Anti-Racist and Black Liberation Archives in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library

The extrajudicial murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which followed the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and coincided with a global pandemic that has taken disproportionate toll on African Americans, reveals that systemic racism is a life or death matter–for the millions of people who suffer its effects, and for a nation that purports […]

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Pride Month and history in the RBML collections

Getting to tell your own story is a gift, but it means that you have to contend with other people’s stories, and I guess that can mean arguing, maybe for 50 years straight. And that’s O.K.  – Who Threw the First Brick at Stonewall? Let’s Argue About It The RBML’s archival, manuscript, oral history and […]

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Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin on the class conscious roots of SNCC

Since the 1990s, with social historians looking back on how we’ve told the history of the Civil Rights Movement, Bayard Rustin has come to the fore as a central leader in the movement. Specifically, for decades, he was the unsung hero behind the conceptualization of the 1963 March on Washington. But more than that, this […]

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