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Resources for African American History Month: Story Map of the Civil Rights Movement
Posted by: Colleen Smith, February 17, 2026
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This is the third post in a series that looks at different resources from the Library that support teaching and learning about the achievements and contributions of African Americans throughout U.S. history.
Story Maps produced at the Library of Congress use geospatial technology to create curated entry points into different digital collections. There are several Story Maps that highlight aspects of African American history; this post examines one that is an excellent resource for teaching about the civil rights movement of the mid 20th century.
The Freedom Story Map, created by Guha Shankar of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, chronicles various aspects of civil rights campaigns, including the Albany movement and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The power of this resource is that it blends together different types of sources to tell a story, emphasizing oral history interviews with individuals who participated in the movement to maps to photographs to news footage.
Using the Story Map with students
As educators might expect, chapters of the Story Map include challenging topics. Teachers will want to preview the full Story Map and determine which sections may work best for their students.
Teachers might assign students different sections, or chapters, of the Story Map. To begin, teachers could model strategies for analyzing different types of sources that they will encounter in the resource.
Students will want to have some practice with listening to and interpreting oral history interviews as these personal experiences are the mainstay of the Story Map. For additional support with using oral histories as a type of primary source, see this post that gives helpful strategies. It also provides links to the Civil Rights History Project, a project of the American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture that is the source of the interviews featured in the Story Map.
As students work through an assigned or chosen section of the resource, encourage learners to consider each type of source in relationship to the particular topic. For example, in the section about the March on Washington, how do different source types contribute to what they understand about the event? What can an interview offer that a photograph may not? How does a portion of a speech give additional perspective or raise new questions?
Finally, teachers might want to look to this post by the Story Map’s creator. It offers additional context on the resource and may spark additional ideas for using the item with students.
Additional Story Maps
If you find Story Maps to be a compelling resource, we invite you to explore additional Story Maps from the Library. Two Story Maps may be of particular interest to teachers: one that examines the legal and strategic path to the Brown v Board of Education decision and this Story Map that focuses on African American performance styles, primarily music.
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Categories
Contemporary United States (1945-present), African American History
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Resources for African American History Month: Story Map of the Civil Rights Movement | Teaching with the Library
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