NORTH ST. LOUIS COUNTY • While in the Army, Jackie Robinson was court martialed for refusing to move to the back of a military bus. Ella Fitzgerald sued Pan American airline after she was not allowed to board a flight. And James Meredith launched a legal fight for admission as the first African-American to the University of Mississippi.

Documents and photos related to their civil rights fights are part of an exhibit that looks at the struggle for freedom at various points in U.S. history, including Susan B. Anthony's push to allow women to vote and the internment of Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack.

The traveling exhibit, which opened in Atlanta in 2009 and stopped at several points across the U.S., finishes its tour in St. Louis, where it remains at the National Archives at St. Louis Personnel Records Center through the end of May.

"You can see the paranoia, the racism all those things we dealt with that, of course, turned out to be unjustified," said Bryan K. McGraw, director of the National Archives at St. Louis.

The "Documented Rights" exhibition was developed to mark the 75th anniversary of the National Archives and Records Administration. The documents and photos that make up the exhibit come from 14 National Archives facilities across the U.S. The exhibit includes documents from all five cases of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark ruling that ended school segregation.

The exhibit documents are facsimiles. Many of the originals are fragile and would not travel well, McGraw said.

The exhibit highlights that discrimination has been a part of the country's fabric since the beginning. Native Americans, Japanese, Germans, women, blacks and Hispanics all have had to fight for equality, McGraw said.

From the exhibit, "you get the idea that you're an American citizen but not really an American citizen," he said.

On Monday, employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs, housed in the Records Center building, toured the exhibit.

"It's just amazing to see some of the pictures, some of the facial expressions," said Delores Stocking, 49, of Pine Lawn, as she viewed a 1959 photo of a group of white people protesting desegregation outside the Arkansas State Capitol.

"Like her," she said gesturing to a woman in the photo. "She's just real angry about something. And him. He's all riled about something. It's hard to think they were spending time on something like that when they could have been doing something else."

Stocking's colleague, Hakim Steward, 35, of Alton, said the exhibit drives home the point of how grateful he and others his age should be to those before them who stood up to injustices.

"It makes me thankful for the sacrifices they made and to put me in a position to where I can excel and make my dreams come true," Steward said. "They couldn't make their dreams come true because of all the adversity going on."

A lecture series is running in tandem with the exhibit. Next up is a lecture on the Emancipation Proclamation. It will be held at 7 p.m. Feb. 16, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the draft of the document.

The November lecture on Native Americans included remarks by C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, a history professor at Illinois College. He applauds the National Archives for putting together an exhibit from its own collections in an attempt to create "an inclusive narrative" of America's fights for freedom, including those of Native Americans.

But Genetin-Pilawa said attempting to cover Native Americans along with so many others in the same exhibit "can flatten out the complexities of Native American history by trying to crowbar it in."

McGraw said the exhibit is an overview of the struggles for freedom, and designed to remind the public of various chapters in American history.

"You read some of this stuff and, wow," McGraw said. "Very, very strong beliefs."