This week marks the 55th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The success of this peaceful march, which attracted an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people on August 28, 1963, was the culmination of twenty years of planning and organizing by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rust...
In anticipation of the official opening of the newly transformed Olin Library on May 1, 2018, we would like to preview some of the new spaces and exhibitions. Lasting Legacies, the inaugural exhibition of the Thomas Gallery on Level 1 of John M. Olin Library, pays tribute to seven influential Was...
Linda Brown Smith whose name became synonymous with the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education has died at age 76, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports. Linda Brown Smith was interviewed by Blackside for the series Eyes on the Prize, and while the interview was not used in the final program it ...
The Washington University Libraries’ Film & Media Archive has successfully completed the preservation of Code Blue, a 1972 recruitment film aimed at bringing minorities into the medical profession. The project was completed with the support of a Basic Preservation Grant from the National Film...
March 7 marks the 53rd anniversary of a pivotal event in the Civil Rights Movement: Bloody Sunday. Henry Hampton traveled to Selma, Alabama after Martin Luther King issued a call for support from civil rights activists. On Sunday March 7, 1965 civil rights activists first attempted to march from ...
The Film & Media Archive holds a copy of the very rare comic, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Gathered by filmmaker Henry Hampton for the series Eyes on the Prize, it is part of the remarkable legacy of the civil rights movement that continues to have an impact today. P...
Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom fifty-three years ago on February 21, 1965. In 1994, Blackside, Inc. and ROJA Productions produced a full length biography of his life for American Masters. Many of the film materials created or gathered for this production are held by the Washin...
This February 26th, the Smithsonian Channel will be airing a new documentary about civil rights leader Malcolm X, the charismatic spokesperson of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. The documentary, titled The Lost Tapes: Malcolm X , is part of the Smithsonian Channel’s Lost Tapes series and highl...
This month, Special Collections Blog will be highlighting a few of our many collections on African American history. Some of our most interesting material comes from the Henry Hampton Collection and the interviews he conducted for his fourteen part PBS documentary series, Eyes on the Prize. Eyes ...
Dick Gregory, comedian, civil rights activist, and St. Louis native, has died at age 84. One of Gregory’s first actions was to protest conditions in Sumner High School in 1951 when he was a senior there. He went on to attend Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE) and then go on...
