Comcast NBCUniversal is celebrating 10 years of their award-winning “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement” platform, which connects audiences to compelling programming that educates, informs, and inspires. The platform includes nearly 20 hours of videos, historical moments, and stories submitted by the public.
Comcast released 10 never-before-seen video interviews called “10 for 10” on Black Experience on Xfinity to commemorate the milestone. This expands the collection of over 200 firsthand interviews featuring American civil rights champions such as award-winning Broadway actress, singer, and lifelong civil rights activist Melba Moore, baseball legend Hank Aaron, and freedom rider Hank Thomas.
Ebonne Leaphart, the Vice President of Local Media Development for Comcast, helped collect the stories for a decade along with the team and spoke with Rolling Out about the platform and why many civil rights heroes decided to speak up and participate.
Why was this an excellent time to promote this platform?
First, it’s to celebrate that this platform has achieved a 10-year milestone. There are [only so] many individual shows on television that reach 10 years, and this one has. In 2013, the initial idea for “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement” was the answer to a question. Our executive management team asked, “What can Comcast do to honor what was then the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedoms?” The company decided that we would do 50 interviews for the 50th anniversary with individuals who were there. There were 50 interviews, and they were released at that time on Xfinity under the Black Experience channel. The company has been a long-standing champion of diverse storytelling, and there was a feature folder called “Black Voices, Black Stories” in 2013. That was an incredible body of content that we launched. It was so widely viewed and celebrated that we started to get feedback from viewers and also from the interviewee participants who said, “I’m telling you my perspective, from my experience, and there’s another part of this story that we recommend you get by interviewing this other individual.” Organically, [the content body] grew to more than 50 interviews, and now we’ve eclipsed 200 firsthand accounts. We just launched, in honor of the [10th] anniversary, “10 for 10,” which is 10 new interviews that are part of that collection on extending the Black experience.
What do you hope people take away from this?
I hope people watch, engage, and [be] inspired by the content. It’s a rich array of firsthand accounts and moments in civil rights history and historical moments that are featured in the collection. If your genre of choice is sports, arts and entertainment, civic justice, health, or education, there are many different areas where civil rights stories are featured in this collection. With Hank Aaron, we were fortunate to be one of the last interviews he gave before he transitioned, and, in fact, Mrs. Aaron finished his story and [answered] some of the questions that we would have asked him about his lived experience.
