BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2022

Protesting the death of Alton Sterling and the Baton Rough Police Department’s request for Black Lives Matter demonstrators to clear roadways, Iesha Evans stands in the middle of a street as two Louisiana state troopers, dressed in riot gear, approach to arrest her.

Letitia and Mae join children leaving school to march in Birmingham, Alabama. Disappointed that they were not arrested while picketing Woolworth’s, they feel reassured by Rev. Bevel, who tells them they made a great contribution to the movement.

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.

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.

Mary Jenkins describes growing up in the Jim Crow era and frequently being told, “You can’t”—both by a mother terrified of what might happen to her daughter if she stepped out of her expected place, and by a system that had institutionalized segregation as a way of life.

This photograph from the Associated Press shows Martin Luther King Jr. in a crowd of people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963.

The freedom riders, black and white, joined together to effect change. Traveling across the South while enduring ridicule and pain, they helped ensure that doors were open to all people, regardless of skin color.

Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.

Based on a true person, this story is told from the perspective of a little girl whose dad took her to the Million Man March—where she saw the tears, happiness, and chants of men banding together for a common purpose.