By GAIL FINEBERG
Freedom songs and calls for unity in a continuing struggle for equal justice for all people rang out on the National Mall one muggy day in August as the Library helped launch a national project to collect the firsthand accounts of those who took part in the civil rights movement during the past several decades.
A bus bearing staff equipped with audio and video recorders and digital cameras visited 35 cities in 22 states, traveling from Washington, D.C., to Modesto, Calif., this fall. The bus began its 70-day journey from the Mall on Aug. 3 following the program.
At stops along the way, including historical sites of racial confrontations and an American Japanese internment camp, people will tell their stories on this traveling "Digital Front Porch." They may also mail their stories to Voices of Civil Rights, AARP, 601 E St. N.W., Washington, DC 20049, or submit them via a Web site, www.voicesofcivilrights.org.
Some 20 Library of Congress staff members in yellow T-shirts began collecting civil rights stories from audience members at the conclusion of the August program. Library staff volunteers will collect oral histories again on the National Mall during the National Book Festival on Oct. 9.
Personal accounts from all these sources will be archived permanently at the Library of Congress.
Marie Smith of Kahakuloa, Hawaii, president of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), explained the Voices of Civil Rights project that AARP is supporting: "Our mission is to collect the stories of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times" and "to create the largest archive of civil rights stories in the world, at the Library of Congress."
AARP, which also supports the Library's Veterans History Project to collect and preserve veterans' oral histories, has joined with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Library to sponsor this project to collect and preserve for all generations the memories of those engaged in America's civil rights movement.
"Today we begin a journey. Today, we begin a freedom ride … and not just down memory lane," Smith said. "Some history should never be repeated. Some history should never be forgotten."
The story of the civil rights movement is "a story of our nation in conflict," she said, noting that the historical struggle for equal justice was not only that of African Americans but also of migrant farmworkers, women, native Americans, people with disabilities, the elderly and others.
Deputy Librarian of Congress Donald L. Scott noted that the Library already holds the most comprehensive civil rights collection in the country, including the papers of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the National Urban League, as well as the papers of individuals such as Susan B. Anthony, Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph.
"So, the Library is honored to add to these rich and heavily used collections the remarkable stories of a new generation of civil rights pioneers," Scott said. "People everywhere will be able to visit the Library in person, or access our acclaimed Web site, which currently receives almost 3 billion hits a year."
Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said it was fitting to launch the Voices of Civil Rights campaign on the National Mall—on the site "of barracks of slaves who built the nation's Capitol" and within a few yards of a new national museum for American Indians.
"Let us never forget the struggle, and never let us forget the pain," Henderson said, emphasizing that it is important also to focus on "the unfinished business of the civil rights struggle in America."
Calling for support of the proposed Fairness Act of 2004, he said one of the biggest challenges for contemporary civil rights activists is to revitalize enforcement of civil rights legislation and other laws protecting civil liberties, which he said have been eroding in practice and in the courts. He cited attempts, unsuccessful so far, by two African American mothers to use an equal protection section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce air pollution control laws against air polluters contributing to the incidence of asthma among children living in "grimy neighborhoods" of Camden, N.J. He told about two wheelchair-bound college students trying to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to force a college they attend to retrofit more than one campus restroom to accommodate them. "The college would rather pay fines than fix the problem," he said.
Henderson also commented on the diversity of support for the Voices of Civil Rights project, which he said mirrors that of his organization and its executive committee. Standing with him and speaking were Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who offered an invocation; Raul Yzaguirre, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza; and Jacqueline Johnson, executive director, National Congress of American Indians, among others. The gay-lesbian voice also is represented by the LCCR, he said.
Yzaguirre was busy staffing a first-aid station during the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington, but he heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech, which, he said, energized and inspired him. King's speech encompassed all people, he argued, adding, "We need to get back to being inclusive."
Among the civil rights stories that must be recorded, he said, are those of 1 million Latinos who were deported during the Great Depression, 5,000 Mexicans killed in "a race war" on the U.S. border and the heroism of José Lopez who, Yzaguirre said, won more World War II medals than much-decorated Audie Murphy and became a "brilliant civil rights attorney" but died a pauper in San Antonio, Texas.
"Each of us feels our pain," Yzaguirre said. But group claims to the "greatest pain" create chauvinism and isolation, he said.
Greeting the audience in her own language, that of the Raven/Sockeye Clan of the Tlingit Tribe of Haines, Alaska, Jacqueline Johnson recounted the efforts of the federal government to strip her people not only of their land but also of their language and culture. "Many times too many our voice has been lost in the race for civil rights," she said, adding she is pleased to be included in the Voices for Civil Rights project of the AARP, LCCR and the Library.
Betty Bunce of Baltimore, a retired teacher, told her story to the audience. She was teaching in New Orleans public schools in early November 1960, when the federal government insisted that New Orleans integrate its public schools in accordance with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
On a Friday afternoon, she was ordered to report for duty on Monday morning at McDonogh No. 9. "No one in the entire city knew which two schools would be integrated except the administration and faculties, the black children and their parents, the federal marshals who were to escort them and the police who were assigned to protect them," Bunce recalled.
Shortly after federal marshals escorted three little black girls, first graders, into the building, white mothers arrived and marched their children out. Bunce and her faculty colleagues reported for duty every day and were paid to work in empty classrooms for the remainder of the school year; only the three little girls attended school. Every morning, whites turned out in the streets near McDonogh No. 9 to jeer and taunt them. The local police kept order.
"Sad to say, that school never became integrated," Bunce recalled. "The white children never came back, and eventually it became an all-black school."
Another speaker was Julianna Lee, one of a new generation of civil rights activists. Born in South Korea and educated at Wellesley College with a master's degree from Harvard University, she is a third-year law student at the University of Michigan Law School. This summer she is a law clerk focusing on hate crimes and race relations for the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium in Washington, D.C.
"The struggle is far from finished," she said, noting, for example, that although the federal government made reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, "racial profiling persists," for example, in the disparate treatment of motorists of color and of people in America with Arab surnames.
"Slavery of African Americans is over," she said, "but people of color are enslaved in brothels and sweatshops."
For 32 million foreign-born people in America, Lee said, there is disparate treatment in education, health care, housing and social services.
King's plea to "let justice roll down like a mighty stream" is as much a call to action today as it was in 1963, Lee concluded.
Gail Fineberg is editor of The Gazette, the Library's staff newsletter.