James Meredith Was Controversial Because He Was Denied Admission Where?
Interview
Reverend Ralph Abernathy, born in Linden, AL, served as the pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL. He was one of the founding members of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He served the SCLC as treasurer-secretary during Dr. Martin Luther King's leadership and as president after Dr. King's death in 1968. Rev. Abernathy moved to Atlanta in 1961 and became the pastor of the Hunter Street Baptist Church, where he remained until his death. Rev. Abernathy also served as vice-president of the American Freedom Coalition. His autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, was published in 1989.
Rev. Ralph Abernathy accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King during all of the MIA and SCLC civil rights campaigns. He was a key leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped to lead the SCLC in Albany, GA, Birmingham, AL, Philadelphia, MS, Washington, DC, and Selma, AL, among other places. Abernathy was with Dr. King in Memphis the night that Dr. King was assassinated. He took over leadership of SCLC after Dr. King died and his first major action in that capacity was directing the Poor People's Campaign in 1968.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Interview
Victoria Gray Adams was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; a voracious reader, she eventually attended Wilberforce University in Ohio until she ran into financial difficulties. Gray Adams later studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and at Jackson State College in Jackson where she qualified to become a teacher. Adams taught public school in rural Mississippi in the 1940s before marrying and living in Germany for several years. Later in life, she served as a campus minister at Virginia State University for some 30 years and taught and lectured at schools, colleges and universities across the nation. While she and her first husband were stationed at Fort Meade, she began selling cosmetics with the black-owned Beauty Queen Co. Soon after, she returned to Hattiesburg, Mississippi as an independent businesswoman, where she would become involved in the Civil Rights movement.
As the Freedom Movement, as Gray Adams called it, came to Mississippi, she began attending citizenship school, an alternative schooling system set up by volunteers who were working in Mississippi. Soon, she was teaching literacy and voter registration classes to sharecroppers and domestic workers, some of whom had never written their names. In 1962, Mrs. Gray Adams became field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and she helped lead a boycott against Hattiesburg businesses. During the Democratic primaries in 1964 she decided to take on Senator John Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for sixteen years, becoming the first women to run for the U.S. Senate from Mississippi. After losing that election, Mrs. Gray Adams, amongst other prominent Civil Rights leaders, led the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) on a historic challenge of the all-white official Mississippi state delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Additionally, with a reputation as a fearless strategist, she became an associate of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a national board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Washington Post obituary
New York Times obituary
University of Southern Mississippi -- Historical Manuscripts Collection
Interview
William G. Anderson was born in Georgia on December 12, 1927. Obtaining an undergraduate degree from Alabama State College for Negroes in 1949, Anderson went on to the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa and received his certification in surgery. Anderson was the first African-American president for the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). Anderson was a clinical professor of osteopathic surgical specialties at Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine, an associate dean for the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, and a developer of osteopathic education curriculum for hospitals in the Detroit area.
In 1957, after completing his residency in Flint, Michigan, Anderson relocated to Albany, GA to start his practice. Anderson developed a thriving practice in Albany due to the great need for health care for African-Americans in a segregated society. Anderson joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and attempted to address this segregation with the white leaders of the town. In 1961, activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began demonstrating in Albany and Anderson and other black leaders formed an organization called the Albany Movement, a coalition whose goal was desegregation. Anderson asked Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., who he had met in Atlanta, to assist the Albany Movement. What was meant to be a short visit from Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) colleagues turned into a year-long campaign of protests and mass arrests with Anderson deeply involved in his role as president of the Albany Movement.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
New Georgia Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Interview
In August of 1957, James Armstrong was among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit which led to the eventual desegregation of Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. His sons Dwight and Floyd became the first black children to attend the school. Their first day at the school was September 9, 1963. Six days later, an all-black Church in Birmingham was bombed and four young girls were killed.
A barber and veteran of World War II, Armstrong was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement from the very beginning. Armstrong was a flag bearer in the Army, so he acted as flag bearer in local civil rights marches, including the pivotal 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. He took part in other demonstrations including an attempt to integrate the Greyhound Bus Station's waiting room and a demonstration to integrate the stores in downtown Birmingham, which led to his arrest in April of 1963. Armstrong worked closely with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and even helped him when his children were jailed in Gadsden, Alabama. In 2011, Armstrong was the subject of a documentary, The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement.
Additional information: NPR story on Barber of Birmingham documentary
PBS story on Barber of Birmingham documentary
Interview
Joseph Azbell began his newspaper career in the United States Air Force, where he founded the Air University Dispatch. In 1948, Azbell was hired by the Montgomery Advertiser and worked there through the early 1960s. His book, The Riotmakers, was published in 1968, and he wrote a weekly column for the Montgomery Independent from 1968 until his death in 1995. Azbell also worked on the presidential campaigns of George Wallace in 1968 and 1972 as Director of Communications.
