The History Channel Presents Voices of Civil Rights

Product description

VOICES OF CIVIL RIGHTS

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The civil rights motion within the Fifties and ’60s–a tumultuous time marked by frequent tragedy and occasional triumph–is examined on this provocative two-disc, four-hour set containing 5 applications produced for the Historical past Channel. The primary of those, “Voices of Civil Rights,” eschews the usual documentary format of narration, interviews, pictures, and so on. in favor of private, firsthand reminiscences by individuals, black and white alike, who lived by the turbulent years when there have been two very separate Americas, particularly within the South. For “Negroes,” there was the world during which they have been reared, cherished and cherished; then there was “the true world,” the place they have been hated by whites and discrimination was a bitter truth of day by day life. Main occasions and points just like the struggles for college integration and voter registration, the killing of Medgar Evers, and the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror are coated, nevertheless it’s the anecdotal accounts of those exceptionally well-spoken individuals that actually drive them house. The extraordinary story of the KKK’s atrocities towards the household of Vernon Dahmer, as an example, is advised not solely by the victims however by one of many Klansmen who participated. Repentant and deeply ashamed to today, the latter in the end testified in court docket towards his “brethren”; later, whereas serving his personal sentence, he was visited in jail and forgiven by the very individuals whose lives he had shattered.

The remaining documentaries on the primary disc element the villainous ways of the “Mississippi State Sovereignty Fee” (a government-appointed company whose mission was to make use of no matter was needed–propaganda, threats, precise violence–to suppress the civil rights motion in that state), and the occasions surrounding March 7, 1965, the “bloody Sunday” when marchers in Selma, Alabama have been viciously attacked by the native police. These are tales that evoke grim recollections of parents like Sheriffs Jim Clark and Bull Connor, and racist governors Ross Barnett (Mississippi) and George Wallace (Alabama), all of them pushed by a flammable mixture of ignorance, hubris, and the concern of dropping a preeminence they’d finished nothing to earn. Nevertheless it was a time that additionally witnessed the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a name to motion by President Lyndon Johnson, who knew there was one thing very improper a few nation the place younger black individuals might battle in Vietnam however have been denied the precise to vote at house. Disc Two features a biography of King, depicting a “reluctant hero… who raged beneath the burden of his burden,” a frontrunner who didn’t search his place however was chosen for it. A second bio particulars the life and work of Thurgood Marshall, the primary African American justice to take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Courtroom. Neither disc accommodates any bonus options. –Sam Graham