The Southern Courier On-Line

Read the Courier and Search the Archives

All 177 issues of The Southern Courier are available right here to browse or search, providing a unique on-the-scenes view of the mid-1960s civil rights movement in the Deep South.

Each issue is available in three different resolutions:

• Low Resolution (Low-Res) displays at 72 dpi. Most text is converted to “soft text”, which allows faster loading, searching, and printing, but will appear blurry when enlarged. Each issue may be downloaded in a searchable pdf file of about 3 Mb.
• Medium Resolution (Standard) displays at 150 dpi. Text and images will be fairly sharp when viewed or printed at full size, but may appear blurry when enlarged. The pdf file for each issue is about 10 Mb.
• High Resolution (High-Res) displays all text and photos at 300 dpi. Text and photos will be sharp when viewed or printed at full size, and fairly sharp when enlarged. Each issue takes up about 10 Mb, so downloads will take significantly more time than for the lower-resolution versions.

The Southern Courier Digital Access Project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this website do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

To get started viewing The Southern Courier archives, click here.

Courier Photos

For many readers of the Southern Courier, the photos told the stories. No other paper, week after week, looked so carefully and and incisively at black lives, the civil rights movement, and racial realities in the Deep South. For more than three years, staff photographer Jim Peppler recorded the events and the people who shaped - and were shaped by - the civil rights struggle. A gifted photo-journalist who went on to a four-decade career at Newsday, Jim donated his 11,000-photo Southern Courier collection to the Alabama Department of Archives and History. To browse this deeply moving photographic history, click here.