The following is an alphabetized list of persons interviewed for the first series of Eyes On The Prize. Under each name is small biographical summary. Click on a name to watch their interview.

T  • V • W • Y 

• Albert Turner (1936-2000)

  • Albert Turner graduated from Alabama A&M and was a bricklayer in Marion, Alabama. In about 1962, he helped form the Perry County Civic League, whose members worked for voting rights. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to Selma and then Marion, Turner soon became a full-time employee of that organization. He led the mule train in Dr. King’s funeral and served as the Alabama state director of SCLC for many years. He died in Selma on April 13, 2000. 
     
    Albert Turner was instrumental in organizing voter registration drives in rural Alabama. Turner participated in both the nighttime march in Marion when Jimmy Lee Jackson died and in the “Bloody Sunday” march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As the local representative for SCLC, Turner marched at the front of the line in the first attempt to march to Montgomery. As an SCLC staff member, Turner stayed near the bridge to make sure that all the marchers made it back after being attacked by state troopers.

• Richard Valeriani (1932-2018)

  • Richard Valeriani spent 28 years as a correspondent for NBC News, covering both national and international affairs. He later wrote a column for the Huffington Post. In his work for NBC, Richard Valeriani covered the civil rights movement in such places as Birmingham, Selma and Philadelphia, Mississippi. He was in Marion, Alabama on February 18, 1965, covering the violent attack on black demonstrators by police and white residents. During the attack, Valeriani was struck on the head with an axe handle and local whites taunted him when he lay bleeding. A state trooper fatally shot Jimmy Lee Jackson during the same incident. Once Valeriani recovered, he reported on the Selma marches. In his interview for "Eyes on the Prize", he talked about the challenges of being a reporter during this volatile time in the movement.

• David J. Vann (1928-2004)

  • David J. Vann was a corporate lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama. He served as the city’s mayor from 1975-79. 
     
    During the early 1960s, Vann was one of a group of business leaders critical of the city’s government and especially its commissioner of public safety, T. Eugene “Bull” Connor. The mob attack on the Freedom Riders in 1961, which was coordinated by Connor and Ku Klux Klan leaders, was covered by media outlets across the globe. Vann and his allies believed that Connor’s actions (and the negative publicity resulting from them) hurt area business, so they put together a voter initiative that changed the city’s form of government in 1962. Connor ran for mayor under the new system but was defeated. Meanwhile, local civil rights activists, led by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, had begun a campaign to integrate the city. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and the SCLC joined the Birmingham integration effort. In the spring of that year, during the final weeks of Connor’s tenure as public safety commissioner, David Vann and other civic leaders met with leaders of the pro-integration forces. In the face of widely publicized police attacks on peaceful marchers and the jailing of a large portion of the black community, Vann’s group reached an agreement with civil rights leaders on an integration plan in May 1963. The new city government implemented the agreement.

• Vanessa Venable

  • Vanessa Venable was a black resident and schoolteacher in Farmville, Virginia. In 1959, when Farmville officials closed the schools rather than accept integration, Venable was a ninth-grade teacher and a parent of school-age children. When the schools closed, well-to-do white families were able to place their children in segregated private schools, but black students and many low-income white students were without any educational opportunities until civil rights organizations set up local schools at their own expense. The public schools re-opened in 1964. Venable and her family moved to Charlottesville, where she again worked as a teacher, and her children were able to attend school there. Venable later served as leader of the NAACP’s Prince Edward County chapter.

• C. T. Vivian (1924-)

  • An executive staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. C.T. Vivian was a supporter of non-violent direct action and used these tactics throughout the civil rights movement. Rev. Vivian was involved in the 1960 Nashville sit-in movement, the 1961 Freedom Rides, and the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Campaign, among other events. 
     
