On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was pulled over by police near Saint Paul, Minn., after being misidentified as a robbery suspect. He was then shot and killed by an officer during the traffic stop. In this StoryCorps edition, Chad Eisen-Ramgren has a conversation with his 10-year-old daughter, who was a student at the school where Mr. Phil managed the cafeteria.
Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.
This story follows a girl who befriends the first African American to attend High Point Central High School, as a result of desegregation. What begins as an unintended and awkward experience in the cafeteria, becomes a strong and admirable friendship.
Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.
Regarded as one of the most important speeches in American history, it was delivered by Booker T. Washington as a plea for racial cooperation in the South during a time of deep racial prejudice.
In this interview, Marian Wright Edelman expresses the importance of each American sending children “signals of fairness and tolerance” and helping to give them “a life that transcends boundaries of race, class, gender and other differences.”
In the graphic novel March, Congressman John Lewis documents his experiences as a young civil rights activist. Hear him describe his first arrest employing a nonviolent resistance strategy, as captured in the book.
After she died of cervical cancer, doctors took a sample of Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells to use for research without her family’s knowledge or permission. Labs have continued to reproduce the immortal “HeLa” cells for decades.