The 1930s in Baltimore, MD, can be characterized as a watershed for the freedom movement. Baltimore was the nation’s seventh-largest city, heavily industrialized, and there was a long history of labor strife. The city was a border city within a border state, resembling a northern industrial city with Black people enjoying more rights than in the south; however, Jim Crow was still a reality.
civil rights
A Soundtrack for Success: How Music Fueled the American Civil Rights Movement
“We sing the freedom songs today for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that ‘We shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome someday’… These songs bind us together, give us courage together, help us to march together.” – Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.
“Soapbox” in Review
From September 2023 to December 2024, Axell Boomer hosted a radio show titled “Soapbox” on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s student radio station, WSUM 91.7FM Madison. Using songs as primary sources or thematic markers, he developed the show to explore protest movements throughout history and the music genres that communicated their goals.
Oral History Interview with Antonio Salazar-Hobson
This oral history interview was conducted by Gabe Sanders with Antonio Salazar-Hobson, a tribal and labor lawyer who has worked with Cesar Chavez. Below is a summary of the oral history, as well as the transcript itself.
Vel Phillips: Wisconsin Civil Rights Trailblazer and the March on Milwaukee
According to Vel Phillips, it is hard to describe the wonder of the cherry blossoms in Washington D.C. to those who haven’t seen them because nothing compares.
Resurrecting King and Resurrection City: Opposing Memories of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and a Forgotten Moment in His Legacy
Every year, come the third Monday of January, Americans flip through news channels reflecting on the legacy of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Individuals active on social media—depending on the political affiliations of their peers—view a long series of posts listing the bastardization of King’s memory on both sides of the aisle.
The Young Lords in El Barrio: Latino Revolutionaries of the Civil Rights Era
In the early 1960s, El Barrio, Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem, was teeming with life. Home to a large Puerto Rican and Latin American community after mass migrations post-World War II to New York City, El Barrio has been a multicultural hub since the early 20th century. Yet, even with U.S. citizenship, migrants have been treated as foreigners and not Americans, their community deemed second-class citizens, effectively invisible to the rest of the city.
News Flush: O’Hare Restrooms Occupied in the Greatest Protest That Never Happened
The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was born in 1960 out of squalor and neglect. Located on the southern outskirts of the University of Chicago: Hyde Park, the neighborhood of Woodlawn had been pulverized by the pervasive “racial discrimination, metropolitan residential segregation, and unequal schooling”—not to mention collapse of industrial employment—that defined the 1950s.
How Women Ended Liberia’s Civil War: Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
By 2003, the Liberian Civil War had been raging for 14 years, over 200,000 people had died and one in three people had been displaced. Originally founded in 1822, Liberia began as a colony for emancipated American slaves.
How Black Milwaukeeans Won the Fight for Fair Housing
The proposed legislation, its author declared, was “doomed to a violent death the moment it was uttered… like so many other issues pertaining to racial discrimination that have been sent to the Mayor’s office.”