Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Newly Digitized Material Coming Soon to the Digital Library

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. This legislation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ended segregation and unequal voter registration requirements. It also prohibited employment-based discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.1 This legislation would be passed a few weeks

Found in the Archives: The Capitol March for the Equal Rights Amendment in Tallahassee

October is American Archives Month! As an institution that works alongside and documents the local community, I wanted to highlight two collections housed in the Claude Pepper Library that illustrate local political action in our historic capitol: The National Organization of Women, Tallahassee Chapter Records and the League of Women Voters, Tallahassee Chapter Records. The

A moment on the Equal Rights Amendment

On March 22, 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by the US Senate and sent to the states for ratification. The central idea behind the amendment is simple: all American citizens, regardless of gender, have equal rights before the law. Almost fifty years later, the amendment has still not passed, as only 35 of

The Florida NOW Times: Looking Back at 20 years of Women’s History

In 1966, a group of women, frustrated at the failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to recognize sex discrimination in the workplace and the failure of the conference they were attending to demand the EEOC do so, started what became the National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1971, Tallahassee gained its own NOW chapter, chartered