Civil Rights — Podcast

Leadership Moment - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Have you ever had someone tell you about their hopes and dreams? Can you remember the passion in their eyes? Can you remember the conviction in their voice? This is the story of a dream and more importantly the vision of that dreamer.

Fifty-six years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered one of the most important speeches in the history of the United States…and it almost didn’t happen. That’s not completely true. It almost didn’t happen in the way we know it.

Here is the little-known secret about that speech. For most of it, Dr. King was ordinary. He was somber. He spoke of the past. He preached. He scolded the powers in America. The crowd that had traveled so far and waited so long to hear him grew restless.

But then a voice cried out. A friend of Dr. King shouted…

Hear his story here.

Leadership Moment - Elizabeth Eckford

Somebody has to go first. It’s an unwritten rule of progress. Somebody has to be a pioneer who blazes the trail for others to follow. It’s rare that the responsibility of being a pioneer for great social change falls on the shoulders of an innocent, unassuming 15-year-old. Regardless, that’s the situation in which Elizabeth Eckford found herself.

Elizabeth was one of the Little Rock Nine. These were the nine African American students who would be the first non-white students to attend prestigious Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As fate would have it, Elizabeth was separated from the other eight African American students on the first day of school. She was left alone to face a gauntlet of scorn, vitriol, and hatred…

Hear her story here.

Leadership Moment - Fannie Lou Hamer

Leadership Moment - Fannie Lou Hamer - Resilience

You can’t imagine a more unlikely leader to take the national spotlight. The youngest of 20 children born to sharecropper parents, she defied the odds and terrified a sitting president. This was during a time when women didn’t have a voice and African Americans were second-class citizens. Fannie Lou Hamer was both. What she lacked in formal education, privilege, and experience, she more than made up for in effort, courage, and a healthy dose of resilience.

Fannie Lou was born in 1917 in the segregated south. She was picking cotton by the age of six. By the time she was 13, she could pick hundreds of pounds a day despite having a leg ravaged by polio. Fannie Lou would have been an excellent student in high school and college, but those doors were not open to African American girls from rural Mississippi.

Her hard labor as a child prepared her to be a fighter as an adult. The catalyst that propelled her to national prominence was…

Hear her story here.

12 Geniuses Podcast

Search for a Topic