FAQs
About the LDF Archives
Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive is an archives education website that is open to the public. Here, you will find a searchable digital collection, consisting primarily of oral histories, legal briefs, legal research, and correspondence related to more than 6,000 cases the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) has litigated since its founding in 1940. You will also find original content, such as essays and an interactive timeline that highlights key, and often forgotten, figures and cases in the advancement of racial justice.
As one of the country’s oldest and foremost civil rights legal organizations, LDF created Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive to preserve and share the inner thinking of legendary thought-leaders and legal minds. We hope litigators, advocates, and activists use these primary source materials to learn from their predecessors and to inform present efforts to advance civil rights. The oral histories, court documents, curriculum, and editorial content provide teachers, students, and scholars with an engaging way to interact with our shared history.
Now more than ever, it is critical that we all have access to reliable information about our nation’s ongoing struggle for racial equity.
Housed within LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI), the LDF Archives are a repository of historic records documenting LDF’s fight for civil rights and racial justice from 1940 through today. By preserving and sharing LDF’s records, the Archives serve the organization’s broader mission of using the power of law, narrative, research, and people to defend and advance the full dignity and citizenship of Black people in America. The LDF Archives hold valuable information about the history of structural racism in the United States, the lived experiences of Black people, and critical information to counter false narratives.
The LDF Archives are staffed by a team of archivists, librarians, administrative professionals, and an attorney. The team believes that everyone deserves access to our shared history, and we hope that sharing and contextualizing our archives will help people tell their own stories and learn from our predecessors.
The LDF Archives consist of 8,000 boxes of legal case files, legislative advocacy materials, reports and publications, correspondence, photographs, videos, administrative materials, documentation of LDF’s sustained efforts in community organizing, social science research, and a new collection of oral history interviews. The Archives team’s work is ongoing as we are actively surveying, arranging, describing, and digitizing these records. After our Archives Counsel reviews digitized documents to ensure that they do not contain privileged, confidential, or sensitive information, they become available on Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive through an integration with our digital repository, Preservica.
LDF prioritizes materials for digitization and sharing based on several factors, including: historical significance, such as landmark cases; relevance to LDF’s current initiatives and concerns, such as voting rights; requests from LDF staff and external researchers; and uniqueness. We also prioritize public documents, especially court documents that are not otherwise available online. Note that the archival material available here does not contain the entire legal record for every case file represented. Some items are restricted due to privilege, confidentiality, and other sensitivities. Other items are not in LDF’s archives or are not yet digitized and ready to share.
Using the website
To search the LDF Archives, enter your keyword in the search box and press the enter key, or click the magnifying glass button next to the search box. If you enter multiple keywords, they will be combined to display results containing all keywords. Alternatively, you can type “OR” to specify that the results should only contain one of your keywords, or “NOT” to specify that the following keyword should be excluded from results. By putting one or more keywords in quotation marks, only results that match that exact phrase will appear.
Example Search: “Brown v. Board of Education” OR “Oliver Brown” NOT “Brown v. County School Board of Frederick County” will retrieve results containing the exact phrase “Brown v. Board of Education” or the exact phrase “Oliver Brown,” and exclude any results with the phrase “Brown v. County School Board of Frederick County.”
By default, the results are sorted by relevance. By clicking the “Sort” button next to the search box, you can instead sort alphabetically by Title, or chronologically by Date (of the item) or by Date Added (that is, when the item was added to Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive).
To further refine your results, see the “Filter Results By” column on the left side of the page (browser view), or click on the “Filter and Sort” button under the search box (mobile view). To filter by additional keywords, type the keyword into the search box and it will filter the initial results by both phrases. To remove specific filters, click the red “X” next to the filter under the search box, or click “Clear Filters” to remove all filters and start a new search.
No. Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive is available to the public for general educational and research purposes, as well as to preserve and contextualize the history of the content it contains. We encourage you to view, read, and/or hear the materials and to interact with them within Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive itself without limitation.
By accessing, using, downloading, publishing, or reusing the materials on Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive, you are agreeing to the website’s terms and conditions. LDF grants you the right to use LDF-owned materials for the Permitted Purposes without seeking further permission from LDF.
Yes. If you publish or redistribute any materials (including excerpts and quotes), you must include a credit line and/or proper citation to the source of the material. Include any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices that appear when using the content.
In general, the following pieces of information should be included when citing materials from Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive:
Oral Histories:
Oral History Interview with [NARRATOR NAME], Interview by [INTERVIEWER NAME], [DATE]. Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute.
Example:
Oral History Interview with John Charles Boger, Interview by Seth Kotch, February 23, 2023. Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute.
Archival Document:
[Name of Archives Collection], [File Name]. [Title], [Date], [ItemID]. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute. [URL]. [date accessed].
Example:
Brief Collection, LDF Court Filings. APPENDIX, LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute. [insert final URL]. Accessed July 15, 2024.
Original Editorial Content:
[Author’s last name, Author’s first name], “Title of Article,” Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive. Date published/accessed.
Example:
Hagen, Carrie, “Smith v. Allwright: The LDF Voting Rights Case that ‘Changed the Whole Complexion of the South,’” Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive. Accessed July 15, 2024.
Like other archives, LDF owns the physical source materials that are digitized for our collection. LDF does not, however, own the underlying copyright or other rights for all items, including many of the images on the Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive website. We have included a credit line alongside images to identify the copyright holder.
It is your responsibility to determine whether any permissions are necessary to reproduce images for your intended use. Please review the relevant terms and conditions for more information.
The LDF Archives consist of 8,000 boxes of materials, and our team is actively surveying, arranging, describing, and digitizing these records. If you are researching a case litigated by LDF and related materials are not available on Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive or in the processed or unprocessed LDF records with the Library of Congress, it is possible that the materials are in our possession but not yet digitized or ready to share. We hope you will revisit this website as we continuously add newly digitized records.
You may want to search other legal and civil rights archives, such as: the LDF Records, 1915-1968, NAACP Records, 1842-2019, and other related collections at the Library of Congress; The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse; ACLU Records, 1917-2015 at Princeton University; SNCC Digital Gateway; Civil Rights Digital Library; and Northeastern Law School’s CRRJ Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.
Information about living individuals is protected by the Privacy Act. We have redacted archival content that contains Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, personal addresses, and other non-public personally identifiable information. Other documents, including oral history transcripts, may be redacted to maintain attorney-client privilege or LDF’s duty of confidentiality to its past clients.
LDF employs policies and processes intended to prevent the display of materials on Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive that infringe on an individual’s privacy or are in violation of copyright law. If, however, you find materials that should not be publicly available for these reasons, please contact the TMI Archives Department at info@ldfrecollection.org to request removal. Please include the following in your message:
- Your contact information
- The reason for the removal request (non-public personally identifiable information, intellectual property infringement, etc.)
- Sufficient information for our staff to locate the materials, including the relevant URL(s)
The materials in the LDF Archives do contain information about living individuals. The Archives Department does not, however, assist researchers with locating someone or conducting other forms of genealogical research. Information such as Social Security numbers and personal addresses are redacted to protect individuals’ privacy.