Former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer's Congressional testimony is so powerful that President Johnson calls an impromptu press conference to get her off the air.
Civil rights work in Mississippi in 1964 was dangerous. Those who had been on the ground in the state for decades knew that well, but some were less aware of what they'd face.
In 1947, 16 men—eight black and eight white—boarded a bus to test compliance with a recent Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation on interstate bus travel.
John Patterson, Alabama's governor from 1958 to 1963, discusses his decision to refuse a phone call from President Kennedy when the Freedom Riders encountered mob violence in Birmingham.
After deciding to participate in the Freedom Rides in May 1961, Jim Zwerg called his parents for support only to be told that he was “killing his father.”
