Sanford, Florida, where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 27-year-old George Zimmerman over one month ago, is currently host to the worst kind of attention a small town could possibly imagine. After weeks of protests around the country, the question lingers as to whether the small town's image will be eternally marred the way that Selma or Birmingham, Alabama still evoke the civil rights movement of the 1960s. What connection does this town have to the long history of the American civil rights movement? For answers, we turn to Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration."

It all started with dinner.

In 2004 my husband, John, and I were celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. That night we were the only Black people at Tru, a five-star restaurant in Chicago’s ultra-exclusive Gold Coast neighborhood. Instead of enjoying the romance of the moment, though, I ruined it by bringing up the discouraging status of Blacks in America. Although we moved on to other topics, they all seemed to lead us back to how fortunate we were and how we should be doing more to help improve the situation— The Black Situation.

On Monday, ground will be broken on the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This $500 million project is just one of the many being erected in major cities dedicated to African American history and the civil rights movement: Atlanta, Jackson and Charleston all have projects in the works. These projects mark an emerging era of scholarship and interest in the history of the civil rights movement, providing the public with new insights.

In 1961 Malcolm X came to Brown University to publicly rebut an article published in the school newspaper that criticized the Nation of Islam. Fast-forward to 2011. A Brown University student was assigned to create a historical narrative using anything in the school library and stumbled across one of the oldest recordings of Malcolm X in existence, heard by virtually no one since its initial taping.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Austin, Texas Tuesday night where he promised the Justice Department's civil rights division will aggressively review new voter ID laws that civil rights advocates say will have a discriminatory impact. This puts the Justice Department smack in the middle of a growing partisan debate over civil rights and minorities' access to the ballot. Several states, including Texas, have passed new requirements requiring voters to present photo ID before casting their vote. 

Fred Shuttlesworth, a civil rights leader who helped bring Birmingham, Alabama to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday at age 89. Shuttlesworth often spoke publicly against the violence that was prevalent in the South at that time, and founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

Many of us trace the Civil Rights movement back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955. But the true beginning may have been during the summer of 1919, remembered as "Red Summer," when race riots erupted across the country. At that time, NAACP membership grew exponentially, as black World War I veterans returned from fighting for democracy abroad and demanded freedom at home. Despite President Woodrow Wilson's promise to further human rights in the U.S., the federal government turned a blind eye and did little to even to protect African-Americans from racial violence.

An excerpt from "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America," by Cameron McWhirter.

1. Carswell Grove

[T]here has been nobody suffered in this matter like I have. I did not do nothing at all to cause that riot.

JOE RUFFIN

Just before the 2010 Midterm Elections, a CBS News poll found that black Americans were more likely than whites to express optimism about the economy. And while nearly 50 percent of black Americans thought America’s next generation would be better off, only 16 percent of white Americans thought the same.

He nicknamed her "Shorty," and she refers to him as one of her "judicial heroes," but in their storied lives and careers, neither of them probably expected what transpired in yesterday's meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As Solicitor General Elena Kagan sits on the precipice of becoming only the fourth woman in history to sit on the Supreme Court, the name of another barrier-breaking justice, Thurgood Marshall, may turn into her biggest liability.

With no history of judicial activity to examine, Republicans are focusing on the year Kagan spent clerking for Marshall in 1988, when she was 28-years-old. To the befuddlement of some, Republicans are decrying the civil rights pioneer as a "well-known liberal activist judge," as Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the raking Republican on the Judiciary committee, described him. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), told The Salt Lake Tribune that he wasn't sure whether he would vote to confirm Marshall if given the chance.

This song, “Lord, I Done Done What You Told Me To Do” echoed through the halls of the White House on Wednesday night.