Remembering the Struggle
By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2004-01-09 16:07:00-05:00
AARP is launching a nationwide commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement to honor the famous and the unsung heroes of that struggle and to examine the country's continuing quest for social justice.
At the center of the multifaceted undertaking—called the Voices of Civil Rights—is the collection and preservation of remembrances from ordinary citizens whose lives were affected by the great push for social change in the last 50 years.
"We want them to be able to leave their personal memories of those extraordinary times as a legacy for future generations," says Rick Bowers, AARP director of digital media and project director of Voices of Civil Rights.
In the late summer of 1965, I sat behind the wheel of a vintage green Hudson a hundred feet from the courthouse [in Haywood County, Tenn.], as a heavyset, middle-aged white man, egged on by a mob, punched at me through the window. His sour, liquor-scented breath washed over me as he shouted, again and again, "You ain't nothin' but a white nigger." The crowd—all men, all white—found this amusing. … He called out to the gleeful faces in the crowd, "I got a knife. I'm gonna cut this mother's arm off." I was 19 and thought I was going to die.
—Stephen Gins, Kenmore, Wash.
The commemoration will observe touchstones of the movement, beginning with the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's seminal ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" doctrine was unconstitutional.
"We hope to remember forever the courage it took to fight for civil rights," says AARP CEO Bill Novelli, "even as we recognize that the work of assuring equality and dignity for all is not completed."
In the early '60s I was a teenager angry about discrimination and the limitations that segregation imposed. I often skipped school to participate in marches and boycotts. My mother and grandmother ("Big Mama") worried about me. Big Mama used to say, "Child, if you was born when I was born, you'd be dead." …
I don't remember the number of times I went to jail; I do know it was every chance I got. … I learned to wear several layers of clothing to dull the pain of being cattle-prodded or smacked with a billy club. …
I often think back to those days of marching and singing freedom songs and retching from the tear gas. … I don't need anyone to tell me that I made a difference. … I knew it the day I saw Big Mama march off to jail.
—Geneva Craig, Anchorage, Alaska
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition of 180 groups committed to social justice and equality, is collaborating with AARP on the project.
It's an especially fitting match, says LCCR Executive Director Wade Henderson, because AARP members are among the last to have had "one foot in the world of segregated America and one foot in a world brought about by the [1954] Supreme Court decision."
Other project plans include:
- "My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience," a book by journalist Juan Williams, with a foreword by journalist David Halberstam and afterword by children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman, to be published this spring by Sterling Publishing;
- www.voicesofcivilrights.org, a website with a searchable archive and interactive features, as well as a portal for submitting personal stories;
- dramatic readings of some of the stories. Actor Danny Glover will host readings at AARP's member event in Las Vegas in October;
- articles in AARP publications on the impact of the Civil Rights Movement across society and on issues facing the country today.
The project will also focus on other milestones, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Rosa Parks' refusal in 1955 to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., triggering a boycott that ended segregation on public buses.
Such events led to change, "not only for African Americans but for a whole succession of other marginalized groups," Henderson says. "We tend to look at history in silos—black history, the women's movement and so forth. This is an opportunity to integrate all of that information in a way that shows the tapestry, the fabric of America, and how dramatically it has changed over the past 50 years."
The Voices of Civil Rights project will archive the collected stories and post many of them online. "The eyewitnesses to this history are vanishing," says project director Bowers. "We want to collect their stories before it's too late."
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