Human and Civil Rights Exhibition Opens June 16 at National Archives at Atlanta

June 3, 2009

Documents from all five cases of Brown v. Board of Education Presented for the First Time

The struggle for freedom is a recurring theme in the annals of American history, and it is the subject of a new exhibition of milestone documents opening June 16 at the National Archives at Atlanta.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Archives at Atlanta opens Documented Rights, a traveling exhibition of original documents from each of the 13 regional branches of the National Archives.

Documented Rights presents records that give voice to the national struggle for human and civil rights. It features more than 80 documents, facsimiles, images and sound recordings, including:

• Selected documents from all five court cases that comprised Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation -- exhibited for the first time together;
• Court records of the schooner Amistad, that tell the story of 53 Africans who resisted enslavement, overpowered the ship's captain and were found off the coast of Long Island;
• Court records from San Francisco in the 1890s chronicling the citizenship odyssey of San Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark;
• The official logbook recording the WWII evacuation and relocation of Aleuts in Alaska;
• Court records reflecting the efforts of white residents of Koinonia Farms, Georgia, to overcome various forms of discrimination;
• An early Montgomery Improvement Association booklet by Martin Luther King, Jr.; and
• A court martial order for Second Lt. Jackie Robinson who refused to move to the back of the bus on a military post.

Documented Rights is part of a nationwide series of commemorative events that includes a one-day symposium at the National Archives at Atlanta on June 13 on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement; registration for the symposium is closed.

The exhibition is free and open to the public at the National Archives at Atlanta, 5780 Jonesboro Road, Morrow, Georgia. The facility hours are Tuesday - Saturday, 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Call 770-968-2100 for more information or see http://www.archives.gov/southeast/.

Source: National Archives