Tennessee: Memphis's Civil Rights Legacy

The United States Civil Rights Trail

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2y ago 32:25

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The Tennessee Civil Rights Trail podcast explores the most significant aspects of the Movement in the state. This episode offers a sketch of the city’s overall history before bringing us into what it was like there in the 1950s and 1960s. We learn about the city’s Sanitation Workers’ Strike in 1968, the cause that compelled Martin Luther King, Jr. to visit there that spring to offer his support. The episode details the moments leading up to King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4th that year as well as the effect it caused nationally. Episode 1 concludes with the role that music and the radio played in the Movement by telling the stories of Stax Records and WDIA, one of the first radio stations in the country programmed entirely for the Black community.

Learn more about the sites on the Tennessee Civil Rights Trail by visiting:

The episode features the voices and perspectives of:

Ryan Jones, museum educator for the National Civil Rights Museum
Elaine Lee Turner, Movement veteran and Civil Rights tour guide
Al Bell, former executive at Stax Records
Mark Stansbury, DJ and news reporter at WDIA

24 episodes