Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement presents educational and noncommercial television and radio programs from the 1950s and 1960s that offer historic testimonies – in interviews, speeches, documentaries, panel discussions, and on-the-spot news reports – from many movement participants, both well-known and unknown. National leaders, local leaders, community organizers, students, clergy, lawyers, educators, academics, writers, and even a comedian and a documentary filmmaker relate often riveting stories that document a range of individual and group experiences and perspectives. The exhibit presents accounts from a variety of locales, each a distinct piece of the complex history of the struggle to integrate the segregated South and achieve full citizenship rights for African Americans.

The original Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement exhibit, launched in 2015 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, consisted of radio programs that had been broadcast as the historical events they covered were taking place. In 2024, we have expanded Voices to include National Educational Television (NET) programs about the Southern Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s to comprise a visual component of the exhibit. Kenneth Alexander Campbell, an intern in the 2020 Library of Congress/Howard University Archives, History, and Heritage Advanced (AHHA) Internship Program, curated the update. Following his internship, Kenneth, an accomplished documentary film artist, received a Masters of Fine Arts in Cinematic Arts from Howard University, taught graduate courses in film history and African cinema at Howard, served as Impact Producer on the acclaimed documentary MLK/FBI, and joined the Department of Mass Communications at North Carolina Central University, his alma mater, as an assistant professor. Kenneth passed away on April 19, 2024. We dedicate this exhibit to his memory.

In a blog post about his AHHA internship, Kenneth discussed the significance of the NET programs we have added to Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement:

Before moving to Washington, I became involved with the SNCC Critical Oral History Project at Duke University, back home in North Carolina. This project documented the experience of veteran members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, which later evolved into the Black Power Movement. My personal involvement with that intergenerational, face-to-face, personal exchange deeply affected my understanding of the history of the people of this country…

This AHHA research experience has further expanded my understanding of the history the people of this country - and the incalculable impact that public broadcasting can have on how our history unfolds. The long-form work of NET Journal demonstrates what an effective vehicle cinéma vérité and journalistic documentary can be. The “Realities” of the series Public Broadcast Laboratory provide a robust visual landscape of faces to replace the opaque and cliché terms “the public” or “the masses.” And the series Of People and Politics often delves much deeper into the nuances of the public discourse around voting rights and the transition to human rights than I ever expected.

NET created a profoundly unique moment in broadcast history. And it documented a profoundly unique moment in American history. But perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated the potential of the camera to be a highly effective tool for broadcasting the densely rich visual history of this land.

Sixty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the legislative landmarks of the civil rights movement, the history of that movement is still being written. The importance of local accounts to enrich this history cannot be overemphasized. Emilye Crosby, a historian specializing in local civil rights studies, has written that the publication during the past few decades of a number of key works in local civil rights history has “marked a major shift in the field.” Local studies, she writes, have "laid a foundation for reshaping movement history, for changing our understanding of many things, including chronology, the role of women, the significance of self-defense, the nature and persistence of white resistance, the failures of the federal government, the differences between long-term organizing and short-term mobilizing, the development of Black Power, the importance of economics and human rights issues, and the possibilities and limitations of nonviolent tactics and ideology."¹

The radio presented in "Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement" explore many of the areas that Crosby has identified. Programs featuring Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Annie Devine, Dorothy Height and Constance Baker Motley, help communicate the role of women in the movement, as do programs with less well-known activists such as Priscilla Stephens of CORE, Mississippi Freedom Summer student worker Ellen Siegel, Mary Peabody, the mother of the governor of Massachusetts, who through her arrest in St. Augustine, Florida, as part of an interracial group demanding service at a motel restaurant drew national press attention to that movement, and an unidentified female high school student who participated in a Charleston, South Carolina sit-in. The significance of self-defense is addressed in An Integrated Project in Georgia. The nature and persistence of white resistance pervades many of these accounts, most prominently in The Negro Lawyer in the South, The Civil Rights Lawyer in the South, Children of McComb, Kidnapping in North Carolina, Birmingham: Testament of Nonviolence, Part 3; Mother's Day, May 12 and One Year Later in Mississippi. Failures of the federal government are expressed vehemently in Report from the South - James Bevel. The significance of long-term organizing is addressed in Thirty Years of Civil Rights Education in the South / Myles Horton and Tribute to Ella Baker. The development of Black Power is discussed in Stokely Carmichael Interview and Black Power Surveyed; Handful That We Are in Mississippi: A Spectrum of Opinion in Mississippi. Assessments of nonviolent tactics and ideology are offered in The Battle Is Not Yet Won, Ralph Gleason Interviewing Dick Gregory, Birmingham: Testament of Nonviolance, Part 4; Back to School in Birmingham, and Report from the South - James Bevel.

Formed in the early 1950s, National Educational Television (NET) was the precursor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Throughout the 1960s, NET focused on producing and airing public affairs and cultural content, including documentaries that explored hot-button issues confronting local communities, such as desegregation, civil rights, and access to the ballot.

