Day 7:
Program 3: Sit-ins
Program 4: Albany
Program 5: Freedom Summer

(VHS.1947)

Atlanta City Councilman John Lewis talks about growing up in Troy, Alabama, and how, in the 10th grade, he first heard of Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Lewis' recalls that his involvement in the movement began while he was a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, TN.  Under the tutelage of James Lawson, a conscientious objector and practitioner of non-violence, Lewis joined with Diane Nash, C.T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette and Marion Barry in the earliest sit-ins in Nashville.

Lewis describes the tactics used by the sitters and how the support of the black community led to the desegregation of public accommodations in Nashville.  The success of the sit-ins was a driving force in the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which Lewis describes as "a revolt against the pace of change and the old guard."

In the spring of 1961, Lewis and other SNCC members answered the call of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) for black and white students to challenge local segregation laws by riding together on interstate bus lines, the Freedom Rides.

Lewis recalls the hostility of local residents and the intransigence of local law enforcement in places like Anniston and Birmingham, AL.  He decribes how a white mob beat the Riders (including Lewis), members of the media, and Justice Department official John Siegenthaler in Montgomery, AL, on May 20, 1961.

A few days later, Lewis and many of the same riders were taken to the maximum security unit at Parchman Penitiary when they entered Mississippi.

Later that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission, bowing to pressure from the Kennedy Administration, issued orders that ended the segregation of interstate bus travel.

Lewis takes questions from the Blackside production team.  He observes that if an open society is the goal, "the means by which we struggle must be consistent with the end we seek."

(VHS.1888)

Former Assistant Attorney-General Burke Marshall believes that the civil rights movement changed the map of the law in just four short years.  From the point of view of the federal government, however, this was a complex undertaking.

When CORE President James Farmer sent a press release announcing the Freedom Rides, it was processed and treated as a routine communication.  According to Marshall, the result was "vast ignorance in the government" about CORE's plan.  But the burning of a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, in May, 1961, quickly focussed the energies of the Justice Department.

Marshall describes how the Kennedy Administration wrestled with reluctant governors, deputized US Marshals, brought suit through key judges on the federal bench and worked the laws and regulations governing interstate commerce to keep the buses rolling.  Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 brought an end to legal segregation.

Marshall states that he was unprepared for his role as head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. He characterizes FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as "unsympathetic and antagonistic to the movement and to blacks." In the face of the movement, he remembers President Kennedy as a responder to events rather than a policy maker.  However, he believes Kennedy learned as he went along and ultimately staked his political future on civil rights when he introduced the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1963.

James Orange became a field organizer for the SCLC when he was just out of high school.  He recalls how he put high school students into demonstrations and voter registration drives in placeslike Birmingham, AL, and Jackson, MS.  He talks about the circumstances that led to the death of one young protester, Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Orange expresses his wish that Blackside producers also seek out the stories of the "names you don't hear."


Historian John A. Ricks III tells the story of the Albany Movement.  Despite the involvement of Dr. King, CORE and SNCC, the tactics usually employed by the movement produced only mixed results and relations between the principal players frayed.

(Segment incomplete on video tape)