In the spring of 1968, long before Occupy Wall Street protesters turned city squares into tent cities, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the country occupied the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and set up an encampment of makeshift shacks called Resurrection City.

2012 marks the notable anniversaries of two groundbreaking newspapers in the black press and American journalism: Freedom’s Journal and The North Star.

In 1865, when Union troops seized the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va., Philadelphia Press reporter Thomas Morris Chester was the only African American covering the Civil War for a major daily.

Each week during the month of February, the Newseum will look back 50 years to the historic Freedom Rides. Like the sit-in movement that was launched in 1960, the young Freedom Riders — black and white — used civil disobedience to highlight the brutal injustice of segregation in the South.

In Nov. 1910, sociologist W.E.B. DuBois founded The Crisis magazine as the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The monthly magazine was 10 cents a copy, and its first edition consisted of 16 pages.

Feb. 1, 1960. Four African-American students in Greensboro, N.C., walked up to the lunch counter at F.W. Woolworth, quietly took seats in the "whites-only" section and asked to be served.

On Feb. 12 — President Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born. It remains the nation’s oldest champion for civil rights. The date of the organization’s founding was intentional.

For 13 years, Ebony magazine photographer Moneta Sleet chronicled the key moments in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. Sleet's photo of Mrs. King tearfully clasping daughter Bernice won a Pulitzer Prize, making him the first African-American photographer to win the highest honor for news.

Ethel Payne, one of the first black women to cover the White House, aggressively questioned politicians on matters of racial discrimination and segregation.

On Feb. 12 — President Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born. It remains the nation’s oldest champion for civil rights. The date of the organization’s founding was intentional.

Frederick Douglass' Paper, published in 1851 as a continuation of the famed publisher's North Star, was called the country's most prestigious and authoritative anti-slavery newspaper. This 1860 edition contains an article on the Underground Railroad.