U.S. on Civil Rights, Jazz and the Blues - Eastern European Journalists

October 23 - November 10, 2005, Washington, DC; Little Rock, AR; Chicago, Ill; Memphis, TN; Montgomery, AL; Oxford and Clarksdate, MS.
Contact: Washington Foreign Press Center Program Officer Andy Strike
Telephone: 202-504-6356, email: strikeap2@state.gov

Ten journalists from 10 Eastern European countries took part in the tour .  Participants visited civil rights sites in five states and the District of Columbia and saw how the movement grew in part out of jazz and blues music.  Highpoints of the tour included recorded interviews with Earnest Green of the Little Rock Nine and Rev. Billy Kyles, who was at the Lorraine Motel the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed.  While in Clarksdale, MS, the journalists attended a briefing by the Delta Regional Authority Chairman Pete Johnson on Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and the challenges of trying to reconstruct an economically depressed region with an African American-majority population.