Through films such as Black Natchez, Louisiana Diary, and From Protest to Resistance, NET became a sort of “Fourth Network” at the height of the civil rights movement, establishing itself in marked contrast to the commercial programming available on ABC, NBC, and CBS. The Public Broadcast Laboratory, an experimental effort to liven up and elevate the quality of educational television, provided unique and profound insights into the growth and expansion of the Southern Civil Rights Movement with documentaries such as The Poor People’s Campaign and Free at Last. NET broke new ground with series such as NET Journal, Black Journal, Regional Report, Local Issue, and Of People and Politics, which allowed for unprecedented television coverage of the movement, and debate and dialogue between guests from a wide array of American perspectives regarding politics and social change. Programs such as The Grassroots Voter 1960: Civil Rights, Head Start in Mississippi, If Eugene Talmadge Were Alive Today, He’d Turn Over in His Grave, and We Shall Overcome illuminate nuances of the great ideological debates of the time from both public and private citizens.

Actions described and depicted in these programs include boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, freedom rides, marches, and a host of other direct action campaigns to confront segregation and discrimination. Documented locales range across nine states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Organizations represented by speakers include the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), Highlander Folk School, Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NAACP National Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), Southwest Georgia Project, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Movement activists who can be heard in these programs include Ralph D. Abernathy, Ella Baker, James Bevel, Julian Bond, Anne Braden, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Leroy Clark, Annie Devine, Charles Evers, James Farmer, James Forman, David Gelfand, Dick Gregory, Fannie Lou Hamer, Tom Hayden, Dorothy Height, Myles Horton, Jesse Jackson, Charles Jones, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, John Lowery, Floyd McKissick, Ronnie Moore, Constance Baker Motley, Karen Mulloy, Rosa Parks, Joe Pfister, Ed Pincus, Bayard Rustin, Charles Sherrod, Priscilla Stephens, Charles Steptoe, James R. Walker, Jr., Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, Whitney Young, Melvyn Zarr, Robert Zellner, and Howard Zinn.

These programs have rarely been seen or heard since they first were broadcast half a century ago. Exploring topics and perspectives often avoided by the other networks with depth and complexity, NET modeled the capacity for public broadcasting to allow audiences to think critically and expansively about the world.

Radio coverage of the civil rights movement is an area that remains to be explored more deeply. While the events described in many of these recordings have been documented in scholarly studies, listening to the programs can add a dimension rarely found in written texts. Audiovisual material often has the ability to convey experiences and emotions more powerfully than the written word. The inflections, pauses, timing, shouting, singing, and quiet moments of reflection that mark these talks, cannot be completely revealed on the printed page. Neither can the passion, urgency, and often humor that enliven many speeches, sermons, and interviews. Audio can command a listener's attention even more effectively at times than either film or video due to its power to establish a tight connection between speaker and listener as the teller’s story unfolds. On-the-spot recordings of long ago can bring the immediacy of past events directly to listeners of today. In addition, these aural testimonies add a wealth of detail often omitted from published accounts.

While the movements discussed in these programs occurred throughout the South, the programming did not originate with southern educational or public radio stations. The radio programs came to the AAPB from three sources: the Pacifica Radio Archives, WGBH, and the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) collection of the University of Maryland. Listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio was established in 1949 with ties to the peace movement and committed to dialogue to further social justice concerns. Pacifica produced probing, in-depth interviews with southern civil rights activists visiting the Bay Area, many conducted by the network’s head of public affairs, Elsa Knight Thompson. Historian Brian Ward has commented that Pacifica’s civil rights interviews were noted for "their intellectual and analytical rigor," that "platitudes and casual assumptions seldom passed unchallenged.”² In contrast with the in-studio interview format favored in these Pacifica programs, WGBH sent reporters out in the field to produce two important series of on-the-spot reports on events as they developed during conflicts in St. Augustine, Florida, and Mississippi: Dateline St. Augustine and Long, Hot Summer '64.

NAEB began operations in 1934 from a precursor organization that had been formed in 1925. In 1951, NAEB established a tape duplication exchange system whereby member stations sent programs to the headquarters in Urbana, Illinois, where they were copied onto tape and then shared with other member stations for broadcast over the newly created National Educational Radio network, a precursor to National Public Radio. The NAEB collection at the University of Maryland and the digital NAEB collection now included in the AAPB are direct beneficiaries of this tape duplication and exchange program. One of NAEB's member stations, WRVR, from the Riverside Church in New York, sent three reporters to cover the Birmingham movement in 1963. WRVR produced the six-part series Birmingham: Testament of Nonviolence (two parts of which are highlighted in this exhibition), for NAEB distribution, which New York Times critic Jack Gould called "a first-class journalistic coup [that] constituted a remarkable social document for the ear." Gould noted that the medium of noncommercial radio provided an "availability of extended time free from assorted commercial pressures" that allowed the broadcast of programs with "depth of treatment and outspokenness seldom available elsewhere on the dial."³

Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement gives voice to the many challenges, tactics, and dangers that organizers and activists faced to achieve the movement's goals in the South. The larger AAPB collection includes additional radio and television programs from this period and later that cover movement activities in other regions of the nation as well. In addition, the complete AAPB collection offers retrospective programs that look back at the movement to add context and historical perspective that comes with the passage of time. Keyword searches for "civil rights" and for other relevant terms will display these additional broadcasts. We encourage you to watch and listen to these programs in the AAPB Online Reading Room or at the Library of Congress and WGBH.

¹Emilye Crosby, ed., Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 5, 6.

²Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), 132.

³Jack Gould, “Radio: Aural Picture of Racial Crisis,” New York Times, June 10, 1963.