Freedom Riders

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This website serves as an accompaniment to and location to showcase the PBS American Experience documentary Freedom Riders, which originally aired in May 2011. The Freedom Riders were young white and African American individuals who rode busses and trains in the South during 1961 as a form of peaceful protest against the Jim Crow laws. At the time, they met with threats, violence, and incarceration.

Follow along with an interactive timeline and an interactive map. Each leg of the journey is summarized with a couple of sentences of text, and cities where major events took place can be selected for a quick overview. You can also read brief biographies of key figures—riders, politicians, movement leaders, and more—or information on the issues of the day from Jim Crow laws to Vietnam War protests.

View short film clips or the entire documentary here. The full documentary transcript is also available for download. The Teachers' Domain, although it sounds appealing, contains only the same film clips. The difference is that in this section the video clips are all marked as being for 6th through 12th grade.

Finally, the most "teacher-targeted" material on the site is a downloadable teacher's guide for use when viewing the documentary.

Say it Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches

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This small website assembles transcripts and audio recordings of 12 important speeches by prominent African Americans of the late 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. These include: Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dick Gregory, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Jr., Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson, Clarence Thomas, and Barack Obama.

Topics include Washington's speech to the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, Bethune's 1939 speech "What Does Democracy Mean to Me?," a 1966 speech by Carmichael at U.C. Berkeley, and King's 1968 "I've Been to the Mountaintop" sermon delivered in Memphis just before his assassination. The speech by Marcus Garvey is his only known recording. Each speech is accompanied by a brief introduction. The site provides 40 links to related websites.