    In 1958, Rev. Vivian helped found the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) as an affiliate of SCLC. Vivian coordinated sit-ins and boycotts throughout the city. The movement was a success and Nashville integrated its public facilities. In 1961, after the Freedom Rides were stopped in Birmingham, Alabama, Rev. Vivian and other Nashville activists continued the Ride from Birmingham to Jackson, Mississippi. In Jackson, Vivian and the Nashville Riders were met with violence and arrested. As an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. C.T. Vivian also helped coordinate the 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama. During the campaign, Vivian and other protesters publicly confronted Selma Sheriff Jim Clark, who was preventing African-Americans from registering to vote. Vivian told Clark: “This is not a local problem. This is a national problem. You cannot keep anyone in the United States from voting without hurting the rights of all other citizens. Democracy is built on this.” Clark then struck Vivian, after which Vivian responded: “We are willing to be beaten for democracy.” Rev. Vivian later recalled the importance of this altercation: “It was a clear engagement between the forces of the movement and the forces of the structure that would destroy the movement...You do not walk away from that. This is what the movement meant.”

• Wyatt Tee Walker (1929-2018)

  • Wyatt Tee Walker was born in Brockton, Massachusetts in 1929. He studied at Virginia Union University, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1950 and a graduate degree in religion in 1953. In the 1950s, he served as a minister to a Baptist congregation in Petersburg, Virginia. From 1967-2004, he was pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem. 
     
    In 1957, Wyatt Tee Walker was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), along with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and the organization’s first president, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1960, Walker became the executive director of SCLC and Dr. King’s chief of staff. Walker was a key strategist for SCLC in many of the organization’s campaigns, including the Albany movement, the Birmingham movement, and the March on Washington. Walker resigned from SCLC in 1964. In the early 1970s, he was an urban affairs specialist for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In the latter capacity, Walker was one of the negotiators who met with leaders of the Attica prison uprising in 1971.

• Governor George C. Wallace (1919-1998)

  • George Wallace was born on August 25, 1919, in Clio, Alabama. He received a law degree in 1942 and then enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew combat missions in World War II. He was medically discharged from the army after a near-fatal attack of spinal meningitis. In 1945, he became the Assistant Attorney General of Alabama and in the following year, he was elected to the Alabama Legislature. In 1953 he became a judge in the circuit courts of Alabama. He was defeated in 1958 in the race for governor by John Patterson. Wallace had the support of the NAACP. His opponent won with support from the Ku Klux Klan. His defeat was partly responsible for his decision to become a strict segregationist. In 1962 he was elected governor on a pro-segregation platform. As Governor of Alabama, George Wallace attempted to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. On June 11, 1963, he stood in front of Foster Auditorium in order to prevent two black students from enrolling. However, Wallace eventually had to stand aside when ordered by federal marshals, the Alabama National Guard, and by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Wallace stood by his segregationist politics through most of his time as governor. Wallace’s wife Lurleen Wallace won the 1966 gubernatorial election (state law forbade her husband from serving consecutive terms). In 1970 George Wallace was again elected governor of Alabama. Wallace also ran for president in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. In his later years, he recanted his segregationist views and apologized for his actions. Wallace died on September 13, 1998, in Montgomery, Alabama. 
     

• Thomas R. Waring (1907-1993)

  • Thomas R. Waring was a long-time editor of the News and Courier, a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina. Waring relentlessly defended segregation in his writings, which included a 1956 piece in Harper’s magazine titled “The Southern case against desegregation.” In 1968 Waring published a number of editorials blaming Dr. Martin Luther King for the riots that followed his murder.

• Hollis Watkins (1941-)

  • Hollis Watkins was born in Lincoln County, Mississippi on July 29, 1941. His parents were sharecroppers and he was the youngest of eleven children. As an adolescent Watkins attended some NAACP youth meetings. Watkins graduated from Lincoln County Training School in 1960. Watkins met Robert Moses of SNCC at a youth meeting in McComb. He joined SNCC and worked to get black voters registered in his area. He attended a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in McComb and was arrested and jailed. He was also arrested for his participation in a walk-out at a high school in McComb. Watkins was involved with a variety of SNCC projects throughout Mississippi, including voter registration in Hattiesburg and citizenship classes in Holmes County. Watkins was the founder and president of Southern Echo, an educational leadership development organization.

• Sheyann Webb (1956-)

  • Sheyann Webb grew up in Selma, Alabama and was eight years old when the Selma marches took place in 1965. Although her parents had not registered during the voter registration drives, she participated in the Selma marches and later co-authored a book about her experiences with Rachel West Nelson. This book, Selma, Lord, Selma, was made into a movie that aired on the Wonderful World of Disney in 1999. Webb-Christburg is currently the student activities coordinator at Alabama State University and speaks about her experiences in Selma as a civil rights activist. 
     
