Stories from the Voices of Civil Rights Bus Tour
By: Source: AARP.org Date Posted: 2005-02-15 11:45:00-05:00
Prime Time Radio's second special on the struggle for civil rights in America captures the quiet voices and memories of ordinary people whose stories are being gathered for a permanent collection to be housed in the Library of Congress. AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights launched the Voices of Civil Rights Project last year with a call for people to write their stories in letters. It evolved into the Voices of Civil Rights Bus Tour, a 70-day odyssey through 22 states and 39 cities that followed part of the route of the 1961 Freedom Rides to Jackson, Mississippi, and then proceeded to historic civil rights sites as far west as California before continuing north as far as Milwaukee and on to Topeka, Kansas. Along the way, nearly 200,000 people attended Voices of Civil Rights events, and thousands shared their personal stories — individual struggles and acts of tremendous courage during one of our nation's most turbulent times.
The one-hour PRIME TIME RADIO special for Black History Month on the Voices of Civil Rights Bus Tour features some of the most powerful of these stories about the quest for racial equality in America, as well as discussion between host Mike Cuthbert and two of the journalists who rode the bus, Lester Sloan and Lydia Lum.
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