This guide provides an introduction to doing research on the Long Black Freedom Struggle in American Folklife Center collections. It focuses principally, but not exclusively, on collections of primary sources that record actors, actions, and events at the grassroots level that shaped the modern civil rights era. In this guide, the modern civil rights era is defined as the period of time between 1948, when presidential order 9981 desegregated the military, and the summer of 1968, when activists in the Poor People's March—Dr. Martin Luther King's last mass action campaign for rights and justice—lived in a tent city erected on the National Mall Washington, D.C., for several weeks. One example is the Civil Rights History Project collection, which includes 145 filmed interviews with 176 participants in the freedom struggle in the United States.

Stepping back in time, the guide also includes several significant collections from the New Deal period (1933–38) that contain the recorded reflections of African Americans about life in the aftermath of Emancipation in the late 19th century. These earlier collections serve to emphasize the historical legacy and persistence of African Americans in their struggles to secure freedom rights a hundred year after manumission from enslavement. One example is the John and Ruby Lomax 1940 southern states recordings collection, which includes interviews of formerly enslaved people.

The collections and other resources give evidence of how individuals and groups in the Black freedom struggle inspired—and were inspired by—a range of social justice movements including actions for indigenous rights and women’s liberation, struggles for workers’ and gay rights, anti-war and decolonization campaigns, and actions against environmental destruction.

The following guide offers general research strategies for use of the American Folklife Center collections.