At the direction of Congress, the voices and experiences from the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century are being documented in an oral history project. This effort is a collaboration of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Library of Congress and the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
American History TV will air a selection of these interviews over the coming months.
Hear from David and Satoko Ackerman, classmates of Jesse Jackson’s at the Chicago Theological Seminary in the mid-1960s. In this interview, they recall answering Martin Luther King Jr.’s plea for “all people of good will” to go to Selma, Alabama to stand against racial segregation. But first we’ll hear more about the Ackermans and the Civil Rights History Project from Smithsonian curator Elaine Nichols.