Civil Rights

The Negro Motorist Green Book (later Negro Travelers’ Green Book) was an annual guidebook for African American travelers. First published in 1936, the pamphlet provided a list of Black-friendly restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, lounges, and services in places across the country including Atlanta.

Like many professional Black Atlantans of yesteryear, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent a lot of time at the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia. Because of his close relationship with the MWPHGLG, some have speculated that King joined the lodge and became a Prince Hall Freemason before his death.

Throughout the civil rights movement in Atlanta, soul food restaurants were hubs of change where civil rights leaders could convene, converse, and strategize, and in times of terror and violence, these places were retreats where leaders could plan their next tactical moves.

Board of Park Commission Minute Books hold significant information, reflecting the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in urban spaces during the early twentieth century.

We created a guide to help Georgians prepare to exercise their right to vote, select the method by which they vote, and to identify and report instances of voter intimidation––on November 2 and beyond.

This summer, along with history and civics organizations across the country, we invite you to join in a program dedicated to the Civic Season.

In 1962, Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. ordered the construction of a barricade served to sever the main line connecting the white and Black sections of the Cascade Heights neighborhood.

For more than fifty years, Ethel Mae Matthews worked tirelessly for greater welfare rights for Atlanta’s poor and disabled.

Honoring the legacy of baseball player, racial equality activist, and historic home run record breaker, Hank Aaron.

Congressman Andrew Young and his son Bo run down the hallway of the Rayburn House of Representatives Building in Washington in June, 1975.

An employee works in the production room at the offices of the Atlanta Inquirer, a Black-owned newspaper, on Parson Street, ca. 1970.

Atlanta Mayor-elect Maynard Jackson makes a speech on election night on October 3, 1973 at the Sheraton-Biltmore Hotel in Midtown.

African American students integrated Atlanta high schools on August 30, 1961.

Born and raised in segregated Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr. grew to be the leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement and was recognized worldwide for his campaign of nonviolent social change. In 1955, while a pastor in Montgomery, he began his struggle to end segregation.