    Sheyann Webb-Christburg and her friend, Rachel West, spent time with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was in Selma to campaign for voting rights. Webb-Christburg participated in the “Bloody Sunday” march and the march from Selma to Montgomery without her parents’ permission. She did not march the entire way from Selma to Montgomery. After she told King that she did not have her parents’ permission to march, she was transported to Montgomery for the end of the march, where her parents met her. Webb-Christburg, who was attending an integrated school, was suspended for her participation in the march. She convinced her parents to register to vote after the 1965 Voting Rights Act by asking for it as her birthday present. 
     

• Robert Williams (1925-1996)

  • Audio only.
  • Robert Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina on February 26, 1925. At the age of eleven, Robert witnessed Jesse Helms, Sr. beating a black woman and became convinced of the need for black people to defend themselves. Williams moved to the North and was a witness to the race riots in 1943 in Detroit. In 1958, Williams successfully defended two black boys who had been arrested for kissing a white girl. Williams also established the Black Armed Guard, which defended local blacks from the Ku Klux Klan’s violence. Williams called for blacks to defend themselves with firearms, leading to disagreements with Martin Luther King and with the national leadership of the NAACP. In 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Monroe and used the local NAACP chapter as their base. Their presence in the county led to armed standoffs between local whites and blacks, and local law enforcement took the side of the whites. During the unrest, Williams was wrongly accused of kidnapping and was forced to flee the country. He went to Cuba where he broadcast a radio show to the U.S, published a newspaper called The Crusader, and wrote an influential book called Negroes with Guns. Williams moved to China in 1965. Eventually, his experience in China became an asset to the U.S. government for diplomatic reasons and he was invited back to the U.S. and the charges against him were dropped. In his later years, he worked for the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies. He died of Hodgkin’s disease shortly after writing While God Lay Sleeping: The Autobiography of Robert F. Williams.

• A.W. Wilson (1902-1989)

  • Reverend A.W. Wilson was the pastor at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and an officer in the Montgomery Improvement Association. The church was a central location for organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), including the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Wilson and other ministers encouraged their congregations to participate in the bus boycott. At the first meeting, Wilson introduced Martin Luther King, Jr., the new Montgomery Improvement Association president, to the crowd of over 5000 people who had come together to discuss the boycott. 
     
    Wilson first joined Holt Street Baptist Church in 1939, having come from a small church in Macon County, and ministered to the congregation for over 50 years, making him the church’s longest-serving pastor. He was married to Mrs. Annie Mae Wilson, who helped to organize the congregation’s women into several mission circle groups.

• Paul Wilson (1913-2001)

  • Paul Wilson was born and raised in Kansas. He earned a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree from the University of Kansas and a law degree from Washburn University. He served as the district attorney for Osage County, Kansas, and then as Assistant Attorney General for the state of Kansas. During his time as Kansas Assistant Attorney General, he represented the state in Brown v. Board of Education. He later taught at the University of Kansas School of Law. In 1995, Wilson published A Time to Lose about Brown v. Board of Education. Although Wilson represented Kansas in Brown v. Board of Education and argued in favor of segregated schools, he has said that he personally felt that the time had come to end segregation.

• Judge John Minor Wisdom (1905-1999)

  • John Minor Wisdom was born in 1905. He received a law degree from Tulane University in 1929 and practiced law in New Orleans for most of the next 30 years. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Wisdom to the Fifth Circuit Court. In 1993, the judge received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wisdom was still serving on the Fifth Circuit Court when he died in 1999. 
     
    Wisdom played a large role in implementing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education integration decision. He issued a number of court orders barring racial discrimination in education, voting, and jury selection. Wisdom is best known for writing the decision requiring that the University of Mississippi integrate and admit James Meredith in 1962.

• Harris Wofford (1926-2019)

  • Born in New York City on April 9, 1926, Harris Wofford attended law school at Yale University and Howard University. Wofford was admitted to the District of Columbia bar in 1954. In the 1950s and 1960s, he held a number of administrative posts dealing with civil rights and also helped create the Peace Corps. A Democrat, Wofford served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania in the years 1991-95. 
     
