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 were two audio-visual kiosks produced by AARP and The History Channel.
