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The Documentary: My Family's Fight for Civil Rights

The Documentary: My Family's Fight for Civil Rights: My Family’s Fight for Civil Rights

NAACP Demonstrator

01/07/2014 GMT

My Family’s Fight for Civil Rights

My Family's Fight for Civil Rights

BBC World Service - The Documentary, My Family's Fight for Civil Rights, My Family’s Fight for Civil Rights

Baroness Oona King discovers her American family’s role in the fight for equality

Fifty years on since the Civil Rights Act was passed, Oona King discovers her American family’s role in the fight for equality.

Baroness Oona King, the former British Labour MP, has an American side to her family that played a variety of key roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Her grandfather and uncles worked with Martin Luther King in The Albany Movement, a campaign of mass protests that tried to desegregate their home town in Georgia. Oona travelled to Albany to speak to members of the movement on the 50th anniversary of the passing of The Civil Rights Act, the legislation which forced the Southern States to give African Americans the equality which was their right under the Constitution. 
 
Oona discovers that the violence meted out to black protesters by the authorities affected her family directly. Her uncle CB King, the first black lawyer in the town, was beaten up by a local Sherriff for asking to see his client in the cells. And her Aunt Marion lost her baby after she was beaten up by the police. 

She speaks to Pastor Boyd, of the Shiloh Baptist Church, who is now in his mid 80s and bravely allowed protesters to meet at his church; Charles Sherrod, of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, who brought the campaign for voting rights and desegregation to Albany; John Perdew, who came from Harvard to help the fight and was arrested on trumped up charges and faced the death sentence for protesting; Chief Judge Herbert Phipps of the Atlanta Court of Appeals, and Chevene King, the lawyer son of CB King, who is now fighting racial injustice in Georgia.

(Photo: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People march in front of the Dinkler Plaza Hotel in Atlanta on 11 Nov 1961. Credit: Associated Press)

BBC World Service

50 years on since the Civil Rights Act was passed, Oona King discovers her American family’s role in the fight for equality.

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