SPJ, Green Eyeshade Awards, Best Documentary. Alabama Public Radio, "...a death, a bridge, and a seat on the bus."
“They claim that everyone is created equal, but they don't treat people equally. And that, I think, is the way we've, at least I've been educated about like the civil rights,”
Benjamin Lundgal
University of Southern Denmark
Please find enclosed Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the SPJ Green Eyeshade award for Best Documentary, titled “…a death, a bridge, and a seat on the bus.” The Alabama Public Radio spent eleven months chronicling three critical anniversaries in the state’s civil rights history, without a budget.
Please click here to listen to the program.
https://www.apr.org/news/2025-12-12/a-death-a-bridge-and-a-seat-on-the-bus-an-apr-news-special
2025 marked sixty years since civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot twice by an Alabama State Trooper on February 18, 1965. APR listeners heard from eighty-eight-year-old Vera Jenkins-Booker, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital who was with Jackson for the eight days before he died.
His death sparked voting rights marchers to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where police on horseback attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. The incident became known as “bloody Sunday.” Most of the marchers captured in black and white film that day appeared to be adults, but many of the protesters were teenagers. APR Gulf coast correspondent Lynn Oldshue spoke with Jeanette Howard-Moore and Diane Harris, who were school students caught up in the attack.
Americans aren’t the only ones studying events like “bloody Sunday,” the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the work of Rosa Parks and Doctor Martin Luther King. Junior. Europeans are watching, too. APR correspondent James Niiler covers stories from his hometown of Aarhus, Denmark that have impact in Alabama. He assembled a focus group of five students majoring in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark to hear their frank assessment of Alabama’s civil rights record.
2025 is also the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rosa Parks, who sparked the protest in 1955, is familiar to Danish young people. But, there’s more to her story that refusing to give up her seat to a white bus passenger. APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge visited the Rosa Parks Museum where an effort is under to tell the story of the civil rights icon, and to lobby the Library of Congress to relocate materials related to Parks to the city where the boycott took place.
Our series wraps up with remembrances from two people on the “front lines” of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that helped make Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior an international figure. APR student reporter Torin Daniel used never-before-heard archival audio from 2018 interviews with Fred Gray and Nelson Malden. Gray was the attorney to Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Malden was MLK’s barber. Gray recalls the planning process that went into the boycott and how King was the last of three names under consideration to lead the effort. Malden remembered the day, from the window of his barber, the day the boycott began.
Respectfully submitted.
Benjamin Lundgal
University of Southern Denmark
Please find enclosed Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the SPJ Green Eyeshade award for Best Documentary, titled “…a death, a bridge, and a seat on the bus.” The Alabama Public Radio spent eleven months chronicling three critical anniversaries in the state’s civil rights history, without a budget.
Please click here to listen to the program.
https://www.apr.org/news/2025-12-12/a-death-a-bridge-and-a-seat-on-the-bus-an-apr-news-special
2025 marked sixty years since civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot twice by an Alabama State Trooper on February 18, 1965. APR listeners heard from eighty-eight-year-old Vera Jenkins-Booker, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital who was with Jackson for the eight days before he died.
His death sparked voting rights marchers to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where police on horseback attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. The incident became known as “bloody Sunday.” Most of the marchers captured in black and white film that day appeared to be adults, but many of the protesters were teenagers. APR Gulf coast correspondent Lynn Oldshue spoke with Jeanette Howard-Moore and Diane Harris, who were school students caught up in the attack.
Americans aren’t the only ones studying events like “bloody Sunday,” the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the work of Rosa Parks and Doctor Martin Luther King. Junior. Europeans are watching, too. APR correspondent James Niiler covers stories from his hometown of Aarhus, Denmark that have impact in Alabama. He assembled a focus group of five students majoring in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark to hear their frank assessment of Alabama’s civil rights record.
2025 is also the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rosa Parks, who sparked the protest in 1955, is familiar to Danish young people. But, there’s more to her story that refusing to give up her seat to a white bus passenger. APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge visited the Rosa Parks Museum where an effort is under to tell the story of the civil rights icon, and to lobby the Library of Congress to relocate materials related to Parks to the city where the boycott took place.
Our series wraps up with remembrances from two people on the “front lines” of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that helped make Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior an international figure. APR student reporter Torin Daniel used never-before-heard archival audio from 2018 interviews with Fred Gray and Nelson Malden. Gray was the attorney to Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Malden was MLK’s barber. Gray recalls the planning process that went into the boycott and how King was the last of three names under consideration to lead the effort. Malden remembered the day, from the window of his barber, the day the boycott began.
Respectfully submitted.
