The civil rights movement began with a collection of quiet
rumblings – in
secretarial pools, grade schools, five and dimes, and on
city buses. Away
from the headlines, long before the marches and sit-ins and
secret
church-house meetings -- like ripples in the rain barrel
– countless
individual indignities sparked ire in the hearts of both
white and
black Americans. And from those first faint murmurs, their
voices grew into a tidal wave of change which altered
America’s social and political
landscapes forever.
But the narratives of history’s major turning points
tend to be written by the leaders -- and many of the
stories of ordinary folks, the foot soldiers who truly made
those turning points possible – their stories are
often lost.
VOICES OF CIVIL RIGHTS is one humble attempt to make sure
that -- at
least in this case – that doesn’t happen. To
capture the stories of this pivotal era, a group of
journalists, photographers and videographers took a 70-day
bus trip around the country. From Greensborough, North
Carolina to Jackson, Mississippi to Texas and Ohio, what
emerged was not a textbook history lesson, but a series of
powerful, intimate themes: awakening, anger, defiance,
suffering, regret, triumph, and reconciliation. The stories
we collected now constitute the country’s largest
archive of oral histories of the civil rights movement and
are housed in the Library of Congress.
VOICES OF CIVIL RIGHTS, a one-hour Peabody Award-winning
documentary, presents the most compelling of these stories
in the hope
that they will inspire not only researchers and historians,
but generations of Americans too young to remember the
triumph of spirit, soul and courage that was the civil
rights movement.