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: Martin Luther King Jr.
The Film May Have Focused on Martin Luther King, But Diane Nash Was the Reason He Was There in the First Place
By Christopher Wilson
February 12, 2015
If you watched the film Selma, you met Diane Nash when you saw her driving with Martin Luther King, Jr., into the Alabama town early in 1965. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had just begun to stage demonstrations to illustrate the need for federal forces to protect African-Americans exercising their right to vote in Selma, and throughout the former Confederacy.
Nash, somewhat surprisingly, stays in the background throughout much of the film—though an FBI field report excerpt flashed on …
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If You Grow Up Black in King’s Hometown, You Can’t Help But See His Story Intertwine with Your Own
By Errin Whack
January 19, 2015
To grow up in Atlanta is to be always aware of the story of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to see it intertwine with your own fate.
I was born there in 1978, less than a mile from the house where King grew up. As a schoolchild, I like others, visited Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue—the street where King was born, worked, died, and is honored. To see King’s neighborhood, and the home he was born in, humanized him for us children, letting …
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My Chance Encounter with Arizona’s Civil Rights History
By Mary Scanlon
November 14, 2014
I have always been a picker. When I was a kid, this meant searching the desert near my home in Douglas, Arizona, for old bottles and interesting rocks. Later in life, after I moved to Phoenix, my collecting interest turned to record albums. My husband had gotten me interested in jazz, and I began haunting local thrift stores in search of old LPs featuring icons like John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, and Dave Brubeck.
I was on …
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