Viewed
New CRMA Video & Audio
New Movement Documents
New Letters & Reports
New Articles & Speeches
In Memory, New Tributes
New Photos, Art, & Posters
Recent Books

News

Last month, the MAGA regime continued their relentless drive to, "Make America Great Again," by rolling back the human and civil rights progress of the last century. Their goal is to restore the race, gender, religious, and social hierarchies of the past and return to the robber-baron economics and legal impunities for the rich and powerful that characterized the so-called "Gilded Age."

• In May, they ordered the federal government to halt use of the well-established disparate-impact standard in both policy-making and civil rights cases. This specifically targets and cripples the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that so many of us put our bodies on the line to win. In essence, the order means that unless a government agency, business, or institution explicitly admits they are discriminating against people on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation, they cannot be challenged on civil rights grounds and the Justice Department won't file a legal case.

• In May, they threatened to revoke the tax-exempt 501c status of educational institutions and nonprofit organizations that (in their sole opinion) are "terrorist supporting organizations" — or who simply don't kowtow to MAGA ideology and policies.

• In May, they intensified their assault against "improper ideologies" by banning books, cutting or eliminating diversity programs, rescinding grants, terminating courses, and threatening to withdraw federal funds from public schools that fail a MAGA litmus test. For MAGA, one of the "improper ideologies," they most want to suppress is the concept that racism is made manifest through political and economic systems built and maintained by exploitation, law, policy, and violence.

We of the Civil Rights Movement Archive and our Sister organizations stand against the MAGA regime's Orwellian censorship and distortion of our history. We remain committed to freely-providing to all an up-from-below, inside-out, and lives-lived, perspective on the Civil Rights and other freedom and social-justice movements that shaped not only our lives but American history and culture to this day.

Please Donate.
With a Little Help From Our Friends,
We'll keep on keeping on.

Ever since we established the CRMA (originally known as "CRMVet") in 1999, it has been almost entirely funded by personal donations from Freedom Movement veterans and individual supporters. We carry on this work with almost zero institutional support, foundation grants, or philanthropic contributions. So if you find our CRMA site useful and worthy, please click donate to keep us alive and growing. You can donate via check, your bank's Bill Pay service, or PayPal. Thank you for anything you are able to contribute.

Our Sister Sites

	SNCC Legacy Project (SLP). SLP preserves and extends SNCC's legacy. Although SNCC the organization no longer exists, we believe that its legacy continues and needs to be brought forward in ways that continue the struggle for freedom, justice and equality today.
	SNCC Digital Gateway (SDG). A joint project of SLP and Duke University, SDG tells the story of how young activists in SNCC united with local people in the South to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered the Black community and transformed the nation.
	Black Power Chronicles. The SNCC Legacy Project created the Black Power Chronicles (BPC) in 2015 to help fill the informational void that exists in our historical record about the impact of the Black Power Movement in local communities throughout America.
	SCOPE 50. Preserving Civil Rights and the Story of Voting. Website of SCLC/SCOPE project activists.
	Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Empowering the next generation, passing it on to carry it on by preserving the history of the Mississippi Movement.
	Movement History Initiative, John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University.
	Teaching for Change and Zinn Education Project. Provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write, and change the world by promoting and supporting the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country.

Announcements

SNCC & Grassroots Organizing Discussion Series. Spring, 2025. SNCC veterans and humanities scholars explore SNCC's organizing work and its connections to life, community, social- justice struggles today. In-Person and Live-Streamed.

From Protest to Power Podcasts . SNCC Legacy Project (SLP). The central theme of these visual podcasts is the ongoing effort of the Black community to achieve the power to define its existence in America.

THANK YOU! Civil Rights Landmark Saved! Regarding the "Preserve St. Augusting Jail" announcement that ran in our April and May newsletter, the organizers notified us:

At a time of so much miserable news, you are to be thanked for your help in contacting officials in St. Augustine, Florida and telling them not to demolish the historic civil rights jail which made international news in 1964. We won. As the late Dr. Robert B. Hayling, leader of the civil rights movement in St. Augustine, always said: "Never give up. Never give up. Never, never, never give up!"

