01Movement & Mobility
Travel to Resist
Reconsiders the constitutional right to travel through the history of people moving across and within states to organize, march, and resist.
Featured sourceMovement travel and protest records ↗
University of Richmond School of Law
Law, movements,
and memory.
A living archive of student scholarship, primary sources, music, and community-engaged learning from Professor Wingfield's Civil Rights History seminar at the University of Richmond School of Law.
Civil Rights History SeminarCreated and taught by Professor Danielle Wingfield
1865Emancipation
1954Litigation
1964Movement
OngoingFreedom Struggle
“The past remains present in law, institutions, and memory.”
Professor Danielle Wingfield
01
About the course and archive
Whose civil-rights history?
This archive grows out of Professor Danielle Wingfield's Civil Rights History seminar at the University of Richmond School of Law. Students learn to identify, locate, interpret, and contextualize archival sources, then use those materials to develop original legal-historical arguments. The featured sources throughout the Student Research Gallery were located by students through that research process.
Through archival research, legal analysis, works-in-progress presentations, and collective discussion, students examine how civil-rights struggles have shaped law and how law has both constrained and enabled social change. The course approaches civil-rights history as a long and unfinished struggle over freedom, dignity, power, and belonging.
Virginia provides a vital vantage point, while student projects reach across regions, generations, practice areas, and national borders. The work collected here reflects Professor Wingfield's teaching and the questions, research, and insights students develop through their learning together.
Student research gallery
Questions we pursue
together.
Drawn from student research in Professor Wingfield's Civil Rights History seminar from 2022 to the present, this gallery features students' works-in-progress presentations and, beginning in 2026, their final seminar papers. These materials preserve questions and arguments developed through research, presentation, revision, and collective discussion. Student names have been redacted, and all course materials are presented anonymously.
02Movement Strategy
Activism as the American Ethos
Traces democratic collaboration from the nation’s founding through abolition and the Civil Rights Movement to argue that activism is central to American political development.
Featured sourceFounding-era and movement texts ↗
03Economic Justice
The Freedman’s Savings Bank
Connects the collapse of the Freedman’s Bank to present-day financial-literacy policy and the continuing racial wealth gap.
Featured sourceFreedman’s Bank depositor records ↗
04Technology & Work
Familiar Discrimination in New Technology
Examines how automated hiring tools can reproduce the patterns of employment discrimination that persisted after the Civil War.
Featured sourceEmployment law and hiring systems ↗
05Constitutional Rights
Forfeiting the Fourth
Asks whether plea agreements can require defendants to surrender Fourth Amendment protections after their criminal cases conclude.
Featured sourceVirginia plea agreements and Senate Bill 334 ↗
06Education & Protest
Chilling First Amendment Rights
Places contemporary university protest restrictions beside the longer history of student speech, in loco parentis, and campus dissent.
Featured sourceCampus protest and student-rights records ↗
07Surveillance & Repression
Government Intervention Against Civil Rights Movements
Compares historical and contemporary government strategies for discrediting, disrupting, and undermining movements for racial justice.
Featured sourceGovernment surveillance records ↗
08Housing & Place
Richmond’s Eviction Crisis
Situates Richmond’s high eviction rate within a longer history of racial displacement, housing inequality, and neighborhood instability.
Featured sourceVirginia eviction data ↗
09Citizenship
Race, Citizenship, and the Anticanon
Uses Dred Scott and the constitutional anticanon to evaluate efforts to restrict jus soli birthright citizenship.
Featured sourceDred Scott, Wong Kim Ark, and Executive Order 14160 ↗
10Education & Memory
Fact or Fiction of American Censorship
Explores how censorship and the reception of literature shape collective memory and public understanding of contested history.
Featured sourceBanned books and censorship records ↗
11Work & Equality
Racial Discrimination in Employment Cases
Examines how courts interpret and apply employment-discrimination doctrine and what those decisions reveal about the limits of Title VII.
Featured sourceTitle VII employment cases ↗
12Policing & Incarceration
The Standard Conditions of Pretrial Release
Argues that standard pretrial-release conditions undermine civil liberties, public safety, and the presumption of innocence while perpetuating mass incarceration.
Featured sourceFourth Circuit pretrial-release conditions ↗
13Reproductive Justice
Rights Deserts
Maps the unequal geography of reproductive freedom after Dobbs and considers Virginia’s role within a regional landscape of restricted rights.
Featured sourceDobbs and post-Dobbs state laws ↗
14LGBTQ+ History
Pay It No Mind
Examines ballroom, artistic expression, and community-building as forms of resistance to policing, surveillance, and social control.
Featured sourceBallroom histories and policing records ↗
15Labor & Movement Strategy
Shared Strategies of Labor and Civil Rights
Traces the overlap between labor militancy and civil-rights organizing, including the adoption of confrontational tactics across movements.
Featured sourceLabor and civil-rights movement records ↗
16Authority & Revolution
Rebels of a New Age
Develops a natural-law account of authority, revolutionary praxis, and the obligations of people confronting illegitimate power.
