1961 Archives

Members of the Black 14 holding a sign during their protest

Oct. 17, 1969: 14 Black Student Athletes Fired at Hint of Protest

Fourteen Black football players at the University of Wyoming were fired when their coach learned they wanted to wear black armbands during a game against Brigham Young University.

Oct. 25, 1969: Opening of Malcolm X Liberation University

Opening of the Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham, North Carolina.

March 10, 1972: National Black Political Convention

Thousands of Black leaders gathered to create a cohesive political strategy at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana.

Side entrance to the Governor’s mansion on Capital Street in Jackson on June 17, 1965.

June 17, 1965: Protest for Voting Rights in Jackson, Mississippi

Five-year-old Anthony Quin and his mother and siblings protested against the election of five Mississippi Congressmen from districts where Black people were not allowed to vote. Refused admittance, they sat on the steps and police-instigated mayhem ensued.

Feb. 12, 1971: Raiford Florida State Prison Uprising

Prisoners at Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida, staged a sit-down strike to protest prison conditions. The 700 incarcerated protesters were met with gunfire by prison guards, leaving 63 prisoners injured.

A rally in New York for Earth Day, 1970.

April 22, 1970: First Earth Day

In April 1970, millions of people gathered around the country in one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history to celebrate the first Earth Day and demand action be taken on a variety of environmental issues.

April 22, 1969: Student Strike Shuts Down City College of New York

With a list of five demands, Black and Puerto Rican students at City College of New York (CCNY) orchestrated a campus-wide closure that lasted more than two weeks.

Women & Gender Toolkit: A SNCC Digital Gateway Companion

Book — Non-fiction. By SNCC Digital Gateway. 2024. 22 pages.
Provides concrete ways for people to engage with and learn about SNCC’s work and the role of women within SNCC, explore primary source materials, and connect contemporary issues in their own lives and communities to central themes in SNCC’s history.

The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights

Book — Non-fiction. By William P. Jones. 2013. 296 pages.
A vital text on the hidden history and significance of the March on Washington.

Teaching Activity by William P. Jones

Freedom Day in Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Article. By Howard Zinn. From Chapter 6 of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
Zinn describes the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voting rights campaign called Freedom Day in Hattiesburg, Miss.

March 26, 1964: Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met briefly by chance as they were waiting for a press conference.

Protestors Dow Chemical | Zinn Education Project

March 22, 1969: DC 9 Protest Dow Chemical Production of Napalm

Nine protesters smashed glass, hurled files out a fourth floor window, and poured blood on files and furniture at the Dow Chemical offices in Washington, D.C.

Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong

Picture book. By Dawn Bohulano Mabalon and Gayle Romasanta. Illustrated by Andre Sibayan. 2018.
The first nonfiction illustrated Filipino-American history book for children tells the story of labor activist Larry Itliong, who organized farmworkers on the West Coast in the mid-20th century.

March 20, 1969: Mexican-American Students Walkout in Colorado

Mexican-American youth walked out of school to protest racial discrimination in Denver, Colorado.

Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this mixer lesson, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression to analyze why disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign, determining what kind of threat they posed in the view of the U.S. government.

A photograph of the Tougaloo Nine, Black activists who staged a read-in at the public library to protest segregation.

March 27, 1961: Jackson, Mississippi Library Sit-In

Nine Tougaloo College students and members of the Jackson Youth Council of the NAACP staged a sit-in to protest segregation at the Jackson Public Library in 1961 and were subsequently arrested.

King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South

Book — Non-fiction. 2025. By Jeanne Theoharis. 400 pages.
Illustrates how King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — outside Dixie — was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice.

March 24, 1965: Anti-Vietnam War Teach-in at University of Michigan

The first anti-Vietnam War teach-in occurred at the University of Michigan, with more than 3,000 students, faculty and community members gathering on campus to educate each other about escalating U.S. aggression in Vietnam.

Teaching the 1964 New York City School Boycott

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
This lesson and accompanying article teach about the largest civil rights protest of the 1960s was in New York City, when hundreds of thousands of students stayed home to protest school segregation.

Teaching Activity by Adam Sanchez

April 3, 1969: Judge George Crockett Jr. Defends Equal Justice

In the face of white supremacists’ threats, a Black Detroit judge upheld the law and acted for equal justice for Black churchgoers detained unlawfully after a deadly police shoot-out.

Medgar Evers

Profile. By Dernoral Davis.
Medgar Evers (July 2, 1925—June 12, 1963), Civil Rights Movement activist in Mississippi.

March on Washington | Zinn Education Project

Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

August 28 marks the anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Publicly associated with Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, this march brought more than 250,000 people to the nation’s capital. The day went down in history as a powerful show of force against Jim Crow segregation. Over time this great event has risen to levels of near mythology. The powerful speech by Dr. King, replayed, in part, for us every January on Martin Luther King Day, has eclipsed all else — so much so that too many people believe that the March on Washington was entirely the work of Dr. King. It is also barely remembered that the March on Washington was for freedom and jobs.

Pentagon Papers collage | Zinn Education Project

Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret

By Bill Bigelow

In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson “lied and lied and lied.” Nixon lied.

Ellsberg concludes: “The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it’s a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it’s no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public.”

In June of 1971, Ellsberg surrendered to federal authorities at Post Office Square in Boston. Forty-two years later, few of the historical secrets that Ellsberg revealed — especially those that focus on the immediate post-World War II origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam — appear in the school curriculum.

Jan. 10, 1966: Voting Rights Activist Vernon Dahmer Murdered

Vernon Dahmer was killed when the Ku Klux Klan fired bombed his home. This was one day after Dahmer offered to pay the election poll tax for anyone who could not afford it.

April 6, 1968: Tuskegee Student Uprising

The Tuskegee Student Uprising of 1968 was one of many instances when Black students fought to expand educational opportunities and create more equity on college campuses.

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