Voices Of The Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966
Smithsonian Folkways, 1997
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=2269

This double-CD reissue documents a central aspect of the cultural environment of the Civil Rights Movement, acknowledging songs as the language that focused people's energy. These 43 tracks are a series of musical images, of a people in coversation about their determination to be free. Many of the songs were recorded live in mass meetings held in churches, where people from different life experiences, predominantly Black, with a few White supporters, came together in a common struggle. These freedom songs draw from spirituals, gospel, rhythm and blues, football chants, blues and calypso forms. The enclosed booklet written by Bernice Johnson Reagon provides rare historic photographs along with the powerful story of African American musical culture and its role in the Civil Rights Movement. The music of the spirit with the history of the flesh. -New York Daily News

Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1990
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=2061

Hymns, speeches, spirituals, gospel songs, and prayers...a moving civil rights collection drawn from 1960s field recordings in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The compilation captures the irrepressible spirit of that era and reveals a determined and triumphant African American culture. A collection of glorious songs and heartstopping selections by The SNCC Freedom Singers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and others. "...there is wonderful singing here, great conviction, and the immediacy of living truth...powerful documentation of the most important social movement of our time." -- Sing Out!

We Shall Overcome: Documentary of the March on Washington
Various Artists
Folkways Records,1963
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1072

We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-Ins
Montgomery Gospel Trio, Nashville Quartet, Guy Carawan
Folkways Records, 1961
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1071

Sit-In Story, The: The Story of the Lunch Room Sit-Ins
Edwin Randall
Folkways Records, 1961
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1028

If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope and Struggle
Pete Seeger
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1998
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=2419

For over 50 years Pete Seeger's music has included songs on labor, civil rights, peace, and the hope for a better world. This CD contains 24 tracks selected from hundreds released on Folkways Records in the late 1950s and 1960s and 2 new songs recorded especially for this collection. Pete plays the 5-string banjo and the 12-string guitar, and appears on some tracks with Almanac Singers and his grandson Tao Rodriguez. Booklet contains detailed notes by Mark Greenberg and a complete discography of Pete Seeger on Folkways. 71 minutes.

Lest We Forget, Vol. 1: Movement Soul, Sounds of the Freedom Movement in the South, 1963-64
Various Artists
Folkways Records, 1980
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1024

Songs, Sermons, Shouts, Prayers, Testimony

Lest We Forget, Vol. 2: Birmingham, Alabama, 1963 - Mass Meeting
Various Artists
Folkways Records, 1980
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1025

Songs, Sermons

Lest We Forget, Vol. 3: Sing For Freedom
Various Artists
Folkways Records,1980
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1026

Songs

Brian Ward. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8123.html

One of the most innovative and ambitious books to appear on the civil rights and black power movements in America, Just My Soul Responding also offers a major challenge to conventional histories of contemporary black and popular music. Brian Ward explores in detail the previously neglected relationship between Rhythm and Blues, black consciousness, and race relations within the context of the ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality in the United States. Instead of simply seeing the world of black music as a reflection of a mass struggle raging elsewhere, Ward argues that Rhythm and Blues, and the recording and broadcasting industries with which it was linked, formed a crucial public arena for battles over civil rights, racial identities, and black economic empowerment. (book Description)

Strange Fruit (2002)
57 minutes. Producer/Director: Joel Katz
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/strangefruit/index.html

The film tells a dramatic story of America's past by using one of the most influential protest songs ever written as its epicenter. The saga brings us face-to-face with the terror of lynching as it spotlights the courage and heroism of those who fought for racial justice when to do so was to risk ostracism and livelihood if white - and death if black. It examines the history of lynching, and the interplay of race, labor, the Left and popular culture that would give rise to the civil rights movement. the site contains an overview of protest music since slavery to the present.

We Shall Overcome (1989)
58 minutes Producer/Director: Jim Brown
http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0104

We Shall Overcome became the anthem that set America marching towards racial equality. By tracing the sources of song, this pathbreaking film uncovers the diverse strands of social history which flowed together to form the Civil Rights movement.

Voices of the Civil Rights
http://www.voicesofcivilrights.org/civil5.html

AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress have teamed up to collect and preserve personal accounts of America's struggle to fulfill the promise of equality for all. The site is a invitation to share stories and explore the tribute to those who were a part of the civil rights experience and to the continuing quest for equality.