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United States Congressman John Lewis discusses how his experience as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement can offer guidance on how to live virtuously and work to change the world. In Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, Lewis revisits the lessons of the 1960s to help the electorate once again confront questions of social inequality.

Sanford, Florida, where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 27-year-old George Zimmerman over one month ago, is currently host to the worst kind of attention a small town could possibly imagine. After weeks of protests around the country, the question lingers as to whether the small town's image will be eternally marred the way that Selma or Birmingham, Alabama still evoke the civil rights movement of the 1960s. What connection does this town have to the long history of the American civil rights movement? For answers, we turn to Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration."

From May to December 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives by traveling together through the Deep South, deliberately violating Jim Crow laws. These Freedom Riders’ beliefs in non-violent activism was tested as violence and racism greeted them. Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr., cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and participant in the Freedom Rides, and Gerald Stern, who was a young civil rights lawyer in the Justice Department at the time, discuss the Freedom Riders actions and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and look at the legacy of the movement today.

In 2011, PBS released Stanley Nelson’s American Experience documentary film Freedom Riders.

It all started with dinner.

In 2004 my husband, John, and I were celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. That night we were the only Black people at Tru, a five-star restaurant in Chicago’s ultra-exclusive Gold Coast neighborhood. Instead of enjoying the romance of the moment, though, I ruined it by bringing up the discouraging status of Blacks in America. Although we moved on to other topics, they all seemed to lead us back to how fortunate we were and how we should be doing more to help improve the situation— The Black Situation.

On Monday, ground will be broken on the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This $500 million project is just one of the many being erected in major cities dedicated to African American history and the civil rights movement: Atlanta, Jackson and Charleston all have projects in the works. These projects mark an emerging era of scholarship and interest in the history of the civil rights movement, providing the public with new insights.

In 1961 Malcolm X came to Brown University to publicly rebut an article published in the school newspaper that criticized the Nation of Islam. Fast-forward to 2011. A Brown University student was assigned to create a historical narrative using anything in the school library and stumbled across one of the oldest recordings of Malcolm X in existence, heard by virtually no one since its initial taping.

In anticipation of the MLK event this weekend at the Brooklyn Museum, we ask: What would it take to make quality education a civil right for all Americans? Is it already?

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David Margolick tells the story of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery, two women whose names might not be well known, but whose image surely is. The famed photo taken of them in September 1957 shows Elizabeth, a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking in front of Little Rock Central High School, while Hazel, a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screams racial epithets. In Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock Margolick tells the story behind the photograph, which captures an epic moment in the civil rights movement.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Austin, Texas Tuesday night where he promised the Justice Department's civil rights division will aggressively review new voter ID laws that civil rights advocates say will have a discriminatory impact. This puts the Justice Department smack in the middle of a growing partisan debate over civil rights and minorities' access to the ballot. Several states, including Texas, have passed new requirements requiring voters to present photo ID before casting their vote. 

Fred Shuttlesworth, a civil rights leader who helped bring Birmingham, Alabama to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday at age 89. Shuttlesworth often spoke publicly against the violence that was prevalent in the South at that time, and founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

Covering the Civil Rights movement for Time's Atlanta bureau taught reporter Calvin Trillin some important lessons. How to report in a place where you're not liked (he says he felt 'a little like a foreign corespondent' in the South), the importance of knowing the subject (race) of your reporting very well, and the importance of not just giving every side of an argument equal weight. Brooke talked with Trillin about his piece "Back on the Bus" which will appear in the July 25 issue of the The New Yorker.

Many of us trace the Civil Rights movement back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955. But the true beginning may have been during the summer of 1919, remembered as "Red Summer," when race riots erupted across the country. At that time, NAACP membership grew exponentially, as black World War I veterans returned from fighting for democracy abroad and demanded freedom at home. Despite President Woodrow Wilson's promise to further human rights in the U.S., the federal government turned a blind eye and did little to even to protect African-Americans from racial violence.

An excerpt from "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America," by Cameron McWhirter.

1. Carswell Grove

[T]here has been nobody suffered in this matter like I have. I did not do nothing at all to cause that riot.

JOE RUFFIN

Just before the 2010 Midterm Elections, a CBS News poll found that black Americans were more likely than whites to express optimism about the economy. And while nearly 50 percent of black Americans thought America’s next generation would be better off, only 16 percent of white Americans thought the same.

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of the “freedom rides” by civil rights activists to protest segregation in the southern United States. Two original freedom riders, Congressman Bob Filner (D-CA)  and Hank Thomas, Chair of the 50 Anniversary Freedom Ride Foundation discuss the legacy of their activism.

Since last summer, there has been a sometimes violent standoff between students at the University of Puerto Rico and the government over an announced budget cut and an increase in tuition fees, but that may just be part of a wider pattern of First Amendment violations. Jennifer Turner, a Human Rights Researcher at the ACLU and Rosie Perez, who just returned from a fact-finding mission in Puerto Rico, describe how authorities have dealt with students, striking workers, journalists, and civilians in recent months.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Keith Beauchamp talks about the premiere of his documentary series on the Civil Rights-era Cold Case Initiative, "The Injustice Files."

Sarah Keys Evans, a Brooklyn resident and Civil Rights figure, is the subject of the book Take a Seat -- Make a Stand: A Hero in the Family. She joins Amy Nathan, the book's author, to talk about her arrest in 1952 that resulted in the end to race-based seating rules in interstate transportation.

Listeners: Call in or post your own family's Civil Rights hero story.

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On today's Brian Lehrer Show we are taking calls and collecting stories from those with connections to the civil rights movement. Here is Brian Lehrer Show producer Jody Avirgan's contribution.

In August of 1964 my mother, Martha Honey, then a Freshman at Oberlin College in Ohio, travelled to Mississippi as a member of SNCC for the "Freedom Summer" campaign to register Black voters. She attended the funeral of James Chaney, one of three civil rights workers - Cheney was a black Southerner; Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were white Northerners - murded by the Klu Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Mississippi. That evening she wrote a letter to a classmate. It appears in Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States. Here is an excerpt: