CRMA
Civil Rights Movement Archive
Monthly Newsletter

January 1st, 2025

CRMA 2024 Annual Report

Archive of Previous Monthly Newsletters

According to Google, there were 20,992 visits to the CRMA website during December for an average of 677 per day. This is approximately 74% higher than December of last year (which was abnormally dismal).

On school days, our number of visitors ranged from 700 to 1200 per day.

Roughly 15% of our visitors came from outside the U.S. On average, international users make up around a fifth 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.

Over the long term, ever since 2020 our U.S. traffic has been slowly declining. Since two-thirds of our visitors are students (grade school and college) we believe that a significant portion of this decline stems from the unrelenting attacks being waged by Republicans and MAGAites against teachers, librarians, school boards, and universities who dare stand against systemic racism and educate around issues of racial injustice. Nevertheless, we persevere.

As of January 1st, our online archive contains 10,544 viewable pages, documents, images, and recordings, plus 418 videos in our Vimeo video channel.

Google reports that out on the global internet there are 30,160 backlinks to our site by people, organizations, and schools using us as an information resource.

 

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.

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.

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.

Announcements

SNCC & Grassroots Organizing Discussion Series. January-March, 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.

Coming Soon! Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. Available March 2025, pre-order now. 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.

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

Now Available: 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.

Second edition of Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching, 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.

SCOPE 60th Anniversary Reunion. Feb 27-March 2, 2025. Montgomery & Selma AL. Lodging in Montgomery. Day trip to Selma. Montgomery sites: Rosa Parks Museum, Freedom Riders Museum, First Baptist Church, SPLC Civil Rights Memorial; Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church, National Memorial for Peace and Justice (the Lynching Memorial) and Legacy Museum.

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.

 

Top-Ten Most Viewed

According to Google, our top-ten, most-visited sections and individual pages in December were:

Sections, Landing & Reference Pages

  1. Site Search: Civil Rights Movement Archive
  2. Are You "Qualified" to Vote?—Literacy Tests & Voter Applications
  3. Documents From the Montgomery Bus Boycott
  4. Freedom Rides and Freedom Riders Resources
  5. Original Freedom Movement Documents
  6. Poems of the Civil Rights Movement
  7. Freedom Movement Bibliography
  8. Documents: Selma Alabama and the March to Montgomery 1963-1965
  9. Documents From the 1960s Sit-Ins
  10. Civil Rights Movement Web Links

Individual Pages & Documents

  1. The Other America, Dr. Martin Luther King. (1967)
  2. Civil Rights Movement History: 1960 (student sit-ins)
  3. The Southern Front: 2 Weeks in Mississippi
  4. Civil Rights Movement History: 1961 (Freedom Rides, MS voter registration, Albany GA)
  5. Poems of Langston Hughes
  6. Louisiana Voter Application and Literacy Tests
  7. Photo Album: The Sit-Ins—Off Campus and Into Movement (1960)
  8. Photo Album: Freedom Movement Posters
  9. Photo Album: The Children's Crusade: Birmingham (1963)
  10. Civil Rights Movement History: 1963 Jan-June (Birmingham, Greenwod, Danville)

(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.)

 

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.

No new videos added in December

New Audio recordings added in December

Willie Blue SNCC 50th Commemoration Interview, by Max Krochmal. Raleigh NC. 2010. 40min.

Cleveland Sellers Oral History Interview by Evan Faulkenbury (SOHP)  Tape #1Tape #2

 

