e-HUM Alert -Bishop White joins other civil rights leaders in Palm Sunday CBS-TV special

March 25, 2004

Bishop White joins other civil rights leaders in Palm Sunday CBS-TV special

Updated with Indiana dates and times

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana United Methodist Bishop Woodie W. White will be featured Palm Sunday on a CBS Television Interfaith Religion Special on the Civil Rights Movement.

"Extraordinary Possibilities: The Civil Rights Movement Then and Now," an interfaith religion special, will be broadcast Sunday morning, April 4 on the CBS Television Network.

In Indiana, WISH-TV in Indianapolis plans to broadcast the program on Sunday, April 4 from 8:30 to 9 a.m. WEVV-TV in Evansville will delay the broadcast to Sunday, April 11 at 6 a.m. WTHI in Terre Haute also will delay the broadcast to Sunday, April 11 at 4 a.m. For the other CBS affiliates in Indiana, check your local listing for time and station.

It's been half a century since the Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in the public schools, 40 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Movement, which had its most productive years in the 1950s and -60s, involved the active participation of hundreds of thousands of people, black and white, northern and southern, from varied religious backgrounds and mostly young. Their efforts advanced the cause of human rights for African-Americans, opening the education and economic doors for many. The young people of those days are growing older now and efforts are being made to collect their stories.

One such project is "Voices of Civil Rights," a year-long effort by the AARP, The Library of Congress and The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in which thousands of personal accounts of people involved in the movement will be collected and preserved.

In this broadcast CBS draws on some of the people and their stories already collected and add more of our own to recall for a new generation what commitment it took to make a dent in the wall of bigotry and virtual apartheid which existed in this country before the 1954 Supreme Court decision. These spokespersons, now in their sixties and seventies, also point out that the struggle has barely begun and that people in this country are still threatened by discrimination based on race, religion, gender, age disability, and national origin.

Participants include: Bishop Woodie White, Indiana Area of The United Methodist Church, who spent three days in jail after entering an all white church in Mississippi; Julian Bond, head of the NAACP and a founder of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Dr. Dorothy Height, 93, president emerita, National Council of Negro Women and still a force in civil rights; Wade Henderson, executive director, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Moses Newson, reporter and editor for black newspapers who covered the integration of The University of Mississippi, Little Rock's Central High School, the Emmett Till case and the Freedom Rides; Joe Harvest, president of his college's NAACP chapter and an activist in Richmond, Va.; and Claudia Dreifus, journalist and a member of NYC CORE in 1962 who worked to integrate lunch counters in Maryland.

John P. Blessington is the executive producer and director of the special; Ted Holmes is the producer. This program was produced with the cooperation of the National Council of Churches of Christ, The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Jewish Theological Seminary and The Southern Baptist Broadcast Communication Group.

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