Exhibition
Overview
The exhibition Voices of Civil Rights documents events during
the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This exhibition draws
from the thousands of personal stories, oral histories, and photographs
collected by the "Voices of Civil Rights" project, a collaborative
effort of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR),
and the Library of Congress, and marks the arrival of these materials
in the Library's collection. This exhibit features twenty oral histories
and seventeen photographs taken during the "Voices of Civil Rights" bus
tour, which started from Washington, D.C., on August 3, 2004. This
seventy-day tour, through twenty-two states and thirty-nine cities,
followed part of the route of the 1961 Freedom Rides to Jackson, Mississippi,
and then proceeded to other historic civil rights sites. The photographs
that accompany these personal stories were taken by award-winning
photojournalist Lester Sloan.
In addition to these contemporary materials, more than thirty vintage
photographs and posters from the Library's rich archive of civil rights
materials provide historical context for the oral histories. The vintage
photographs cover events such as the1960 Greensboro, North Carolina,
lunch counter sit-in, the1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the deaths
of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and activist Viola Liuzzo. The
vintage posters document pivotal events in the struggle for civil
rights in the United States. Also featured in the exhibition are two
audio-visual kiosks produced by AARP and The History
Channel.
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