Featured sourceRevolutionary-era political and legal texts ↗
17Surveillance & Repression
The FBI and COINTELPRO
Studies COINTELPRO’s constitutional and moral failures and the persistence of federal tactics used against Black activists.
Featured sourceFBI and COINTELPRO records ↗
18Comparative Civil Rights
Laws, Leadership, Liberty, and Legacy
Compares the role of law, leadership, and youth activism in the American Civil Rights Movement and South Africa’s struggle against apartheid.
Featured sourceU.S. civil-rights and South African anti-apartheid laws ↗
19Economic Justice
Who Pays the Price?
Uses the economics of externalities to connect exploitation in slavery, immigrant labor, housing discrimination, and mass incarceration.
Featured sourceLabor, housing, and incarceration records ↗
20Art & Protest
Women’s Rights Activism Through Music
Considers music as a form of women’s-rights protest in the digital age and the legal implications of artistic activism in the United States and abroad.
Featured sourceProtest music and digital-media records ↗
21Education & Memory
Law, Education, and Memory
Surveys the uneven legal and policy landscape governing Black-history education in K–12 schools, with particular attention to Virginia.
Featured sourceState statutes, standards, and curricula ↗
22Policing & Reconstruction
Attempts at Reform
Compares Reconstruction with efforts to reform policing in Los Angeles and asks why institutional reforms repeatedly fall short.
Featured sourceReconstruction laws and Los Angeles police-reform records ↗
23Technology & Access
Virginia’s Technology Deserts
Shows how broadband and device access reflect older patterns of geography, race, wealth, and public investment.
Featured sourceFCC National Broadband Map ↗
24Privacy & Racial Violence
Doxing: Mob Violence in the Twenty-First Century
Connects contemporary doxing to the history of mob violence and vigilantism while evaluating tort, privacy, and First Amendment responses.
Featured sourceAnti-lynching records and contemporary doxing cases ↗
25Published Scholarship
Bodies on the Line
Explores assassination and incarceration as both tools of repression and catalysts within recurring cycles of civil-rights mobilization.
Featured sourceMovement records from the 1960s to the present ↗
26Published Scholarship
A World Created by Fear
A public-history essay emerging from seminar research and published by the Richmond Public Interest Law Review.
Featured sourceJapanese American incarceration records ↗
27Published Scholarship
Speech and Protest Rights: Vietnam and Palestine
Compares legal and institutional responses to student protest across two periods of conflict and campus mobilization.
Featured sourceVietnam-era and contemporary protest records ↗
28Related Published Work
The Forest Is Everywhere
Examines state criminalization of protest and dissent in the movement opposing Atlanta’s proposed Cop City project.
Featured sourceCop City protest and prosecution records ↗
These presentations originated as works in progress in the Civil Rights History seminar. They capture student research and argument at a particular stage of development and should not be treated as formally published scholarship unless otherwise indicated. The gallery includes materials currently available for the archive and is not a complete record of every presentation or project produced in the seminar. Course copies are anonymized; journal links lead to the official published versions.
Published work
Research that travels
beyond the classroom.
After the seminar ended, these students continued the demanding work of developing their course papers into published scholarship. I am tremendously proud of what they accomplished. Their publications reflect both their individual dedication and the rigor and quality of work students bring to the Civil Rights History seminar. These links lead to the official versions hosted by their publishers.
01Read published work ↗02Read published work ↗03Read published work ↗04Read published work ↗05Read published work ↗06Read published work ↗07Read published work ↗08Read published work ↗09Read published work ↗
Bodies on the Line
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
The Freedman’s Savings Bank and Financial Literacy Education
University of Richmond Law Review Online
Forfeiting the Fourth
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
A World Created by Fear
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
Speech and Protest Rights: Vietnam and Palestine
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
Laws, Leadership, Liberty, and Legacy
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
A Brief Overview of Legal Solutions to Resolve Technology Deserts
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
Virginia: The Last Safe Haven of the South Post-Dobbs
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
The Forest Is Everywhere
Richmond Public Interest Law Review
Primary source highlights from student research
Read the record.
Ask what it reveals.
Statutes, court opinions, maps, letters, and government records reveal how law constructs inequality and how communities answer it.
Browse featured sources ↓Two Laws Dismantling Segregation
The United States and South Africa
The Civil Rights History Soundtrack
Hear history as an ongoing struggle.
Each class contributes songs that illuminate freedom, pain, defiance, hope, and political possibility. Together, the selections form a student-curated historical record across generations and genres.
Course standards
Browse the soundtrack ↓- A Change Is Gonna Come
- Lift Every Voice and Sing
- Strange Fruit
- We Shall Overcome
- Freedom
Featured selections
Three classes.
One living soundtrack.
Select a song to find it in YouTube Music. The collection will continue to grow with each new seminar.
Fall 2022
Fall 2023
Fall 2024
A living course archive
Every class adds
to the record.
New research, sources, songs, and community partnerships will expand this collection each year.