A new online series by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) revives a classic audio documentary about the Civil Rights Movement, enhancing it with text, archival images, video, maps and links to further resources.
"Trouble the Land: A Personal History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Cities," appears in Southern Spaces, an online journal about real and imagined places in the U.S. South produced by ECDS.
"Trouble the Land" draws audio from "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" a Peabody Award-winning radio documentary series produced by the Southern Regional Council in 1997. The documentary explored the Civil Rights Movement in five Southern cities with sound from pivotal events and interviews with those who were there.
Two civil rights advocates whose voices are heard in "Trouble the Land": Donald Hollowell, an attorney who sued to integrate Atlanta's public schools, Georgia colleges and public transit; and Martha Jackson, who took part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march.
Photo by Kate Sweeney
Though critically lauded, "the radio program wasn't really accessible after it aired," says Ella Myer, series editor for "Trouble the Land." Myer, an Emory doctoral candidate pursuing a PhD in religion, is an ECDS digital humanities fellow and assistant managing editor of Southern Spaces.
"Trouble the Land" builds on the original documentary's content and makes it available to a new generation of scholars, educators and others around the world. Southern Spaces has launched the first four installments, covering pivotal events in Atlanta. It plans to release 21 more over the course of the year, covering civil rights history in Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; and Columbia, South Carolina. The series describes the distinctive tactics of resistance employed by residents in each city.
"Then we can reflect: How can this be applied to civil rights questions we have in our current moment?" says Allen Tullos, co-founder and senior editor of Southern Spaces. He also serves as co-director of ECDS and an Emory professor of history.
Myer finds poignancy in starting the series in Atlanta, which is frequently acknowledged as a strategic hub of the Civil Rights Movement.
"There's a woman in my church who was involved in the Atlanta student movement," she says. "I love talking to her about how she got arrested at a lunch-counter sit-in. So, this is a living history here."
The second installment of "Trouble the Land" covers the Atlanta sit-ins, in which Black and white college students pushed for integration by refusing to leave their seats at segregated dining establishments in the early 1960s. Other installments trace the Atlanta movement's beginnings; desegregation of the city's public schools; Atlanta's reputation for racial moderation in the 1960s; and the rise of Black political power in local government.
Katherine Fisher is leading an effort at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library to digitize full-length interviews from "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Fisher is the head of digital archives at the Rose Library, which houses files and sound recordings from the audio documentary.
Taken together, "Trouble the Land" and the full-length interviews represent a treasure trove of research opportunities for scholars and contemporary activists.
Southern Spaces plans to host related events at each city "Trouble the Land" covers, starting in September at Atlanta's National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
The series is funded by an anonymous donor, Southern Spaces, the Rose Library and ECDS.
Ordinary people, extraordinary actions
Alongside famous figures in civil rights history, "Trouble the Land" focuses on the stories of "ordinary people working together to do extraordinary things," says Tullos.
The project's emphasis on community cooperation rather than singular heroes is what attracted Myer. She is writing her dissertation about Pauli Murray, a lesser-known 20th-century civil rights activist, scholar and Episcopal priest.
"The rhetoric of the trailblazer or the icon can hide the way social change actually happens," she says. "It wasn't just Martin Luther King and Julian Bond who were doing these things, and I think that's important to understand: that it's not just about finding the leader. It's not just about finding the one, but the many."
The satisfaction of the hunt
Locating photographs, videos and other items relevant to the movement's unsung heroes and stories required a great deal of sleuthing.
"Luckily, I have the sort of personality that enjoys that," Myer quips.
She spent hours searching digital archives at the Atlanta History Center for evidence of an organization made up of white women who fought Georgia's resistance to school desegregation.
Myer was working from a clue in the original audio documentary: "They made this huge petition with thousands of names," she says.
Finally she spotted it: a black-and-white image from 1960 of women in hats and gloves holding a long sheet of paper cascading from the Georgia Capitol's balcony and down its steps. It was the petition.
"That's pretty gratifying," says Myer. The photo appears in the third installment of "Trouble the Land."
The team who works with Myer to unearth archival material for the project includes Angelica Johnson, managing editor of Southern Spaces and doctoral candidate in English; Ayoung Kim, editorial assistant and doctoral candidate in English; Nyaradzai Mahachi, editorial assistant and doctoral student of art history; and Jessica Halsey, editorial assistant and graduate student of English.
Granular attention to detail
Steve Bransford, senior producer with ECDS, prepares sound and video for "Trouble the Land"— another painstaking process.
This reel-to-reel tape holds the speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave in Montgomery, Alabama, at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.
Photo by Kate Sweeney
Bransford used AI tools to scrub copyrighted music recordings from beneath narration and sound bites from "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"
Despite these efforts, some snippets of music remained.
Bransford turned to the audio documentary's archives at the Rose Library, which include tapes of the original, unabridged oral history interviews and narration outtakes without music. He listened to hours to identify the clips he needed before piecing them together digitally for "Trouble the Land."
"There's a two-plus-hour interview with [former Atlanta mayor] Maynard Jackson," says Bransford, recalling a moment that gave him chills after he pressed play. "I remember thinking, 'There are maybe four or five people who have heard this raw recording.'"
"The project represents a tremendously granular attention to detail," says Myer.
Southern Spaces began work on "Trouble the Land" in 2022, "so it's really exciting to see it out in the world where people are engaging with it and enjoying it," she says.
Tullos hopes the series stimulates discussion and analysis among scholars and activists about what works and what doesn't when it comes to effecting change — which, he adds, is not a quick process.
"These stories remind us that these things don't get solved in just a generation or so," he says. "'Trouble the Land' gives us something to build upon."
