Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

Search Results

Southern Conference for Human Welfare Southern Conference for Human Welfare
Call Number: KP 430Format: 1/4 7 1/2 ipsProgram: Southern Conference for Human WelfareCollection: Voices from the South
Interviews with two leading women in the early southern civil rights movement, on a 1938 conference, in Birmingham Alabama that is considered one of the sparks that led to the growth of the civil rights movement. From 1938 to 1948, the Birmingham-based Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) tried to bring long-overdue New Deal-inspired reforms to the South. In particular, the organization was committed to improving social justice and civil rights and instituting electoral reform in the region by repealing the poll tax. Perhaps the most noteworthy of a number of organizations that grew out of the movement for regional reform in the 1930s, the SCHW folded because of funding problems and charges of harboring Communist sympathies, but it laid the groundwork for future civil rights activism.