Episode five of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher.

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Our latest podcast episode, “The Civil Rights History Project,” explains the background of one of AFC’s congressionally mandated oral history projects, and presents interviews with participants and moving excerpts from the oral history interviews.

This blog post exists to give a little more context to the podcast episode, and provide full-length audio or video items for the excerpts featured in the podcast.

The project was initiated by the U.S. Congress on May 12, 2009, when they passed The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directs the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans, and to record new interviews with people who participated in the struggle.

The survey of existing collections resulted in a useful database of Civil Rights oral histories all over the country, which you can find here.

The new collecting initiative resulted in a collection consisting primarily of video recordings of oral history interviews with Civil Rights activists and leaders. Clips from many of them are in the podcast. Most of those are online to be watched at this link.

We also included in the podcast several excerpts from the Botkin lecture “Reflections on Memory & History: Collecting New Oral Histories of the Civil Rights Movement” by Joseph Mosnier, and from the lecture’s introduction by Elaine Nichols.  You can watch that video at this link.

The Civil Rights History Project has also been the subject of many blog posts here at Folklife Today, which you can find at this link.

So thanks for visiting Folklife Today–and once again, please listen to our podcast!