Interviews from Unfinished Civil Rights Film Digitized
The Film & Media Archive has just uploaded forty-two interviews from a never completed documentary on the history of the civil rights movement. See the digitized interviews from the Civil Rights Project here.
Public media producer and documentarian Jack Willis worked on the film with former SNCC member Jean Wiley from 1978 to 1982. During that time, they interviewed forty individuals on film and sixty-two folks as audio-only interviews. The filmed interviews are up online now. The audio interviews are accessible if you contact Special Collections at spec@wumail.wustl.edu.
This collection was digitized thanks to the support of a Council on Libraries and Information Resources’ Recordings at Risk grant.
By 1979, Jack Willis had been making documentaries for sixteen years. He had recently started his own company and directed an Emmy award-winning documentary, Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang. For his next project, he returned to the topic of his earliest films on the Black freedom movement, including 1963’s The Streets of Greenwood, preserved with funding from the National Film Preservation Collection, and 1966’s Lay My Burden Down.
Before the epochal Eyes on the Prize (1987 and 1990), there was no in-depth film on the civil rights movement. With the support of a planning grant from the NEH, Willis hired former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member and teacher with the Center for Black Education, Jean Wiley, as a co-producer for what they informally called The Civil Rights Project.
Ms. Wiley began a series of audio-only interviews to gather information that would shape the documentary. She conducted multiple trips around the South, visiting the cities where important events occurred. There she talked to local activists like Albany, Georgia, resident Yvonne Griffin, who was jailed for participating in sit-ins, and Laura McGee of Greenwood, Mississippi, whose family participated in SNCC’s voter registration efforts. Willis and Wiley also spoke with scholars on the impact of the civil rights movement and white activists who took part in the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer.
In 1980, the two conducted onscreen interviews. They filmed acclaimed activists like James Forman, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, and Bernice Johnson Reagon. But they continued their focus on lesser-known individuals who did equally important work, like Harry Bowie, an Episcopal priest in McComb who collaborated with SNCC during Freedom Summer; Montgomery’s Hazel Gregory, who co-led the Women’s Political Council with Jo Ann Robinson; and June Johnson, who joined SNCC while a teenager living in Greenwood. Willis and Wiley also interviewed an FBI agent, Klan members, and FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, who worked with the Klan and other dangerous white organizations.
By 1982, Willis and Wiley were at a standstill. While they had filmed over 40 interviews, they were not getting the specific information from interviewees in a form that would work in the finished documentary. A final attempt to acquire additional funds from the NEH for follow-up filming and reediting failed. Work on the Civil Rights Project halted.
It is the film’s unfinished nature that makes these interviews so valuable today. They are almost entirely unseen and unheard, making them an untapped resource for historians, teachers and students, filmmakers, and political activists. Moreover, Willis and Wiley interviewed a number of figures not included in Eyes on the Prize. Their interviews provide a different narrative of the movement than Eyes did. They planned their film to cover events up to 1968, which would have allowed them to cover the movement’s successes but also its failures, unlike the first season of Eyes on the Prize, which ends in 1965.
The finding aid for the Jack Willis papers covering this collection can be viewed on ArchiveSpace.
The complete list of filmed interviews can be found at the above Vimeo link. A list of the audio-only interviewees follows:
- James Armstrong
- Ella Baker
- Harry Bowie
- Ed Brown
- Wiley Branton
- C. C. Bryant
- Stokely Carmichael
- Courtland Cox
- Al Dixon
- L.C. Dorsey
- James Forman
- Warren Fortson
- Freddie Fox
- Lorenza Gaines
- Gloria Gilmer
- Dewey Greene / George Greene
- Freddie Greene
- Yvonne Griffin
- Vincent Harding
- Dorothy Henson
- Mary Hightower
- Norman Hill
- Jan Hillegas
- Len Holt
- Goldie Jackson
- Johnny Jackson
- Tim Jenkins
- Mrs. Clarence [Florence] Jordan
- Ed King
- Henry Kirksey
- Charles Langford
- Ken Lawrence
- John Lewis
- Bob Mants
- Joe Martin
- Thomas McCloud
- Willie McGhee
- Jesse Morris
- Don Miller
- Ethel Minor
- Amzie Moore
- Daisy Newsome
- E. D. Nixon
- Ernest Nobles
- John O’Neal
- Beula Owens
- Gwen Patton
- W. C. Patton
- James Peck
- Amanda Perdew / John Perdew
- Georgia Price
- Marvin Rich
- Cleveland Robinson
- Charles Sherrod
- Fred Shuttlesworth
- Ronald J. Smith
- Sue Thrasher
- Gladys Williams
- Hosea Williams
- Gloria Wise
- Bob Zellner
- Dottie Zellner
Andy Uhrich is a former curator of the Film & Media Archive.