The Voices of Civil Rights Still Speak to Us
By: Source: AARP.org Date Posted: 2004-08-09 11:02:00-04:00
By Marie Smith, AARP National President
The young African American men and women who participated in the sit-in demonstrations at Nashville's segregated 5 & 10 cent stores in the 1960s didn't know if they could really change anything. Still, they kept up their protest day after day. They were cursed and arrested. People threw lighted cigarettes in their hair.
I was a student at Fisk University, just a few blocks away, and I remember wondering where it would all lead. We'd experienced threats and jailings, but the bombing of a local civil rights attorney's home brought a new level of violence. We didn't know whether the sit-in and boycott would succeed, or whether anger, fear and prejudice would sweep the dreams away.
We did succeed—not simply in compelling the stores to allow African Americans to shop and eat at the lunch counters, but in bringing the nation a small step closer to equality and fairness.
It is easy to forget what those times were like, but it is important to remember. To preserve that history, AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights have launched the Voices of Civil Rights project—an archive of first-hand accounts of America's civil rights movement.
We are gathering written stories and oral histories not only of people involved in the civil rights struggles of the sixties, but of those who worked—and continue to work—to end discrimination against women, people with disabilities, Hispanics and others. The archive will ultimately become a permanent collection of the Library of Congress. You can contribute your recollections to the archive online.
With the pressing challenges we face today, why are we working on a project that focuses on the past? There are several reasons. First, the nation is slowly losing the voices that called for equality throughout the twentieth century. People who were schoolchildren at the time of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which outlawed school segregation, are now old enough to be members of AARP. Their recollections should not be lost.
The project will benefit both those who hear the stories and those who tell them. These difficult and painful memories eat away at people, even years later. Sharing them can be a cathartic experience. The archive will present an opportunity to place the experiences in the pages of history and move forward.
And there are lessons for today in these stories. They teach us that with time and effort, even very deep divisions can heal. They teach us that there may be more courage and endurance, or the potential for it, in people around us than we'd ever suspect. They teach us to recognize that the struggle for equality goes on, including our fight for the rights and dignity of older Americans. And they teach us that, even when we're not sure we can really change anything, we do have "The power to make it better."
Related Articles
- Civil Rights Bus Tour Visits Tallahassee
preview