New Movement Documents

1951Is This the American Way of Life?, New York City flyer protesting bombing assasination of Harry (and Henrietta) Moore in Florida. Unsigned American Labor Party. 1/6/51.
1958Don't be a Free Rider!, NAACP recruitment flyer.
1958A Voteless People is a Hopeless People flyer. Unsigned Baltimore (NAACP?). Undated (possibly 1958).
1960Don't Ride City Busses, flyer. Unsigned Jackson Nonviolent Movement. Undated 1960
62? 63?Memo re Southwest Georgia summer program, unsigned SNCC. (First page missing.) Undated (possibly 1962, 63, or 64?).
62? 63?All Benny, organizing notes re Albany GA (handwritten). Unsigned SNCC. Undated (possibly 1962, 63, or 64?)
1963Albany Movement Mass Meeting Program &Albany Student Voice, Unsigned, SNCC. Undated (probably 1963)
1963Special Information Birmingham Bombings and Killings. Unsigned SNCC. Sept. 16, 1963. 4 pages.
1963Albany Movement Mass Meeting Program & Albany Student Voice. Unsigned SNCC. Undated (possibly 1963)
1960Don't Ride City Busses, flyer. Unsigned Jackson Nonviolent Movement. Undated 1960
1962?Memo re Southwest Georgia summer program, unsigned SNCC. (First page missing.) Undated (possibly 1962 or 63).
1963Remember Medgar Evers. Did he Die in Vain?, flyer. Unsigned Jackson Movement. Undated (probably summer 1963).
1963Join and Support Christmas boycott flyer. Unsigned Jackson Movement. Undated (probably December 1963)
1963Freedom Note, Jackson boycott flyer. Unsigned Jackson Movement. December 15, 1963.
1964The Mississippi Summer Project, report. Unsigned SNCC? Undated (probably September or October 1964). 14 pages.
1964All Benny, notes re Albany GA. Faith Holsaert, SNCC. Handwritten. Undated (probably 1964)
64? 65?Albany, Georgia, Needs Nursery Schools. Unsigned, SNCC. Undated (possibly 1964, or 65?)
64? 65?Albany, Georgia, Needs Nursery Schools. Unsigned, SNCC. Undated (possibly 1964, or 65?)
1965Fifth District COFO Staff Meeting & freedom schools report. April 14-17, 1965. 18 pages.
1965SCOPE Security memo & report form, Hosea Williams, SCLC. 7/15/65
1966Negro-White Voter Registration in the South. Unsigned VEP. State & county level statistics a year or so after Voting Rights Act. Undated (probably late summer 1966). 34 pages.
1967SNCC Statement to UN General Assembly, James Forman, SNCC. Nov. 17. 18 pages.

Press Releases

12/11/63SNCCFederal Jury Frees Five in Mississippi Beating

WATS & Phone Reports (Log of daily phone-in reports)

SNCC, March 26, 1964. Greenwood 2nd day for Freedom Day, Dick Frey.

SNCC, March 26, 1964. Greenwood 2nd day for Freedom Day (cont.) Dick Frey.

SNCC March 26, 1964. Jacksonville FL, protests, Phillip Savage.

SNCC March 27, 1964. Pine Bluff AR, Little Rock AR school board, Greenwood MS, Dick Frey.

SNCC March 29, 1964. Mrs. Hamer's campaign and incidents in Mississippi.

SNCC March 29, 1964. Nashville TN protest arrests.

SNCC March 30, 1964. Jackson MS church integration arrests, Leflore Co. MS intimidation, Hattiesburg MS injunction case in court.

SNCC March 30, 1964. Jackson MS arrest of Richard Jewett CORE.

SNCC March 31, 1964. Jackson MS picket line arrests, Pine Bluff AR Cliff Vaughs arrested, Memphis TN bus station arrest.

SNCC, November 12, 1965. Forest City, Gould, Pine Bluff AR, Carthage MS

Vietnam War, Military Draft, & GI Movement Documents

1967Dear Friends, news from Committee to Defend the Rights of PFC Howard Petrick. (Army soldier who expressed opposition to the Vietnan War.) July 3, 1967
1965Channeling, Selective Service orientation kit. U.S. Govt. Describes using the draft to channel manpower in civilian society and the military. July 1, 1965
1970sDescription of Bases re existing or possible G.I. organizing projects. Unsigned SOS. Undated (possibly early 1970s).
1970sProposed Monthly Budget for Support Our Soldiers Unsigned SOS. Undated (possibly early 1970s).

Documents from the Northern Wing of the Movement

9/22/63NYCNational Day of Mourning for the Children of Birmingham flyer. New York City civil rights organizations.
7/6/65FoSCanadian Friends of SNCC Newsletter, 12 pages.
1965FoSJob description & report, New York SNCC office. Faith Holsaert. Undated (probably summer 1965)
8/1/65CNVADirect Action, New England Committee for Nonviolent Action newsletter #60. August 1, 1965
2/67FIGHTThe Fighter, newsletter. Rochester, NY
2/9/67????Housing Committee Workshop, Tony Robinson.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Documents

1966Columbia Point Health Center: Health Care in the Urban Ghetto, unsigned SDS. Flyer about health care for the poor in Boston. Undated (probably 1966)
1966Summer Projects SDS. Unsigned, SDS. Describes half a dozen 1966 summer projects. Undated. 11 pages.
1966National Vietnam Examination Unsigned SDS. Anti-war organizing/educational material structured as an exam. Undated (probably 1966) 4pages.
1966Power in American Society, pamphlet. Jim Jacobs, SDS/REP. Study guide. Undated (probably 1966). 9 pages.
1966Towards the Working Class, Why the Working Class? SDS convention position paper. Hal Draper, ISC. Undated 1966. 20 pages.

