This collection from the Prints and Photographs Division comprises more than 9,000 original drawings for editorial cartoons, caricatures, and comic strips spanning the late 1700s to the present, primarily from 1880 to 1980. The cartoons cover people and events throughout the world, but most of the images were intended for publication in American newspapers and magazines.

This project guides researchers to collections in several Library divisions that specifically focus on the Civil Rights movement as well as the broader topic of African American history and culture. The Civil Rights History Project Collection (AFC 2010/039) contains 401 items consisting of video files, videocassettes, digital photographs and interview transcripts, with several more such items to be added once the interviews conclude in 2015.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States. This exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark judicial case.

The Law Library’s collection of primary and secondary sources constitutes the largest legal collection in the world.

The Library's digital collection of photos, prints, and drawings is vast, numbering over 850,000 items in approximately 120 collections, representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.

The era of legal segregation in America, from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Brown v. The Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas (1954), is seldom fully explored by students of American history and government. At most, these studies are sidebar discussions of isolated people or events. It is important for students to develop an understanding of the complex themes and concepts of African American life in the first half of the 20th century to provide a foundation for a more meaningful understanding of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The following mini-unit will allow students to explore to what extent the African American experience was "separate but equal."