Civil Rights Organizations

Elaine Graham Estes, longtime director of the Des Moines Public Library, discusses the civil rights movement in Iowa.

You can almost trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement through the press by observing that in the early period of The Bystander I saw references to organizations that were involved in civil rights or improvements of human rights activities. Those organizations' involvement carried through from all the years and you saw their names change, there was an interracial group, there was a human rights commission, there was a human rights committee, there was a brotherhood week and you’d see activities for each of those. That is a very good indicator of the need for human rights organizations and who the people were that were involved in those and what their activities were.