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The Movement History Initiative

Telling the story of how young people in SNCC united with local communities in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for voting rights and change.

11/02/2026

🕰️ This Day in History | November 2-4, 1963

As Election Day approaches, it's worth remembering the Mississippi Freedom Vote. In 1963, only about 12,000 Black Mississippians were registered to vote, despite widespread organizing across the state. Many pointed to those numbers as evidence that Black people simply weren't interested in voting.

Organizers with COFO set out to challenge that claimed with a statewide mock election, the Freedom Vote, to show what'd happen if Black Mississippians could participate free from intimidation & discrimination. Communities organized registration sites, rallies, & polling sites statewide, while Aaron Henry & Ed King campaigned as Freedom Vote candidates.

📆 From November 2-4, Black Mississippians cast more than 83,000 votes in a powerful answer to claims that they did not care about voting. It demonstrated interest, but also built momentum, experience, and a statewide base that would fuel the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), Freedom Summer, and other future critical organizing efforts.

📷️ All photos & documents are available on CRMVET.org, one of the largest online archives of Civil Rights materials.

Learn more about the Freedom Vote➡️ https://buff.ly/dPI1TC4
To listen to Bob Moses's full interview with Joseph Sinsheimer, visit https://buff.ly/rvfZRog

10/31/2026

Today, we celebrate the birthday of Casey Hayden, a SNCC organizer, educator, and writer whose commitment to justice helped shape both the Civil Rights Movement and the emerging women's movement.

As a student activist in Texas, she joined sit-ins to desegregate Austin restaurants before finding her way to SNCC, where she worked alongside Ella Baker and became part of the movement's grassroots organizing efforts. In 1963, she moved to Mississippi, helped launch a literacy project at Tougaloo College with Doris Derby, and later played a role in planning Freedom Summer.

Hayden's legacy extends beyond the campaigns she helped build. Through both organizing and writing, she challenged movements to live up to the ideals of equality and participation they sought to achieve.

Read more about Casey Hayden and other SNCC veterans at https://buff.ly/TOXoxDC

📷: CRMVET.org, Danny Lyon, New York Times, & SNCCDigital.org

10/30/2026

📥 Want even more Movement History in your inbox?

✉️ A NEW ISSUE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ARCHIVE NEWSLETTER IS HERE: https://buff.ly/pKoDeu9

This month's Civil Rights Movement Archive newsletter highlights They Say I'm Your Teacher, a film by Lucy Phenix exploring the history and legacy of Citizenship Schools and the educators who helped expand access to literacy, civic participation, and grassroots leadership during the Freedom Movement.

📽️ They Say I'm Your Teacher by Lucy Phenix

A new issue drops every month. Subscribe so you never miss new stories, resources, and materials from the archive.

Email to subscribe: [email protected]

Visit the archive: www.crmvet.org

The Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving and sharing the history of the Southern Freedom Movement through original documents, photographs, oral histories, videos, and first-person accounts created and collected by movement veterans.

10/29/2026

📥 Want even more Movement History in your inbox?

✉️ A NEW ISSUE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ARCHIVE NEWSLETTER IS HERE: https://buff.ly/pKoDeu9

Check out some of the materials from the Civil Rights Movement Archive Monthly Newsletter!

📃 Document: Citizenship Education Program brochure, SCLC, 1962
📷 Photo: “Citizenship schools,” photograph by Ida Berman

A new issue drops every month! You don’t want to miss out!

Email to subscribe: [email protected]

Visit the archive: www.crmvet.org

The Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA) is a 501c3 nonprofit corporation based in California. We are a free, non-commercial, web-based archive created by civil rights workers active in CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC and similar Southern Freedom Movement organizations during the 1950s and 1960s. We are part of the national African American Civil Rights Network. The CRMA has a Memorandum of Understanding with Duke University Libraries that they will assume stewardship over the archive to preserve and sustain it when the current managers are no longer able to carry the work forward.

This website has been (and is still being) created by veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement (1950-1970). It's an online archive to preserve and make available original-materials, histories, narratives, remembrances, and commentaries related to that movement. It is where we tell it like it was, the way we lived it, the way we saw it, the way we still see it.

10/29/2026

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. A year later, the court ordered schools to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.”

But progress was anything but swift.

in 1969, 15 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the immediate desegregation of public schools in the South, ending years of legally sanctioned delays.

The fight for equal access to education didn't end with Brown. It took years of legal challenges and community organizing to enforce the ruling.

10/29/2026

Black Fact: In 2012, Black voters turned out at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, the first time on record that Black turnout topped white turnout. That showed what our collective voice can do, and this midterm is another chance to use it. Make your plan to vote at LDF.vote.

10/28/2026

📼 From our archive, about archives. For National Archives Month, we're running this one back.

Do you know the role that an archivist plays? Archivist like Malu Brooks and Khafre Abif give insights on the critical roles they play in documenting Black movement building.

Originally shared from our "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Test Until it Comes Intergenerational Organizers Conversation" that was held September 6-10 2023 at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

▶️Full Clip Here: https://youtu.be/QyAx1vABZ-g

10/27/2026

📆 7 Days Until Election Day (November 3rd) -> 7 Photos From Movement History

The right to vote was never freely given. Across the South, ordinary people organized, marched, registered voters, challenged discriminatory laws, and endured violence to secure a voice in the decisions shaping their lives.

These 7 photos offer a glimpse into that freedom struggle and the people who carried it forward. As Election Day approaches, we honor the generations who fought to secure and protect the voting rights many exercise today.

📷️: All found at CRMVET.org

10/25/2026

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10/23/2026

"VOTEless People Are Hopeless People."

A longstanding voting rights slogan, these words also appear on a sample South Carolina voter literacy test from 1964. The phrase captures why voting rights became such a central demand of the Civil Rights Movement

Activists across the South understood the transformative power of the vote. They knew political participation was a path toward self-determination and justice. Access to the ballot offered a way to influence the future of their communities and challenge systems built to exclude them.

The struggle for voting rights was ultimately an act of hope: hope for freedom, hope for a more inclusive democracy, and hope that change was possible. Across generations, people turned that hope into fierce action, organizing and mobilizing to secure the right to vote.

Photos and digital materials from https://buff.ly/o8t0HMC

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