The bars of the prison cell from where Martin Luther King Jr wrote an open letter written on April 16, 1963, defending the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism, arguing that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws.

This chair is located in Martin Luther King Jr's private study at The Ebenezer Baptist Church.

The Reverend C.T. Vivian is a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and is a prominent Civil Rights Movement activist, Freedom Rider, and a proponent of non-violent direct action.

Elaine is the former Black Panther Party chairman. She held this position from 1974 to 1977.

On August 28, 1955 Wheeler Parker, Jr. and Simeon Wright witnessed the abduction of their 14-year-old cousin, Emmett Till in Mississippi. He was taken by two white males who accused Till of having whistled at a white woman. Till was tortured and murdered; his body was dumped in a river, where it was found three days later. Images of the open casket showing his disfigured body at the funeral in Chicago were published in newspapers across the nation and played a pivotal role in the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

Black Power Button, Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC, 2009.

This button refers to the imprisonment of Black Panthers' co-founder Bobby Seale who was convicted of contempt of court in 1969 during the trial of the “Chicago Eight."

Joseph and Franklin belonged to the ‘Greensboro Four’ – the first students who dared, in 1960, to sit at a “whites-only” lunch counter inside the Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina. This led to The Greensboro sit-ins, a series of nonviolent protests, which led to the Woolworth department store chain reversing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States.

Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. Belafonte was an early supporter of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s confidants.

Jesse Jackson is an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister.

Congressman John Lewis stands near the Lincoln Memorial where he gave a speech during The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The last surviving speaker from the March, he has represented Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since 1986.

Kathleen is the former national communications secretary for the Black Panther Party.

Ku Klux Klan costume, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, 2009.

Foom left: Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Elizabeth Eckford, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Terrence Roberts, Thelma Mothershed-Wair, Melba Beals, and Ernest Green. The nine registered at the high school in September, 1957, but were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard, on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus. They were able to attend classes only after President Eisenhower sent Army troops to escort them.

This button was issued at the time of Malcolm X’s death on Feb. 21, 1965.

Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted, and was stripped of his championship title and suspended from boxing. “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” Ali's personal courage as a conscientious objector to the war made him an icon for the larger counterculture generation. 

 A banner used at The March on Washington in 1963.

On Sept. 15, 1963, a little over two weeks after the March on Washington four little girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson—were killed in an explosion at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Al. The explosives were placed and discharged by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Chris and Maxine McNair at the church where their daughter Denise died, aged eleven.

The Telegram reporting MLK’s shooting, Smithsonian Museum, DC, 2009.

Judge Robert L. Carter worked for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund and presented its case in arguments leading to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Clockwise from left: the Reverend Joseph Lowery, the Reverend C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young, and the Reverend Fred Shuttleworth, at Martin Luther King, Jr’s church in Atlanta.

From left to right: Qubilah, Gamilah, Malaak, Attallah, and Ilyasah Shabazz.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave the Black Power salute on the podium at the Mexico City Olympics, in 1968.