In Twilight of Life, Civil Rights Activists Feel ‘Urgency to Tell Our History’

By Eduardo Medina, The New York Times

Young people who marched and organized during the civil rights movement are now in their 70s and 80s. With fewer and fewer remaining, historians rush to record their stories.

The people who marched and organized in their teens and 20s during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when segregation was legal and disenfranchisement widespread, are now in their 70s and 80s.

With every year, there are fewer surviving activists from that era, a monumental period of surging activism. It was one of the most consequential times in American history, mired in bloody beatings and deaths and remembered for the landmark laws that were passed in its wake.

“Today is April 4, 2019,” a University of Florida historian began, and as Ms. (Vivian Washington) Filer, then 80, heard her name spoken, she looked straight ahead and smiled.

“A lot of people my age who fought for freedom, there is so much we know that others won’t because our stories are dying with us,” Ms. Filer said on a recent afternoon. “So the urgency to tell our history is here and now.”

“There were so many of us,” she said. “That’s why the few of us who are left have to tell our story.”

Ms. Filer is now the chair of the board of directors at the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center in Gainesville, which, in March, will produce “Grandma’s Stories,” a reading of oral histories from women who lived during the time of Jim Crow.

Read the full story about these activists here.

Read about this period of activism here or here.

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