 

New Letters & Reports From the Field

9/19/62Faith HolsaertLetter to Helen Bailey, Dean of Studies, Bard College requesting leave to work in Albany GA for SNCC
1963?UnsignedThe New Barbarians, Charles Sherrod. Undated
1/24/63Julian BondDear Faith, memo to Faith Holsaert re Albany Georgia
10/22/64Bob MosesMemo to activists from Bob Moses re Mississippi Black Paper book. 10/22/64.
11/12/64Judy RichardsonRelease form for Mississippi Black Paper. 11/12/64.
11/12/64Random HouseMemo to Judy Richardson from Random House. 11/12/64.

New Letters & Reports From Mississippi Freedom Summer

June-July"Rusty" AllenDear Pop/Mom, four letters to family from Oxford and Greenville

New Letters & Reports From SCLC's SCOPE Projects of 1965

Pike County, Alabama
Reports, Frechettia Ford and Ned Moore. (Not chronological)
Note to Rev. Sconiers, Leon Gutherz. 7/28/65
General Comments. Unsigned. 8/65
Pike Co. SCOPE office. Unsigned. 7/65
Note about SCOPE the dog. Many Atlanta SCLC/SCOPE signers, 8/26/65

 

New Additions to Our Stories

Willie BlueSNCC 50th Commemoration Interview, by Max Krochmal. Raleigh NC. 2010, 21 pages
Si KahnNo Easy Walk Conference. Performance and presentation. 1996. 9 pages
Cleveland SellersOral-History Interview, by Evan Faulkenbury (SOHP)

Affidavits of Repression, Retaliation & Violence

1964Affadavit of Sam Block, re police harassment, brutality & arrests of himself, Willie Peacock, Charles McLaurin, and James Jones in Oktibeha Co. MS. 6/11/64. 4 pages.
1964Affadavit of Greene Brewer, re beating and violence by whites in Charleston MS. 5/24/64
1964Affadavit of Sherry Everett, re church burning in Pike Co. MS. 7/27/64
1964Affadavit of Fannie Lou Hamer, re Atrocity in Winona MS. 5/24/64. 3 pages.
1964Affadavit of Arthur Harris (child), re being beaten by police in Canton MS. 6/7/64
1964Affadavit of Julius Samstein, re assault by white racist in McComb MS. 7/24/64

 

New Articles & Speeches From the Southern Freedom Movement

Georgia Voter's Oath & Registration Card. Undated (probably early 1960s)

 

New Tributes & Memories added to In Memory

Nikki Giovanni

 

New Answers Added to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

No new answers added this month.

 

New Additions to Poetry

No new poems added this month.

 

New Additions to the Photo Album Pages:

SCOPE Project, 1965

Freedom Movement Posters

Web Links and Bibliography updated, revised, & expanded.

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.

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.

Love Letter from Pig: My Brother's Story of Freedom Summer, by Julie Kabat. University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Based on primary-source materials, the personal story of volunteer Luke Kabat and the Meridian MS (Lauderdale Co.) project.

No Ordinary Joe: Lesson From a Life of Community Organizing for Social Change, by Jerome Christensen. Wordshop at Fourth & Sioux, September 2023. Life of Civil Rights Movement activist and community organizer Joe Morse.

Standing, by Ernest McMillan. August, 2023.

My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd's Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War, edited by Luke Smith. Foreword by Staughton and Alice Lynd. Haymarket Books, 2023.

The Struggle of Struggles, by Vera Pigee (1924-2007), edited by Frangoise Hamlin, University Press of Mississippi. 2023. New edition of Vera Pigee autobiography chronicles Coahoma County MS, NAACP, Women's leadership, grassroots organizing, citizenship schools, voter registration, and the Baptist church.

A Day I Ain't Never Seen Before Remembering the Civil Rights Movement in Marks, Mississippi, by Joe Bateman, Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, and Richard Arvedon. How the civil rights movement unfolded in a small rural town, far from the cameras.

Stayed On Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family's Journey, by Dan Berger, Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons. An authorized biography of Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons that brings into focus the lives of two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. Basic Books, January 2023.

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners, by Margaret Burnham, 2023. Investigation of Jim Crow-era racial violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy. If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law?

 

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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