A Place for All: Three Stories of Integration in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Sep 12, 2022 in | Comments Off on A Place for All: Three Stories of Integration in Pennsylvania The American Civil Rights Movement focused public attention on segregation in the South and the laws and practices that kept Southern Blacks disenfranchised. By the late 1950s places such as Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Greensboro, North Carolina, had become household names in the battle to dismantle the racial caste system of “Jim Crow.” But discrimination based on race, much...
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From the Executive Director

Posted by on Mar 9, 2022 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director Civil rights, voting rights and race relations. These are all topics of conversation today, as they have been for more than a century and a half across the United States, including here in Pennsylvania. But without a shared knowledge about the history of these topics, it becomes harder to have meaningful and productive conversations. This summer we are opening a new exhibit at The State Museum...
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From the Executive Director

Posted by on Mar 9, 2020 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director The Year of the Woman. How many times have we heard that? 1975. 1992. 2018. Yet, this year is a momentous one for Pennsylvania women. June 24, 2019, marks the 100th anniversary of the commonwealth’s ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment, which would give women the right to vote, was adopted on August 18, 1920, making this a full year of celebration....
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Documents for Freedom and Equality of African Americans

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Documents for Freedom and Equality of African Americans One of the primary responsibilities of the Pennsylvania State Archives is to maintain and make available records that document and safeguard the civic and property rights of Pennsylvanians. Many records document the struggle for freedom and equality of the Commonwealth’s African Americans. As early as the seventeenth century, some Pennsylvanians were concerned with the manner in which...
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Breaking Down Barriers

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Breaking Down Barriers In the summer of 1957, William and Daisy Myers and their three children moved from their house near Philadelphia to the post-World War II development of Levittown, some twenty miles northeast of the city. Like millions of American families in the 1950s, they were seeking the highly touted amenities of suburban living (see “Picture Window Par­adise: Welcome to Levittown!” by Curtis...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Over the Line Beginning in the early nineteenth cen­tury, a clandestine movement known as the Underground Railroad helped African American slaves escape bondage in the South to freedom in the North. Adopting the vocabulary of the railroad, this secret passage to freedom consisted of a loosely organized network of abolitionists who lived in the southern border states and in the North and assisted...
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