    From 1954 until 1958 Wofford was a legal assistant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 1960, he joined John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, where he was a specialist on civil rights issues. After Kennedy won the presidency, he appointed Wofford to the chairmanship of the subcabinet group on civil rights.

• Senator Ralph Yarborough (1903-1996)

  • Ralph Yarborough, born in Chandler, Texas in 1903, earned a law degree from the University of Texas in 1927. Yarborough worked as an attorney in El Paso, Texas, and was appointed Assistant Attorney General for Texas in 1931. He is well-known for his successful prosecution of the Mid-Kansas Oil and Gas Company. In 1936 he was appointed district judge for Travis County. Yarborough ran for governor of Texas several times but lost to Allan Shivers, who portrayed Yarborough as a communist and integrationist. Yarborough won a special election for a senate seat in 1957. Yarborough was more liberal than most Texas politicians and he consistently voted for civil rights bills. He credits his election and re-election to the senate with making Lyndon Johnson more comfortable with taking a pro-civil rights stance. After Selma, Yarborough made a famous statement that the 1965 Civil Rights Bill was about "human rights."

• Andrew Young (1932-)

  • Pastor and politician Andrew Jackson Young was born on March 12, 1932, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Young studied at Dillard University before transferring to Howard University, where he received his BS in pre-dentistry in 1951. Young then studied divinity at Hartford Theological Seminary before becoming a pastor in Thomasville, Georgia, and Marion, Alabama. As a pastor, Young became involved with the growing civil rights movement, especially voter registration campaigns. Young was associate director of the Department of Youth Work at the National Council of Churches in 1957 (he would later become president of the organization in 2000-2001) until he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1961. Young quickly became one of the most active and important leaders in the organization, working with SCLC’s “citizenship schools” and developing voter registration programs. Young served as the executive director of SCLC in 1964 and as its vice president in 1968. Young participated in and helped strategize for all of SCLC’s major battles in the civil rights movement. A close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., Young can often be spotted next to him in photographs of marches and speeches. Young was present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, when James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. King. After King’s death, Young successfully ran for Congress, becoming the U.S. Representative from Georgia’s 5th District. Young was the first African-American elected to Congress from Georgia since the Reconstruction. In Congress, Young was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Rules Committee, and the Banking and Urban Development Committee. President Jimmy Carter appointed Young as the first African-American ambassador to the United Nations in 1977. The appointment turned out to be controversial. Young was an outspoken and often independent ambassador, infamously speaking bluntly about American race problems in a French newspaper. Andrew Young resigned from his position after controversy over his meeting with a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, despite an official policy of engaging directly with the PLO. In 1981, Young successfully ran to become the mayor of Atlanta, succeeding Maynard Jackson. Young served as mayor until 1990. In the early 90s, Young was co-chair of a committee that brought the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. Young continued serving on the board of directors of many organizations and working as a professor at the Georgia State University Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Morehouse College renamed its Center for International Studies the Andrew Young Center for International Studies in 1998. Andrew Young has authored or co-authored Way Out of No Way (1994), An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (1996), and Walk in My Shoes: Conversations between a Civil Rights Legend and his Godson on the Journey Ahead (2010, with Kabir Sehgal). Young has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and more than 45 honorary degrees. Through Andrew Young Presents, Young began making short documentaries on African history and contemporary black issues. 
     
    Young began working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961 and served as its executive director from 1964 to 1968, and afterward as its vice president from 1968 to 1970. During this time, he worked with civil rights luminaries Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Wyatt Tee Walker, and many others. SCLC contributed to and organized movements in Birmingham, Alabama; Albany, Georgia; St. Augustine, Florida; Selma, Alabama; and more. Young was a strategist for SCLC’s famous March on Washington in 1963. Young was a leader in SCLC’s “citizenship schools,” which taught African-Americans the skills necessary to pass voters’ literacy tests and to community leadership more generally. Young also helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark piece of legislation that banned public discrimination on the basis of race. Young himself was the first African-American Congressman from Georgia since the Reconstruction and the first African-American Ambassador to the United Nations. He succeeded Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta, who in turn succeeded Young as mayor in 1990.

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