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 is airing a selection of these interviews. In this program, we hear from Freeman Hrabowski. Now the president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, he was a 12-year-old living in Birmingham, Alabama when Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to children in 1963 to march for civil rights. He answered the call – and paid for his convictions. His oral history is preceded by a conversation with Lonnie Bunch and Elaine Nichols, the director and curator, respectively, of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.