The Oral History Project

This ongoing project (begun in 2005) today, in 2011, consists of over 150 interviews with unsung heroes nationwide—men and women of all races who deserve our nation's acknowledgment and gratitude. The interviews were videotaped by photographer and cameraman, David M. Bernstein. In time, we hope to have them all represented on AEA's website—and with your support, we can!

Joseph H. Holt, Jr.'s family led the fight in the 1950s to integrate the Raleigh public schools. In this video he describes the brutality his family endured until the integration battle was won for other children during the 1970s. Then keep on watching -- there is more. To view all available videos, click here.

Here you will meet, for instance. . .

Margaret Wiseman, who worked for voter registration in Mississippi, and who crawled through brush at night to help free the beloved Fanny Lou Hamer, then a sharecropper, from imprisonment by her landlord;
Georgia State Representative Tyrone Brooks, first arrested as a youngster for peacefully protesting his inferior school (since then arrested 67 times on behalf of civil rights);
Ricardo Grijalva, a civil rights lawyer from Texas, who was almost beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan and who continues his work today;
Charles Myers of Tennessee, who recounts speaking with his wife about who will care for their children if they are killed for participating in lunch counter sit-ins;
Addie Wyatt of Chicago, who spent years integrating and organizing for the Butchers and Meatpackers Union;
Herbert Randall, of the Shinnecock Nation in New York, who went south with his camera to record the history of civil rights protests;
The Reverend Samuel "Billy" Kyles, who gives his eyewitness account of the assassination of his friend and colleague, Dr. Martin Luther King;
Judge D'Army Bailey, who tells of fighting to save the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where this tragic act was committed, and to preserve the site as the outstanding National Civil Rights Museum.

View our portraits of unsung heroes

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