University Library News

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day falls on Monday, January 16, this year. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a federal holiday designated by Congress in 1994 as a day of service. The holiday falls on the third Monday of January; King’s actual birthday was January 15, 1929.

The Georgia State University Library has many resources for learning more about Martin Luther King, Jr’s life and impact, the broader civil rights movement, and on building on the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy into the 21st century. Our newest acquisitions include:

Books on Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Angela Herbert, Martin Luther King: “Now Is the Time” – His Dream to Influence Education Today (2016)
• Jefferson Walker, King Returns to Washington: Explorations of Memory, Rhetoric, and Politics in the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial (2016)
• Lewis V. Baldwin, Behind the Public Veil: The Humanness of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2016)
• Pam Smith et al., eds., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North (2016)

Films

• Martin Luther King: Death in Memphis (2016; available to GSU affiliates through our new film streaming database, Kanopy)
• Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine (2013; also available to GSU affiliates through our new film streaming database, Kanopy)

Government Sources

• Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park Act of 2016, H. R. 2880, 114th Cong. (2016)
• United States. Congress. House. Committee on Natural Resources. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park Act of 2016: report: (to accompany H.R. 2880) (including cost estimate of the Congressional Budget Office) [2016]
• United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park Act of 2016: report (to accompany H.R. 2880)

Broader sources on the Civil Rights Movement, newly acquired, include:

• John Dittmer, Freedom Summer: A Brief History with Documents (2017)
• Claire Parfait et al., eds., Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom (2017)
• Brian D. Behnken, ed., Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States (2016)
• Jason Morgan Ward, Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century (2016)
• Crystal Sanders, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle (2016)
• Laura Visser-Maessen, Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots (2016)
• Martha Wyatt-Rossignol, My Triumph Over Prejudice: The Martha Wyatt-Rossignol Story (2016)
• Michael Butler, Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia, Florida, 1960-1980 (2016)
• Jon H. Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (2016)
• Michael Newton, Unsolved Civil Rights Murder Cases, 1934-1970 (2016)
• Yohuru R. Williams, Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement (2016)

And, on how to build on the legacy of civil rights activism into the 21st century, see these resources (among others!)

• William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (2016)
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
• Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (2016; available in the Law Library)

These are only our newest resources. We have many more resources about King and the Civil Rights Movement.

• To find resources by King in our library type “King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968″ into the search box on the Catalog tab or the Advanced Discover Search b (both on the library’s homepage), and select “Author” from the dropdown menu.
• To find resources about King, try the same search, but select “Subject” from the dropdown menu.

The GSU Library also provides access to a number of databases which include many documents and other materials created as part of the Civil Rights Movement; these databases are accessible to GSU students, faculty, and staff (Campus ID and password needed):

• History Vault: NAACP Papers
• History Vault: American Politics and Society from Kennedy to Watergate
• History Vault: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century
• Atlanta Daily World, 1931-2003 (Atlanta’s oldest continuously publishing African-American newspaper)
• Chicago Defender, 1910-1975 (most influential African-American newspaper of the 20th-century, with over 2/3 of its readership from outside the Chicago area)

These websites are examples of freely available digital collections of similar materials:

• UmbraSearch (new! portal to digital primary sources on African-American history from across the country).
• Civil Rights Digital Library (part of the Digital Library of Georgia)
• The Digital Public Library of America‘s Activism in America exhibition has resources from the Civil Rights Movement.
• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (King Center)
• Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site

Finally, the federal government’s Corporation for National and Community Service website for Martin Luther King Day of Service website contains toolkits and other resources for locating and carrying out service projects for January 16.

Please note that the GSU Library will be closed on January 16, but our databases are accessible from off campus with your GSU Campus ID and password.