US civil rights – in the New Yorker
Written by Ciara Leeming
It’s difficult to squash a big subject like the US civil rights movement into a 15 minute multimedia piece but Platon’s current project for the New Yorker at least offers a taster so anyone with an interest will hopefully look into the era more deeply. Contemporary portraits of some of the (often very elderly) surviving figures – including Jesse Jackson and actor and singer Harry Belafonte – are presented with small snippets of audio interview, historical photographs and audio commentary by New Yorker editor David Remnick. It may be 55 years ago now since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, the town where Martin Luther King Jr also happened to be a Baptist minister, but the impact of their battle is still felt today. Without the sacrifices of them and many others, Barack Obama could not be US president today.