CHILDREN OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS documentary film is a film about the strength of the young. It begins with a group of kids who conducted sit-ins for six years in Oklahoma City. The kids and their youth advisor, Clara Luper started in 1958, a year and a half before the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins. Their demonstrations never got violent, they never really made national news, but just about every restaurant in the city was desegregated before the Civil Rights Act was put into law. CHILDREN OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS documentary film, for the first time in history, shares the kids six year odyssey to freedom with the nation.
The film doesn’t stop there; it compares the kids experiences with young people throughout the deeper south and delves into how we gain and loose freedom incrementally. National news journalist and civil rights leaders, including Julian Bond talk about the struggles and the terror in places like Nashville, Atlanta, Ol’Miss – the University of Mississippi, and Birmingham Alabama. Then the film ends with a punch. Congressman John Lewis was just twenty-five when he led a group of peaceful demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Fifty years later, Lewis tells his dramatic tale of Bloody Sunday, a day he thought he would die. Congressman Lewis then turns and speaks directly to today’s young and what he says is powerful!
In additions, a resource disc with outtakes will accompany the film and CIVIL, a stand alone interactive iBook/eBook will both be ready for market soon. CIVIL is full of stunning photos and stories that span 200 years back in time. The book digs deeper into the how and the why. It layers individual stories, each told from a real life character’s point of view. These struggles build the foundation for the children’s success. Shorts include: the Indian Removal Act; Manifest Destiny and the Treaty of 1855; Emancipation Proclamation; the Oklahoma Land Run; the rise of Jim Crow; Gandhi; a Belgium priests fight to get children out of working in factories and mines; the Tulsa Race Riot; the Great Depression; A girl named Clara; Hitler and the Jews; an academic Swede named Gunnar Myrdal and his study on race in America; the power of the press; Martin Luther King before he became Dr. King and the death of a boy named Emmett Till.