Man drinking from a segregated water cooler in an Oklahoma City streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, July 1939 - Russell Lee
"Voices of Civil Rights," a Library of Congress exhibition featuring personal stories and images from the civil rights era in the United States, draws from the individual accounts, personal stories, oral histories and photographs collected by the Voices of Civil Rights project, a collaborative effort of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) and the Library of Congress.
Civil rights leader John Lewis (today a congressman from Georgia), left, and others pray during a demonstration, ca. 1963. - Danny Lyon
With a theme of "ordinary people, extraordinary stories," the Voices of Civil Rights project was launched last summer to create the world's largest permanent repository of firsthand accounts of the civil rights movement. The AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights began collecting this material from people of diverse backgrounds during the Voices of Civil Rights bus tour, which began in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3, 2004. This 70-day tour through 22 states and 39 cities followed part of the route of the 1961 Freedom Rides to Jackson, Miss., and then proceeded to other historic civil rights sites. The photographs accompanying the oral histories were taken during the bus tour by award-winning photojournalist Lester Sloan.
A street rally in New York City, Oct. 11, 1955, was sponsored by the NAACP and the District 65, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union to protest the slaying of Emmett Till, a black teenager shot while visiting relatives in Mississippi. - Layne's Studio, New York City
Made possible by the generous support of AARP, the exhibition celebrates the donation of more than 4,000 of these oral histories to the Library of Congress, which will house the recordings permanently and make them available to researchers studying this period in American history. Taken as a whole, these stories make up a broad mosaic of the quest for freedom and equality in America.
"We are delighted to present selections from these firsthand accounts of the struggle for civil rights during the 20th century," said Librarian James H. Billington. "This material will complement our extensive collection of civil rights material and add to our ever-growing collection of oral histories, which provide unique insights into different facets of the American experience."
The Library houses the most comprehensive civil rights collection in the country, including the original documents of the organizations that led the fight for civil liberties—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the microfilmed records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as the personal papers of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Spingarn, Patricia Roberts Harris, Edward W. Brooke and Joseph Rauh.
Left, labor leader Cleveland Robinson, on the second floor balcony of the National Headquarters of the March on Washington, which was located in Harlem; right, a pair of muddy shoes underscores the weariness following the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., with the state capitol in background. - Orlando Fernandez; United Press International Telephoto
The exhibition features 20 oral histories and 17 photographs taken during the Voices of Civil Rights bus tour. In addition, the exhibition includes more than 30 vintage photographs and posters drawn from Library of Congress collections, such as the Farm Security Administration Collection, the New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection and the Visual Records of the NAACP. The work of individual photographers such as Danny Lyon are also included. The photographs illustrate events such as the 1960 Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter sit-in, the 1963 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.; the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march; and the deaths of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and Viola Liuzzo. The posters portray civil rights leaders F.L. Shuttlesworth, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.
The exhibition also features two audiovisual kiosks. One kiosk shows the "Voices of Civil Rights" bus tour video produced by the History Channel and narrated by actor Danny Glover. The video shows scenes from bus tour events at the different historic sites around the country. The second kiosk shows oral history excerpts from "Save Our History: Voices of Civil Rights," the History Channel documentary that premiered on Feb. 12.
Participants in the Selma march - Peter Pettus
The exhibition is also is accessible on the Library's Web site at www.loc.gov/exhibits/civilrights/.