If Anybody Should Ask You ... This Is What Happened: A Memoir, by Gwendolyn J. Dennis-Mack. 2024. The personal story of an African American high school girl who joined the movement of young people to desegregate American classrooms in Deep South Georgia.

Movement Art: If you are aware of any works of art related to the Freedom Movement such as paintings, drawings, murals, statues, and so on, please take a look at our Civil Rights Movement Art page to see if we already have an image of it in our collection. If it isn't included in our collection please email us an image we can post, or a weblink, or some other information that we can use. Thanks.

Movement Materials: Please continue to email to us documents, letters, reports, stories, and other Southern Freedom Movement materials from the period 1950-1970. See Submissions details.

Website Report

As of June 1st, our online archive contained 11,172 viewable pages, documents, images, and recordings, 486 videos in our Vimeo video channel, and listings for 696 Freedom Movement veterans.

According to Google, there were 31,534 visits to the CRMA website during May for an average of 1017 per day. This is identical to May of last year.

On school days, our number of visitors ranged from 500 to 1300 per day.

Roughly 17% of our visitors came from outside the U.S. in May. On average over the course of a year, international users make up 15%-20% of our users. We are proud that our Freedom Movement of the 1960s is still of interest to people around the world and that our site still stands as a free, publicly-available, un-censored international information resource.

Top Ten Most Viewed

According to Google, our top-ten, most-visited sections and individual pages in May.
(Note that Google does not count how often PDF files are accessed. Since most of our documents are in PDF format, the "Top Ten" lists are not all that accurate.)

Sections, Landing & Reference Pages

1. Freedom Rides and Freedom Riders Resources
2. Site Search: Civil Rights Movement Archive
3. Poems of the Civil Rights Movement
4. Freedom Movement Photo Album
5. Freedom Movement Bibliography
6. Civil Rights Movement History 1950-1970
7. Documents: Selma Alabama and the March to Montgomery 1963-1965
8. Civil Rights Movement Major Topic Resources
9. About the Civil Rights Movement Archive
10. Our Words, Articles & Speeches

Individual Pages & Documents

1. Photo Album: The Sit-Ins—Off Campus and Into Movement (1960)
2. Photo Album: The Freedom Rides (1961)
3. Civil Rights Movement History: 1960 (student sit-ins)
4. The Other America, Dr. Martin Luther King. (1967)
5. Civil Rights Movement History: 1961 (Freedom Rides, MS voter registration, Albany GA)
6. Photo Album: The Children's Crusade: Birmingham (1963)
7. Poems of Langston Hughes
8. Photo Album: Freedom Movement in Art
9. Photo Album: They Say That Freedom is a Constant Struggle (1962-1963)
10. Civil Rights Movement History: 1963 Jan-June (Birmingham, Greenwod, Danville)

Top Ten Sections & Pages That Others on the Internet Link To

Google reports that out on the global internet there are 21,335 backlinks to materials on our site by people, organizations, grade-schools, and universities using us as a trusted information resource. The Top-Ten linked to pages are:

1. The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR)
2. CRMA Home Page
3. The Other America, Dr. Martin Luther King. (1967)
4. Are You "Qualified" to Vote?—Literacy Tests & Voter Applications
5. Freedom Rides and Freedom Riders Resources
6. Public Opinion Polls on Civil Rights Movement activities 1961-1969, Roper Center archive
7. Civil Rights Movement History: 1961 (Freedom Rides, MS voter registration, Albany GA)
8. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story Comic Book. (Fellowship of Reconciliation)
9. Nonviolence, Self-Defense & Provocateurs
10. Civil Rights Movement History: 1963 Jan-June (Birmingham, Greenwod, Danville)

CRMA Video & Audio

Our CRMA Video Channel on the Vimeo hosting service provides videos created by Freedom Movement veterans (or their immediate families) and videos created by others that are substantially about Movement veterans. When you visit the channel, please consider adding yourself as a "follower" for social-media metrics. Thanks.

