Maryland Civil RightsStudent research archive · Baltimore · 2006 to 2007
The archive

About This Archive

The original mdcivilrights.org was published in 2007 by students of Doris M. Johnson High School in Baltimore and their teacher, Mike Douglas, working with staff of the Maryland Historical Society, among them Naomi Coquillon and Jennifer Janssen. The project grew out of a Save Our History grant won in 2004 and was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation through Associated Black Charities. The site gathered student essays on the civil rights movement in Baltimore and Maryland, a list of oral history interviews recorded in 2006 and 2007, and a timeline. The students also produced a printed book, and two of them were inspired to create a song based on "Strange Fruit."

This site is an independent reading archive. It is not run by the school, the Maryland Historical Society, or the project's sponsors, and it has no connection to any of them. The pages were rebuilt from Wayback Machine captures of the original site made between late 2009 and early 2011, before the domain lapsed. Fourteen pages were recovered: the home page with the teacher's introduction, the interview list, the timeline, the About Us page, and ten essay pages covering Pennsylvania Avenue, Dunbar and Douglass high schools, Carl Murphy, the Eastern Shore lynchings, the University of Maryland law school, the March to Annapolis, Poly, churches, Morgan State students, and the Black Panthers.

Some parts of the original site were deliberately left out. The About Us page carried portrait photographs of the students and short self-introductions; those have been left out because the material was personal. Press photographs owned by others that illustrated the essays are not reproduced. Pages that appeared on the domain after it lapsed were unrelated spam and were discarded. The oral history interviews were linked as audio files, and those files were not saved in any capture, so the interview page now lists the recordings without the sound.

The photographs on this site are public domain images from Wikimedia Commons, added during the restoration to match the subject of each page. The essays are reproduced as the students wrote them, including their numbered endnotes, quotations, and occasional slips in spelling or grammar. No attempt has been made to correct facts, update citations, or revise wording. The only changes are to formatting, such as consistent headings, paragraph breaks, and the removal of broken links to files that no longer exist. A short reader's note above each page describes what the text covers and the sources it draws on.

Photographs on this site

Every photograph shown here is in the public domain and comes from Wikimedia Commons. The pictures that appeared on the original pages were left out.