We are working with Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer.  We will read this as a communal text and get to know many different people involved in the CRM.  In class, we look at many of the primary documents in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle.  
Picture
14 Year Old Emmett Till before and after his brutal murder in 1955

The Oral Histories
Read the prologue and then any ONE set of oral histories listed below. Follow your syllabus for your writing assignment.
Start with reading the Prologue to Voices of Freedom: An Oral History to he Civil Rights Movements from the 1950s through the 1980s (click here). Then choose any one of the readings below based on your own interest (click on the title):
1) Emmett Till, 1955
2) The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956
3) Little Rock Nine, 1957-1958
4) Student Sit-ins, 1960
5) Freedom Rides, 1961
6) Albany, GA, 1961-1962
7) James Meredith, 1962
8) Birmingham, 1963
9) Mississippi, 1961-1963
10) March on Washington, 1963 
​11) Four Little Girls (1963)
12) Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964)
13) Selma (1965)
14) Malcolm X (1925-1965)
15) Lowndes County (1965-1966)
16) Meredith March (1966)
17) Chicago (1966)
18) Muhammad Ali (1964-1967)
​19) Martin Luther King and Vietnam (1965-1967)
20) Birth of the Black Panther Party
​21) Detroit (1967)
​22) Carl Stokes (1967)
23) Howard University (1967-1968)
24) King's Last Crusade (1967-1968)
25) Resurrection City (1968)
26) Ocean Hill-Brownsville (1967-1968)
​27) The Black Panthers (1968-1969)
28) Attica & Prisoner's Rights (1971)
29) Gary Convention (1972)
30) Busing in Boston (1974-1976)
31) Atlanta & Affirmative Action (1973-1980)
32) Overtown, Miami (1980)
About the Freedom Singers (playing in background)
I date my work as an organizer from being a student leader in my home town of Albany, Georgia. My work as an organizer, and singer was combined in my work as a Freedom Singer and field secretary for SNCC. We sang wherever we could find an audience, from concert halls, to living rooms to elementary schools.
The Freedom Singers were organized by Cordell Reagon in 1962... Cordell, one of the SNCC field secretaries who came to Albany Georgia in 1961 was a wonderful tenor singer out of the Nashville Sit-in Movement. The youngest member of SNCC’s staff, by 1961 he had been on the Freedom Rides, worked in voter registration in McComb MS, sit-in demonstrations in Cairo, Illinois, and Alabama. He formed the first group of Freedom Singers from the movements he had been active in: Rutha Harris, soprano from Albany, Charles Neblett, bass from Cairo, Il and I sang alto. It was an amazing way to see the country, carrying the stories of local movement campaigns to audiences across the nation in song.
                      ~Bernice Johnson Reagon
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