Website chronicles civil rights struggles in Philadelphia

The black-and-white television news footage of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Girard College is compelling, even after 46 years.

King, at an August 1965 rally protesting racial segregation at the North Philadelphia residential school, leans down from the stage when KYW-TV reporter Tom Snyder asks him what recommendations he has about the segregation of Girard College and "settling our controversy here."

"I have said, over and over again, that there is nothing to do but to continue the struggle and to continue to keep the issue before the forefront of the conscience of the community," King replies. "Certainly this problem is symbolic of the same problem that we face in the South. Segregation is not only unconstitutional, but it is ungodly and sinful."

That vintage news clip is part of a new Temple University website devoted to civil rights struggles in Philadelphia.

The site, Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia, brings together 1,500 items - newspaper clippings, photographs, TV news coverage, oral histories, correspondence, and other materials - to tell the stories of the struggle for civil rights in the city. The Web address is northerncity.library.temple.edu

The site, officially launched over the summer, is so far focused on two events: the desegregation of Girard College (1954-1968) and the Columbia Avenue riots (1964).

Brenda Galloway-Wright, associate archivist at the university's Special Collections Research Center, who is guiding the project, said the website, which is accessible to all, grew out of brainstorming sessions between campus library officials and staff and a $24,000 state grant.

Galloway-Wright said many students had been researching the topics, using materials from throughout the Paley Library and its Special Collections Research Center and the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection.

She said officials decided to focus on civil rights in Philadelphia "because of the wealth of information that we have on the topic."

"It was a heavily researched topic by our students, faculty, historians, writers, and filmmakers," Galloway-Wright said. "They always were coming in to look at the same type of material."