"Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" program files and sound recordings

"Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: An Audio History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Communities and the Music of Those Times" is an award-winning radio documentary. Produced by the Southern Regional Council (SRC), it chronicles the struggle to end segregation in Atlanta, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Jackson, Mississippi, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Montgomery, Alabama. While other documentaries about the civil rights movement concentrate on national leaders and national organizations, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" focuses on "the essential local character of the places and people who collectively became the Movement." In order to capture the undocumented side of the movement, the producers conducted over a hundred original interviews with civil rights activists and combed through archives across the country for oral histories and other materials. "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" aired on Public Radio International (PRI) affiliates across the country in 1997, and it won a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award the same year.

The series consists of 26 episodes. Affiliates could choose to broadcast "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" as either 13 fifty-nine minute programs or 26 twenty-nine minute programs. The series kicked off with a "Prologue," which chronicled race relations and social conditions in the South before World War II. After this introduction, the series started telling the story of civil rights movement in each city, beginning in Columbia and ending in Atlanta, Georgia. The structure of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" served two purposes. First, it recounted the history of the movement in each individual city. This approach represented an important step because, as historian Robert J. Norrell wrote, "The civil rights movement had a different experience in each place." Second, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" used the struggle in each city as a way to highlight specific directions the civil rights movement took as well as specific strategies activists employed to bring about change. The Columbia shows, for example, outlined the use of "litigation as a route to social change" by tracing how a lawsuit from Clarendon County became part of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Little Rock episodes then explored the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling because the Arkansas city's public schools became a battleground over the implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The structure of the series produced an innovative and powerful history of the movement.

The programs in the series are:

Program 1: Prologue

Program 2: Columbia, South Carolina: "Our Place, Their Place."

Program 3: Columbia, South Carolina: "Under Color of Law."

Program 4: Columbia, South Carolina: "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Segregation's Got to Go."

Program 5: Columbia, South Carolina: "Orangeburg."

Program 6: Montgomery, Alabama: "The Cradle of the Confederacy."

Program 7: Montgomery, Alabama: "Walk and Pray."

Program 8: Montgomery, Alabama: "The Bus Boycott."

Program 9: Montgomery, Alabama: "My Feet Is Tired."

Program 10: Montgomery, Alabama: "Rocking the Cradle."

Program 11: Little Rock, Arkansas: "The Jim Crow Years."

Program 12: Little Rock, Arkansas: "Nine for Justice."

Program 13: Little Rock, Arkansas: "Soldiers in School."

Program 14: Little Rock, Arkansas: "The Lost Year."

Program 15: Little Rock, Arkansas: "The 1960s."

Program 16: Jackson, Mississippi: "American Apartheid."

Program 17: Jackson, Mississippi: "The Birth of the Jackson Movement."

Program 18: Jackson, Mississippi: "The Demonstrations."

Program 19: Jackson, Mississippi: "Freedom Summer."

Program 20: Jackson, Mississippi: "Power and Resistance."

Program 21: Atlanta, Georgia: "Prelude to a Movement."

Program 22: Atlanta, Georgia: "The Atlanta Student Movement."

Program 23: Atlanta, Georgia: "Crow and Molasses."

Program 24: Atlanta, Georgia: "The City Too Busy to Hate."

Program 25: Atlanta, Georgia: "The Rise of Black Political Power."

Program 26: Epilogue