Civil Rights in Georgia for 8th Grade Georgia Studies Students

Our collections primarily document people and organizations in the 20th- and 21st-century American South. You can find information about our collections in ArchivesSpace, our finding aid database.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photograph Collection contains over six million images from the newspaper’s photo archive. The bulk of these images come from the 1950s-1980s, but the collection also includes images that appeared in the Atlanta Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, and many of the smaller newspapers they absorbed over the years. Over 2,000 images are digitized and available online at the Georgia State University Digital Collections, with new additions every day. NOTE: not all photographs in this collection are available online.

The growth and development of Georgia State University from an evening school of commerce to a major urban research university is documented in the records of campus administrative offices, deliberative bodies, and major extracurricular organizations. The University Archives includes the records of GSU presidents and other high-ranking officials, minutes of the University Senate and its committees, annual reports of deans, reaccreditation studies, research reports, theses and dissertations, catalogs, the student newspaper, and a complete set of yearbooks.

Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, houses an extensive collection of oral history interviews that compliment its manuscript holdings.

The Special Collections and Archives houses several significant photographs collections that provide visual documentation of local Atlanta, regional, and national issues from the 1930s through to the end of the 1990s.

This collection documents select neighborhood and social movements, primarily in Atlanta. Included are topics and activities such as community building, education policy, political campaigning, lobbying, strike action, student activism, civil and gender rights, anti-death penalty, homelessness, civil disobedience, social activism, and environmentalism.

The AFL-CIO established the Southeast Division of its Civil Rights Department in 1965, part of an enhanced focus on civil rights issues prompted by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Led by longtime labor organizer E.T. “Al” Kehrer, the Southeast Division worked to promote minority membership in unions, education and training programs aimed at minority groups, anti-discrimination work within unions, and voter registration. It collaborated closely with many other labor and civil rights organizations, such as the A. Philip Randolph Institute and the National Urban League.

This research guide will help you to find primary source information to help you with your research project.

Georgia State University Library's Digital Collections provide online access to unique and rare material within the University Library's Special Collections and Archives Department, the general collections and select community partners to support the research interest of scholarly communities and the general public. Material within the collections include manuscripts, photographs, periodicals, newspapers, oral histories, audio/visual, maps, and printed materials.

The materials listed above are either natively digital or digital representatives made available online for greater access. They are just a small representation of the current physical collections held within the library and our community partners.

You can use ArchivesSpace to find out more about our collections. Our finding aids act as inventories that describe and list the contents of collections and contain information about the person, family, or organization that created the collection. Through this site, you can search and browse these finding aids for our many collections available for research.