Promised land

Description

This program sets out to portray the current tensions and frustrations, hopes and fears, of this divided city that was at the center of the civil rights struggle in the 50s and 60s. Here is where it all started in 1955 with the famous bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ten years later, Montgomery was the symbolic goal of the march from Selma to protest restrictions on black voters, when many marchers were beaten by police. Images of those years are interwoven with the experiences of Montgomery's black citizens today. Vanzetta, a lawyer, recounts how the whites fled when she moved into their middle-class neighborhood. Harold and Lloyd are brothers who own a hairdressing shop. Theirs is one of the few black businesses to survive in this racially divided city. Paget took her employers at a fast food shop to court after she was fired because white customers complained that there were too many black employees. "It's important to make a stand on something," she says. Rev. Ralph Abernathy voices the suspicion that King's involvement in the poor people's campaign was the cause of King s death. He believes it was too radical a movement to be tolerated by the American power structure.

Runtime

50 min

Series

Subjects

Geography

Genre

Date of Publication

1993

Database

Alexander Street

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