May 13, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As a teenager in segregated Petersburg, Va., Priscilla Robinson took part in sit-ins at restaurants that would not serve black people and protested at businesses that would not hire black employees. She was determined to fight for change, but always anxious.
“Apprehension was my constant companion,” Ms. Robinson recalls. “I never knew what to expect. Sometimes a car full of white people screaming obscenities and waving Confederate flags would drive by. Sometimes they would confront us on the sidewalk and spit on us or attempt to push us out of line.”
Ms. Robinson’s story is one of about 1,500 first-person accounts collected by the Voices of Civil Rights project, which is run by the AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
The Voices project is sharing those written and spoken histories through a new Web site, as well as a book called My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience, a collection edited by Juan Williams, and a special issue of AARP magazine that devotes 20 pages to civil-rights topics.
Rick Bowers, director of digital media at AARP Publications, says he came up with the idea for the civil-rights collection last year.
“I went on the Internet and looked for archives of civil-rights stories and was surprised to learn that there was no broad, national archive with large numbers of stories from people who took part in the civil-rights movement,” says Mr. Bowers.
Later this summer, the project will send a bus around the country to collect additional, harder-to-get stories, he says.
The “Freedom Writers” bus will travel from Washington, D.C., to the South, and then head west to collect stories from former migrant workers who were involved in labor organizing in Texas and California. The trip will end at the AARP national conference in Las Vegas in October.
Mr. Bowers says he hopes young people will learn from the project. Currently students at Spelman College and Georgia State University are using the stories to learn how to collect oral histories, and Mr. Bowers plans to provide a teaching guide for classrooms to use with the Web site.
Voices of Civil Rights also will be part of a Library of Congress exhibit in Washington this month commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The final collection of the stories will be permanently housed at the Library of Congress.
To get there: Go to http://www.voicesofcivilrights.org.
