The quest to find boycott participants ramps up as we near our deadline for locating people to interview. We plan to finish interviews by March of 2016, so now’s the time to help us find people in the photos if you’ve been putting it off! Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded us an Art Works grant so we can continue to work on the project and finish by 2016.
We are still looking for more students we can identify in our footage from 1963, so please look through the website, send it around to friends and family who may be able to identify people, and keep in mind these schools listed here. This is a list of participating schools and percentages. If you know people who went to any of these schools or may be in contact with people who were at these schools in the 60s, let us know. (Click here to download a pdf: School by School Boycott Participation) Note: this is not a complete list. We know of other schools with students who participated, such as Medill Elementary. If you know someone who went to Medill, check this out.
We have made some important outreach additions to our website. We made a new postcard and added a page to our website to encourage youth to share the pictures with elders. This includes some pointers and tips for asking questions around the boycott, downloadable links to slideshows of the pictures, a downloadable link to the new postcard, and a link to a document written by Chicago Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce about the historical context in education at the time of the boycott. If you would like a stack of postcards sent to you, so you can pass it out to your friends, family, community group, school, or congregation, please contact us and let us know how many you would like.
We also were recently interviewed for a radio podcast special about boycotts. Moor Talk Radio looked at the history of boycotts, successful boycotts across the world, and the ’63 Boycott project. Skip ahead to minute 49:00 of the program to hear about the history of boycotts, and minute 56:00 to hear about the ’63 Boycott project.