Born in Ripley, Miss., in 1948, Henry O. Braddock was a young child when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education ruling banning segregation in 1954. But as the 56-year-old Atlanta resident knows firsthand, discrimination and racism in the educational system persisted long after that.

There was his white sixth-grade teacher in Battle Creek, Mich., who told him he would "never amount to anything" and that his only chance to make it was to learn some trade.

Stung by her words, but motivated to prove her wrong, Braddock became the first in his family to attend college, enrolling at the University of Michigan in 1966. Determined to let his former teacher know her words had actually encouraged him, Braddock went back to see her after finishing graduate school in clinical psychology.

His former teacher thought he was back to ask for an employment reference. She told him about a possible janitorial opening.

Braddock set her straight.

"Every time I got one of those awards, I thought of you and how you said I wouldn't make it," Braddock recalls telling her. "I thought in the back of my mind: 'Take that!'"

What's got Braddock thinking back to this time in his life is a nationwide effort to record the untold stories of the civil rights movement from those who lived through it. On this day, he is being interviewed by Jeri Herron, 54, a graduate student in social work at Georgia State University.

The multimedia project, called "Voices of Civil Rights," is being run by the AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a national civil rights coalition founded in 1950, and will eventually be housed at the Library of Congress. About 25 students from Spelman College and five from Georgia State University are conducting interviews with area residents.

"For the most part, we have learned about the civil rights movement from leaders," said Gloria Gayles, a professor and endowed chairwoman at Spelman College who trained the students in oral history techniques. "As important as they are, there wouldn't have been a movement without the people. This project gives us the voice of ordinary people who were not leaders but who can talk about what the movement did."

As he tells his story, Braddock sits in a second-floor conference room at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History, twirling a pen in his right hand. Dressed in a white sport jacket and Hawaiian-style shirt, Braddock reclines in his chair as a tape recorder captures his memories. Urged to transfer

For Braddock, the unequal treatment of black students didn't end in sixth grade. At Michigan, he remembers meeting with a white guidance counselor who told him to transfer to Eastern Michigan University, a less-challenging school.

"He said, 'I don't know why this school let you in, but you are not going to be able to make it at Michigan,' " Braddock recalled.

Black students were purposely given more challenging course loads than others in an attempt to make them flunk out, Braddock said. Some of his black classmates took the advice and transferred. But Braddock carried on, more focused and again motivated by those who were trying to keep him down.

"I'd go to the Michigan football games with my homework and I'd be studying at halftime," he said.

After graduating from Michigan with a degree in psychology in 1970, Braddock earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Michigan State.

Two anniversaries

In addition to interviews, the $3 million project is also culling stories from individuals through a Web site, www.voicesofcivilrights.org, the mail and through a bus trip retracing the path of the famous "Freedom Riders." About 1,200 stories have been collected. The project will end in spring 2005 with a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington.

Rick Bowers, the project's director, said it was born out of a desire to do something that could draw on the collective experiences of AARP's 35 million members. With this year marking the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, civil rights seemed like the perfect topic for an oral history project, Bowers said.

The project's organizers drafted Spelman students after learning about a similar effort that recorded the memories of 70- to 95-year-old women involved in the civil rights movement. That project produced a book, ''Their Memories, Our Treasures: Conversations With African-American Women of Wisdom,'' published by Spelman through a grant and released this month.

At Georgia State, Herron and four other students are participating as part of a social work course called "community project" taught by Fred Brooks. The civil rights project is one of four that students in the class are working on, Brooks said.

Braddock came to Atlanta in 1979 after serving in the Army for four years. In the early 1980s, he gained exposure working for the Fulton County Health Department during the Atlanta child murders. He served as an expert witness during the trial of accused killer Wayne Williams and made appearances on "Nightline" and "Good Morning America."

Today, Braddock spends a lot of time talking with at-risk teenagers and trying to motivate them to. He often thinks back to that teacher.

He said she "buried a lot of us in sixth grade, but she didn't get me," he said.