Teaching Eyes on the Prize: Educating for Civic Participation

Judy Richardson was on SNCC staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963-66). Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. She is currently completing the new visitor center film for the National Park Service’s Frederick Douglass House in Washington, D.C.

In 1968, she was a co-founder of Drum & Spear Bookstore, once the country’s largest African American Bookstore. She was on the production team for all 14 hours of the seminal PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, as its series associate producer, then its education director. With Northern Light Productions, she continued to produce documentaries: for PBS, the History Channel, and museums. Those include films for the “Little Rock 9” and the “Selma” National Park Service visitor centers; The Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (PBS); and Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters (History Channel).

She co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a compilation of the testimonies of 53 SNCC women. She co-directed two NEH three-week teacher institutes, co-hosted by Duke University and focused on “Teaching Grassroots Movements in the South (1940-1985)”. She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College.

Dory Lerner earned her BA in Sociology from Willamette University in Oregon and her MA in Museum Education from Tufts University in Massachusetts. For 20+ years, Dory has created engaging experiences in museums, schools, libraries, and community centers. As the K-12 Educator at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, she develops programs and curricula to inspire learners of all ages and encourage community building. She also worked at MoSH (formerly the Pink Palace) and Lichterman Nature Center managing education programs. Dory served at the King Center in Atlanta, as well as the Field Museum and the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago.

For Dory, growing up in Memphis, instilled a strong moral conscience for racial and economic inequities both historically and in modern context. Dory has volunteered and served on the board of Memphis Artists for Change and led a community garden with local youth, for more than a decade. Dory and her wife, who is also an educator, are grateful to live with their two daughters in Memphis. Most recently, Dory was published in a book entitled Illmatic Consequences: The Clapback to Opponents of ‘Critical Race Theory’ edited by Walter Greason and Danian Jerry. Her chapter focused on using innovative resources such as visual arts and hip-hop lyrics to reconcile hard history and inspire young activism.