Civil rights

Portrait of Ide B Wells

Ida B Wells: civil rights activist and scourge of lynch mobs

Young civil rights activists sit in defiance at a ‘whites only’ lunch counter in Oklahoma City, 1958

Your guide to… Jim Crow in the United States

American civil rights leader Martin Luther King in Washington DC, where he delivered his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech to a quarter of a million civil rights supporters in Washington DC in August 1963. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)

Mourning Martin Luther King Jr: the life and legacy of the civil rights leader

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after her arrest

Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat: what happened next?

Charlotta Bass (centre) was a newspaper publisher, activist and would-be US vice president, who fought against racial discrimination and social injustice. She's seen here with presidential running mate Vincent Hallinan (to Charlotta’s right) and singer and actor-turned-activist Paul Robeson

Charlotta Bass: the first woman of colour to run for US vice president

Emmett Till funeral

American spotlight: how today’s protests echo historical outrage

American civil rights leader Martin Luther King

The civil rights movement: everything you wanted to know

Black rights activist Malcolm X

Malcolm X: Activism, assassination and how he predicted his own death

Rosa Parks rides an integrated bus

From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream

Josephine Baker lounges on a tiger skin around the time she starred in La Revue Nègre

Jospehine Baker: the hidden depths of Jazz Age icon

Crowds march through the streets of Chicago to hear Martin Luther King speak at the Illinois Rally for Civil Right on 21 June 1964

Seymour Hersh on the US civil rights movement and the Vietnam War

Four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, hold the first sit-in (Corbis.)

Timeline: the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s

Malcolm X chats with Eric Abrahams – the Oxford Union president who vowed to “fill the room with blacks” – before giving his famous address on 3 December 1964. (Getty)

Malcolm X in Oxford: Black power amid dreaming spires