Hands Across America

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In May 1986, more than five million people took part in Hands Across America - an attempt to form a nationwide human chain to raise awareness of poverty and homelessness. Hear from the organiser of the event, Hollywood promoter Ken Kragen.

Photo: Santa Monica California. Credit: Associated Press.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.
0:04.3	Today we're going back to May 1986 and one of the biggest charity events in history,
0:09.8	Hands Across America. I'm Simon Watts and I've been talking to the man who
0:14.3	organized it Ken Craigen.
0:17.0	They're not just holding hands, they're stretching them, 4,200 miles, 4 time zones,
0:27.0	across 2 deserts and 2 mountain ranges.
0:30.0	It's for the poor that many Americans never knew they had.
0:34.0	I wish I had a home.
0:36.0	We had six and a half million people holding hands
0:41.0	from New York Battery Park, which looks out on the Statue of Liberty
0:45.3	through 17 states to the Queen Mary which is in Long Beach, California here and
0:51.8	it was all at one single moment in time on May 25th,
0:57.0	in 1986.
0:59.0	It spilled as the largest event of its kind, a promotion drive led by the stars run like a presidential
1:05.2	campaign mass involvement to publicize a national scandal. Hands across this man I know.
1:16.0	The aim of Hands Across America was to raise awareness of the millions of homeless and hungry in the United States, the world's richest country.
1:25.2	It was organized by the USA for Africa charity, which was already working to fight famine in
1:30.4	Africa through its We Are the World record.
1:39.0	The man behind it was the same Hollywood music promoter Ken Craigen.
1:43.0	What happened was that I went off to Africa with supplies and food, medicine, refrigerators, all kinds of stuff.
1:52.0	And when I got back here here I got off the airplane and a
1:56.2	volunteer who was picking me up said to me you know it's great what you're doing
	...

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