The University of Virginia has launched a new online resource on the civil rights movement. The university’s Project on Lived Theology has gone live with its website, The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama.
The new online digital archive offers biographies of key figures in the civil rights movement, oral histories, and digitized documents relating to each person featured in the archive. The documents include newspaper articles, personal correspondence, letters, court documents, and field reports.
Charles Marsh, director of the Project on Lived Theology, stated, “During that extraordinary period in American history, White conservatives, civil rights activists, Black militants, Black moderates and Klansmen all staked their particular claims for racial justice and social order on the premise that God was on their side.”
Kelly West Figueroa-Ray, manager of the new online archive and a doctoral student in religious studies, added, “The archive puts firsthand reflections from people of diverse positions – from both pro- and anti-civil rights activists to fence-sitting moderates – in conversation with each other, and demonstrates the struggles of peacemaking, community-building and lived theology during a pivotal moment in history.”
