The audio recordings and transcripts in this collection document lectures from a fifteen-week series on the race crisis in the United States, held in the spring of 1964 at the New School and organized by New School professor Daniel S. Anthony. The recorded speakers include Charles Abrams, Algernon D. Black, Dan W. Dodson, Milton A. Galamison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Louis Lomax, Melvin Tumin, Robert C. Weaver, and Roy Wilkins.

Open to the general public, the lectures were held in the New School auditorium at 66 West 12th Street in Greenwich Village. Topics discussed range from the impact of school integration, housing discrimination, affirmative action, the growing Black separatist movement, and motivations for racial prejudice. Dr. King opened the conference, and the recording of his talk consists only of the question and answer session following his address.

Bob Adelman (1930-2016) studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch at The New School in the 1950s and became one of the photographers regularly documenting the life of the New School in the 1970s and 1980s. Adelman also taught at the school and was one of the most well-known photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. This collection consists largely of black and white photographic prints taken for the New School for Social Research.

The collection also includes a small group of prints representing Adelman's work in documentary journalism, including photographs of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as photographs documenting life in New Orleans and Moscow, and the New York City Housing Authority.

This collection consists of an introductory booklet to Benedict J. Fernandez's portfolio of photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., taken in the last year of King's life, Countdown to Eternity: Photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960's. Fernandez was founder of the photography program at Parsons School of Design, serving as chair from 1981-1994.

This collection contains 85 photographs by Leonard Freed, an American photojournalist known for his coverage of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. The photographs include candid depictions of underrepresented American communities, the civil rights movement, and European street scenes.