Confronting the Living History of the Civil Rights Struggle

To visit the town where Emmett Till was brutally murdered is to bear witness to our ongoing struggle for justice.

Since 2018, The Nation has hosted a US Civil Rights Tour led by documentary film maker André Robert Lee. Traveling across the South to the most important sites of the Civil Rights era, meeting with people who lived through that time of upheaval and promise, we come face-to-face with history: That confrontation can be nothing short of transformational.

Watch as Sylvester Hoover, a former sharecropper, takes a class of young students to Money, Mississippi, the town where he was born and raised, and the town where Emmett Till was brutally murdered in 1955.

“Our country is experiencing a moment of honest reckoning, one that has been a long time building. To understand the enormity of this moment, one needs only to turn to the American South for the living, breathing memory of the struggle for civil rights,” explains documentarian Lee.

“Most of us do not have access to all the intricacies of American history. We can learn a tremendous deal about the evolution of civil rights in this country from books, films, and lectures. But to walk the streets where courage and fear so famously clashed—to break bread with and learn from the living foot soldiers, marchers, and participants of the movement both past and present—that is to bear witness. That is to see history come alive.”

The Nation was founded by abolitionists in the summer of 1865—just months after the end of the Civil War—to serve as a vehicle for the cause of emancipation in the era after which it had, at least formally, been won. (It inherited the subscription list of William Lloyd Garrison’s trailblazing newspaper The Liberator, a symbol of its mission.) In more than a century and a half since the first issue rolled off the presses, The Nation has kept up the fight, leading the crusade against lynching, helping to found the NAACP in 1909 (our owner at the time, Oswald Garrison Villard—a grandson of the abolitionist—lent space in our office building for the group’s first headquarters), and playing a prominent role in covering the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. We also published an annual report on the struggle by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1961 to 1966.

Since February 2018, the magazine has hosted several hundred travelers on US Civil Rights Tour: On the Road to Freedom. A longer version of this documentary, looking at the students’ journey and contrasting their experience with an adult tour group, will be shared in the fall. Stay tuned.

ABOUT: André Robert Lee is a teacher, producer, and acclaimed documentary filmmaker who has led multiple civil-rights tours of the American South over the past several years. He directed and produced The Prep School Negro and has visited over 350 high schools, colleges, universities, and conferences with his film-based workshop. His most recent work includes a film about how junior- and senior-high-school students are responding to the 2016 presidential election, and a documentary about incarcerated youth who create art to fight recidivism in Richmond, Virginia.

Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation (@thenation) has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.