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Center for Art Design and Visual Culture - UMBC

Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights

Above is a still image from the project introductory trailer. It shows a group of older Black and white men and women holding hands and singing together. There is a black music stand in front of them and a multi-colored map of the US on the dark red wall behind them.
Video still from the introductory trailer of “Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights.”

Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights

Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights (formerly For All the World to Hear: Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights) is organized by the Educational Outreach Program of UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. As a dynamic humanities project, it centers senior adults from the Baltimore area, who write, tell, perform, and digitally publish personal stories documenting their involvement in the struggle for civil rights.

Introductory Trailer, “Stories from the Struggle for Human Rights”

The first part of the project brought senior citizens from inter-racial and inter-faith backgrounds together for a series of oral history interview meetings. With guidance from oral historian, dramaturg, and performance director, Harriet Lynn, their written accounts resulted in a lively program delivered before diverse audiences in the Baltimore area.

Following each live performance, there were mediated, interactive audience discussions. Performances were held at sites including museums, libraries, and college campuses. Additionally, CADVC’s long-standing K-12 Educational Outreach Program activated connections with schools in proximity to performances resulting in a rich, first-person history lesson for Baltimore area school children. At this link is an article in the Beacon with further details on how the project came together.

Digital Stories

The second half of the program involved the same group of seniors with the Center’s ongoing digital publishing initiative through a unique digital storytelling component. Each senior partnered with a UMBC student to realize his or her story in digital video format, which ultimately is published here and on CADVC’s YouTube page and CADVC’s Vimeo page, where you can also see the full, live program of Stories from the Struggle.

Click below to view their digital stories:

A portrait of a senior man with a medium-dark skin-tone. He has a mustache and wears round brown glasses and a beige shirt. The man is softly smiling and standing outside in front of greenery.

Robert Houston

A portrait of a senior woman with a light skin-tone. She has short white hair and wears thin glasses, a black turtleneck, and a purple sweater. The woman is smiling and standing outside in front of greenery.

Lu Coleman

A portrait of a senior woman with a medium-dark skin-tone wearing a bright patterned shirt. The woman is grinning and standing outside in front of greenery.

Pat Brown Leak

A portrait of a senior man with a medium-dark skin-tone and a mustache. He wears tinted glasses and a brown collared shirt. The man is looking into the distance and is standing outside in front of greenery.

Woody Grant

A portrait of a senior woman with a medium-dark skin-tone. She wears a blue head wrap and blue glasses as well as a blue shirt, a large circular pin, a cross necklace, and hoop earrings. The woman is smiling and standing outside in front of greenery.

Janice Grant

A portrait of man with a light skin-tone. He has short white hair and a mustache wearing a black turtleneck and suit jacket. The man is smiling and standing outside in front of greenery.

John Brown

A portrait of a man with a dark skin-tone and a mustache. He wears a white suit jacket over a brown sweater vest and white collared shirt. The man is softly smiling and standing outside in front of greenery.

Deryck Charles

A portrait of a senior woman with a light skin-tone. She has short white hair and wears thin glasses and a blue cardigan over a striped blue shirt. The woman is smiling and standing outside in front of greenery.

Shirley Billy

A portrait of a man with a dark skintone. He has a mustache and beard wearing a blue baseball cap, tinted glasses, and a blue shirt. The man is smiling, looking into the distance, and standing outside in front of greenery.

John Brown

This project was a community outreach program of the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture, UMBC. It was organized by Sandra Abbott, CADVC’s curator of collections and outreach in collaboration with Harriet Lynn, producer/artistic director of Heritage Theatre Artists’ Consortium. The program was supported in part by the Maryland Humanities Council. Program partners included the St. Francis Neighborhood Center, Stoop Storytelling Series, Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory & Botanic Gardens, Druid Hill Park and the Senior Citizen Division of Baltimore City Recreation and Parks. Media partners included The Beacon Newspaper and WYPR.

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is a non-profit organization dedicated to organizing comprehensive exhibitions, the publication of catalogs, CDs, DVDs, and books on the arts, and educational and community outreach projects.