James P. Marshall

I am a civil rights activist and an independent research professional. In 1963-1966 I was active in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Washington, D.C, and New York City. During those years I was involved in demonstrations and civil rights organizing. While I was active in movement events I met and talked with other activists and conducted interviews and gathered documents that led to producing research studies both as an undergraduate and a graduate student.

Those early civil rights experiences and more recent ones have accompanied the updating of my research materials and have led to a research fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research of the Hutchins Center at Harvard and doing research in the Civil Rights Division's files at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. That work is found in Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965 (2013) and in The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964: A History in Documents (2018).

Recently I have begun work on the Alabama civil rights movement and the part women and young people played in the fight for their rights alongside the ministers who were active in that fight.