The activism of the Civil Rights Era manifested as direct action as well as artistic responses to the realities of Black life in America. Through various mediums, including quilts, artists documented the mid-twentieth-century struggle for equal rights but also explored untold and underrepresented stories of the African American experience. In her Yesterday: Civil Rights in the South, Yvonne Wells unflinchingly tells the story of lynchings, murders, bombings, and abuse inflicted upon Southern Black Americans prior to and during the Civil Rights Era.