New Videos Posted in May

Bob Mants, interviewed by Blackside. SNCC, Lowndes Co. AL, voter registration, Stokely Carmichael. 1988. 39 min.

Rudolph Lee, interviewed by Blackside. Montgomery Bus Boycott, Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, mass meetings. 1979. 13 min.

Linda Brown Smith, interviewed by Blackside. Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock school integration. 1985. 15 min.

Darrell Evers, interviewed by Blackside. Re Medgar Evers. 1986. 21 min.

A.G. Gaston, interviewed by Blackside. Re Birmingham, AL protests, AG Gaston Motel, children in marches, Bull Connor, Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King. 1985. 17 min.

Patricia Harris, interviewed by Blackside. Re youth movement, protest marches, freedom songs. 1979. 16 min.

Georgia Gilmore, interviewed by Blackside. Re Montgomery Bus Boycott. 1979. 6 min.

Georgia Gilmore, interviewed by Blackside. Re Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks. 1985. 21min.

Joseph Ellwanger, interviewed by Blackside. Re Birmingham AL, Selma to Montgomery March. 1988. 28 min.

Darrell Evers, interviewed by Blackside. Re Medgar Evers. 1986. 21 min.

A.G. Gaston, interviewed by Blackside. Re Birmingham, AL protests, AG Gaston Motel, children in marches, Bull Connor, Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King. 1985. 17 min.

Georgia Gilmore, interviewed by Blackside. Re Montgomery Bus Boycott. 1979. 6 min.

Georgia Gilmore, interviewed by Blackside. Re Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks. 1985. 21min.

Sherie Labedis, SCLC, SCOPE, NAACP, South Carolina, 1965-66, 24min.

Julian Bond, SNCC, NAACP, Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), Georgia state legislature, 1960-2015. 2006. 84 min.

Ed Brown, Louisiana sit-ins, Howard University's Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), Freedom Summer, Holmes County, MFDP Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE,) The Delta Foundation in Greenville, Mississippi. 2005. 120 min.

Constance Curry, SNCC, Georgia, 1960-64. March 2006. 69 min

Constance Curry, SNCC, Georgia, 1960-64. August 2006. 26 min.

Lawrence Guyot, SNCC, Mississippi, MFDP. Undated. 76 min.

