The Spartacus Educational website provides a series of free history encyclopaedias. Entries usually include a narrative, illustrations and primary sources. The text within each entry is linked to other relevant pages in the encyclopaedia. In this way it is possible to research individual people and events in great detail. The sources are also hyper-linked so the student is able to find out about the writer, artist, newspaper and organization that produced the material.
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In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.
According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Officefs Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.
As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, the Virtual School and the Spring Europe Project and done other online work for Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) and the Historical Association.
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After the arrest of Rosa Parks, King and his friends, Ralph David Abernathy, Edgar Nixon, and Bayard Rustin helped organize protests against bus segregation. It was decided that black people in Montgomery would refuse to use the buses until passengers were completely integrated. King was arrested and his house was fire-bombed. Others involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott also suffered from harassment and intimidation, but the protest continued.
For thirteen months the 17,000 black people in Montgomery walked to work or obtained lifts from the small car-owning black population of the city. Eventually, the loss of revenue and a decision by the Supreme Court forced the Montgomery Bus Company to accept integration. and the boycott came to an end on 20th December, 1956.
On the way back from one of these trips to the airport, Viola Liuzzo and Leroy Moton, a young African American, were passed by a car carrying four members of the Ku Klux Klan from Birmingham. When they saw a white woman and black man in the car together, they immediately knew that they had both been taking part in the civil rights demonstration at Montgomery. The men decided to kill them and after driving alongside Viola's car, one of the men, Collie Wilkins, put his arm out of the window, and fired his gun. Viola Liuzzo was hit in the head twice and died instantly. Leroy was uninjured and was able to get the car under control before it crashed.
The four men in the car, Collie Wilkins (21), Gary Rowe (34), William Eaton (41) and Eugene Thomas (42) were quickly arrested. Rowe, an FBI undercover agent, testifed against the other three men. In an attempt to prejudice the case, rumours began to circulate that Viola was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her five children in order to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement. It was later discovered that these highly damaging stories that appeared in the press had come from the FBI.
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