Freedom March

Streaming video - 2016

Freedom March features the San Francisco civil rights protest march of May 26, 1963, sponsored by Bay Area black churches and the labor movement in support of the Birmingham, Alabama Campaign against segregation led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The film shows the march down Market Street and the rally with speakers at the Civic Center. This march was the first community wide, racially integrated march against racial segregation in the United States since the Civil War. Fifteen thousand people marched in response to a call by San Francisco religious groups and labor organizations. The film shows the march and the rally with the Rev. Bernard Lee of the SCLC and others. Speakers called for... freedom in Birmingham and equality in San Francisco. Harvey Richards filmed the march just after he had returned from Mississippi where he had filmed the voter registration activists that appear in his film We'll Never Turn Back. This march occurred just four months before the bombing of the Birmingham, Alabama, 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four girls and shocked the nation. more