New Movement Documents

1947	Segregation on Common Carriers. By James Wallace, Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. Undated (probably 1947).
1947	About the Journey of Reconciliation. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Fellowship of Reconciliation. March 13, 1947
1947	Journey of Reconciliation miscellaneous documents. 28 documents.
1947	NAACP Contact List for Journey of Reconciliation. Undated 1947.
1947	Journey of Reconciliation report. By Bayard Rustin, CORE/FoR. Undated (possibly May or June 1947). 13 pages.
1962?	Migrant Agricultural Labor, reading list and resources. Unsigned. Undated (possibly 1961 or 1962). 5 pages.
1963	Freedom Vote Group Oct/Nov 1963. Mississippi. Contact list of volunteers and their later-life compiled in 1995.
1964	Overview of the Political Program, COFO. Undated (possibly prepared for Freedom Summer).
1964	Freedom Schools Notes on Teaching in Mississippi. COFO multiple authors. Undated (possibly May or June 1964).
1964	Sample Official Ballot, June 2nd, Mississippi Democratic Party Primary.
1964	COFO Council of Federated Organizations, flyer. Unsigned. Undated (probably 1964)
1964	Dear Mr. Watts, information for Freedom School teacher. Sandra (Casey) Hayden, COFO. 5/26/64
1964	The Negro as a Political Force in America and in the South Since 1900-- , by Otis Pease (Hattiesburg COFO). Undated. 10 Pages.
1964	Freedom Summer California volunteers Unsigned. Undated. 6 pages.
1964	COFO Political Program. Unsigned COFO. Undated (probably for 1964 Freedom Summer volunteers). 3 pages.
1964	Mississippi Freedom Schools, memo appealing for support. Unsigned COFO. Undated (possibly May or June 1964).
1964	Car-tax receipt levied on summer volunteer Tom Watts by Jones County MS. $6.68 (equal to $70 in 2025). 7/8/64
1965	Lousiana CORE Personal Information form instructions, W.? Webb, CORE. Undated (probably 1/65).
1965?	Adopt a Freedom School, Tom Watts (COFO volunteer). Undated (probably 1965)
1966	Statement on exploitation and suffering, re housing. Unsigned SNCC Atlanta Project. 3 pages.
1966	Conversation with Robert Slayton report. Re landlord Shaffer and community's attitude towards the Movement. Unsigned SNCC Atlanta Project. 2/16/66
1966	Report on attempt to hold community meeting re housing and landlord Shaffer. Unsigned SNCC Atlanta Project. 2/17/66
1966	Independent Candidate's Petition's, Number of Selectors Signatures. Unsigned (for running MFDP candidates as Independents because they lost in the June Democratic primaries.
1966	Managers for State Senate Campaign, Bolivar Co. Unsigned MFDP. November 8, 1966.
1966	Sample Ballot, Mississipi general election. 11/8/66.
1967	Election organizing materials. Unsigned MFDP (Bolivar Co. MS?) Undated 1967. 5 pages.
1968	Democratic National Convention 1968, map of Chicago convention hall. (Probably provided to Mississippi delegates (including former MFDP)
1968	To All Humphre-Muskie Campaign Workers. Thank you note from Aaron Henry and Claude Ramsay.
1971	Bolivar County Convention program. Mississippi. Unsigned (MFDP?) 9/11/71
1971	Bolivar County Convention Resolution political platform. Mississippi. Unsigned (MFDP?) 9/11/71

Personnel Documents

Mrs. Cathrine Ciswell(?)	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form. 1/21/65
Richard Jewett	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, 1/21/65
George Smith Jr.	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, 1/21/65
Stu Wechsler	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, 1/21/65
Eric Weinberger	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, 1/21/65
Frank Wright	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, 1/21/65
Joyce Marie Johnson	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, 1/21/65
Joel Rubenstein	Louisiana CORE Personnel Information form, undated (presumed 1/65)

Documents from the Northern Wing of the Movement

5/64

FoS

Newsletter, Bay Area Friends of SNCC (FoS)

New Letters & Reports From the Field

11/62	Leko	Dear Faith, note to Faith Holsaert in Albany GA. Undated (probably late November or early December 1962)
11/9/62	Daddy (Holsaert)	Dearest Faith, letter to Faith Holsaert in Albany GA
12/8/62	[Illegible] & Dennis	Dearest Faith, letter to Faith Holsaert re work and situation in Albany GA
12/9/62	Daddy (Holsaert)	Dearest Faith, letter to Faith Holsaert in Albany GA
12/31/62	Grandma Cora (Holsaert)	Dear Faith, note to Faith Holsaert in Albany GA.
9/24/63	Rev. B.L. Tucker, SNCC	Selma Alabama report, student protests, arrest & incareration of Tucker.
1/7/63	Rochelle Haimer(?)	Dear Faith, letter to Faith Holsaert in Albany GA.
2/17/67	J. Reece	Appeal to Operation Freedom for help, re unionization effort (handwritten). Mississippi
6/3/67	Mrs. Flossie Minley	Dear Mr. Moore, appeal Amzie Moore for financial help (handwritten). Mississippi
6/7/67	Bill Peters	Dear Amzie Note to Amzie Moore regarding TV release and copy of show (handwritten).
9/20/67	Alex Cockersole, MSES	Mr. Amzie Moore, invitation from Mississippi State Employment Service to participate in forum for community leaders.
9/28/67	BCVL	Appeal to white voters by establishment power structure, Bolivar Co. Mississippi
11/27/67	J. Dodson, MFDP?	Beat organizing report, Bolivar County?

New Letters & Reports From Mississippi Freedom Summer

9/13	To the Alumnae of COFO-Hattiesburg, Leigh, Schwartzbaum, Kelly. Letter to former volunteers updating them on events. 2 pages.

New Articles & Speeches From the Southern Freedom Movement

1964	Draft article for USIS Peggy Reiman, submitted to United States Information Service (publication status unknown). June 1964.

New Thoughts & Commentaries

Wilcox County Alabama Voting Rights Fight Timeline, Maria Gitin, May 2025

ASCMR Spring Report. Americus Sumter County Remembered Committee. May 2025

In Memory, New Tributes

Worth Long

New Photos, Art, & Posters

Before I'll Be a Slave...

Grenada Freedom Movement, 1966

Web Links and Bibliography updated, revised, & expanded.

Archive of Previous Monthly Newsletters

Recent Books by or About Movement Veterans:

Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. Atria/One Signal Publishers (Simon & Schuster) March 2025. The little known story of how four activists in the 1950s created and built a semi-clandestine network of Citizenship Schools across the Jim Crow South. A network that formed a foundation for the Freedom Movement's voting rights battles of the 1960s. Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and Myles Horton of the Highlander Center.

Mississippi's Black Cotton. By MacArthur Cotton and John Obee, foreword by Nikole Hannah-Jones. University of Georgia Press. May 1, 2025. A personal history of the 1960's Mississippi Civil Rights Movement by SNCC Field Secretary MacArthur Cotton, who lived it.

If Anybody Should Ask You ... This Is What Happened: A Memoir, by Gwendolyn J. Dennis-Mack. 2024. The personal story of an African American high school girl who joined the movement of young people to desegregate American classrooms in Deep South Georgia.

More Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Continuing the Struggle, by Kent Spriggs. Stories and descriptions by 23 Civil Rights Lawyers about their struggles to advance and maintain human rights in the United States South.

Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching, Second Edition. By Menkart, Murray, and View. 2024. Lessons, quizzes, images, essays, articles, primary source documents, and poetry, to help teachers go beyond a "heroes and holidays" approach to teaching about the Freedom Movement in K-12 classrooms. The focus is on people of color, women, youth, organizing, culture, institutional racism, and the interconnectedness of social movements — Desegregation of Public Spaces, Voting Rights, Black Power, Labor and Land, Transnational Solidarity, and Student Engagement.

Unlawfully Incarcerated At Age Thirteen, by Emmarene Kaigler Streeter, 2024. Personal story of one the "Stolen Girls of the Lee County Stockade arrested in Americus GA, and imprisoned in 1963.

Marching in Montgomery, by John J. Hartman. IPBooks. 2024. First-hand account by a participant of the March 1965 voting rights protests in Montgomery Alabama in support of the movement in Selma AL.

Ma Lineal: A Memoir of Race, Activism, and Queer Family, by Faith Holsaert. Memoir of NYC childhood, SNCC in Southwest Georgia, and raising her own children in the coalfields of West Virginia.

The Rise and Fall of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, by Martin Oppenheimer. Native Publishers, 2024. Concise history including the historical antecedents, the Greensboro sit-ins, Freedom Summer, the violence of KKK and police, and its demise around 1973.

As always comments, suggestions, corrections, and submissions from Freedom Movement activists are welcome. Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement who are listed on the website's Roll Call are encouraged to contribute to the website their stories, thoughts, documents, and memories & tributes of those who have passed on by emailing them in to us.

If you're not already a subscriber to the monthly email version of this newsletter, send us your email address and let us know you'd like to be added to the list. To unsubscribe (heaven forfend!) do the same.

 — Bruce Hartford
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