Washington, DC, USA /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — On Aug. 2, 2013, in time for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the Newseum will open “Make Some Noise: Students and the Civil Rights Movement,” an exhibit that explores the new generation of student leaders in the early 1960s who fought segregation by making their voices heard and exercising their First Amendment rights. The exhibit will feature a section of the original F.W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where in 1960 four African-American college students launched the sit-in movement by refusing to leave their counter stools after being denied service in the whites-only section.
“Make Some Noise” will spotlight key figures in the student civil rights movement, including John Lewis, now a U.S. representative from Georgia, and Julian Bond, who later became chairman of the NAACP. Through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the young activists took direct action to end segregation and break down racial barriers in voting rights, education and the workplace by organizing sit-ins, marches and voter registration drives.
The exhibit also will feature a bronze casting of the Birmingham, Ala., jail cell door behind which civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. penned his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” in 1963.
In addition to “Make Some Noise,” the Newseum will launch a three-year changing exhibit, “Civil Rights at 50,” which will be updated each year to chronicle milestones in the civil rights movement from 1963, 1964 and 1965 through historic front pages, magazines and news images. “Civil Rights at 50” will be on display through 2015.
On June 5, the Newseum kicks off a series of programs on the civil rights movement with “The Legacy of Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers.” Evers, a civil rights activist, was assassinated June 12, 1963, in his driveway in Mississippi. His widow, Myrlie Evers, chairman of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute, will take part in a panel discussion with Julian Bond and Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., whose work in the 1990s helped convict the man who assassinated Evers. Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for “PBS NewsHour,” will moderate the discussion. Tickets to the7:30 p.m. program are free but must be reserved through the Newseum’s website.