During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Joseph Azbell was the city editor for the Montgomery Advertiser. When E.D. Nixon told him of the upcoming boycott, he put it on the front page of the newspaper. As a reporter, Azbell attended the first mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church and sat in on meetings between the Montgomery Improvement Association, the bus company, and the three city commissioners. He was also present after the bombings of Martin Luther King's and E.D. Nixon's homes. When Dr. King was on trial in Montgomery, Azbell testified to the fact that King advocated non-violence.
Additional information: Reporting Civil Rights - Library of America
Interview -- The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University
Associated Press obituary
Interview
Melvin "Mel" Bailey served on the Birmingham police force before becoming sheriff of Jefferson County, Alabama. His career as sheriff began in 1963 and ended with his resignation in 1996, after a period of illness. Although less famous than Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor, Bailey helped shape the police's relationship with the civil rights activists of the early 1960s.
As sheriff of Jefferson County, Bailey's jurisdiction included the city of Birmingham, and his position gave him authority over police officials in the city. During the 1963 marches and protests, Bailey tried to minimize conflict between black protestors and white Klansmen. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Bailey met with black ministers and leaders, and refused official sanction for Ku Klux Klan activities. He also tried to constrain the racism of the police force, and admitted that Connor and many Birmingham police officers had ties to the Klan and the White Citizens' Councils.
Bailey's tactics were not always effective. On May 10, 1963, news conferences announced a compromise between black leaders and white Birmingham businessmen. Connor and other former city councilmen were enraged, and Klan leaders called for retribution. On the night of May 11, bombs exploded at the house of King's brother and at the A.G. Gaston motel, where King and other Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leaders had been staying. Over Bailey's objections, Connor's policemen came to restrain the black demonstrators who arrived at the scenes of the bombings, and state troopers sent by Governor George Wallace began beating black demonstrators with clubs and handguns. King, other black leaders and some white officials attempted to restore calm, but the night erupted into violence once again. Thirty-five blacks and five whites were injured, seven stores were burnt, and local authorities restored order only after President Kennedy sent federal troops to a nearby military base. In his later years, Bailey helped desegregate the police force, and remained popular with black and white voters until his retirement in 1996.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Bhamwiki
Gaillard, Frye. Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Interview
Marion Barry was born on March 6, 1936 in Itta Bena, Mississippi before moving at a young age to Memphis, Tennessee. After completing an undergraduate degree at LeMoyne College, Barry attended Fisk University in Nashville, where he met participants in the Nashville civil rights movement, such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member James Lawson as well as activists Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard Lafayette. Soon after, he became the first chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and moved to Washington, D.C. He left the organization in 1967 and remained a local activist. First elected to the Washington, D.C. school board in 1971, then to the City Council in 1975, Barry received the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Washington, D.C. in 1978 and was elected mayor later that year. Barry served three terms as mayor from 1979 to 1991, working against increasing unemployment, poverty, drug use, and violence in the city. On January 18, 1990, the FBI and D.C. police arrested Barry for cocaine possession and use, infamously capturing him on video in a local hotel. Despite his sentencing, Barry remained a popular figure in D.C.'s 8th Ward, and shortly after his release in 1992 Barry won a seat on the City Council. In 1994, Barry ran for a fourth term as Mayor, winning 56% to 42% against Republican Carol Schwartz. Barry later served on the City Council, again representing the 8th Ward.
Through a large group of activists from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, and other schools, Barry became involved with the Nashville sit-ins and SNCC. Encouraged by a sit-in in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, student activists began sitting in at various segregated businesses in downtown Nashville. After weeks of protests, many business owners relented and began the slow process of desegregating the town. Barry was elected the first chairman of SNCC at its convention at Shaw University in 1960. He served for one year. Moving to Washington, D.C. i n 1965, he helped provide food for impoverished blacks after the city's 1968 race riots, some of many across America during that year.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University index.html
New Yorker
HistoryMakers - African American oral history collection
Interview
Dr. Bash was a professor emeritus in the Curry School of Education and co-founder the Desegregation Center at the University of Virginia. During the Civil Rights era, Bash was the principal of the Farmville, Virginia high school located in Prince Edward County. The county had been included as a defendant in the Brown case, stemming from student-led protests against conditions at the all-black R.R. Moton High School. Following the order to desegregate by the second Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court, citizens of Farmville opted to open an all-white private school, while the county Board of Supervisors denied any funding for integrated public schools. Bash was against closing the public school and opening a separate privately-funded school and because of this position he lost his job as principal. The school board continued with their plan, and as a result public schools in Prince Edward County would remain closed for five years. Bash went on to teach at the Curry School of Education and helped create the Desegregation Center at the University of Virginia.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Obituary - Daily Progress, Charlottesville, VA
Interview
Melba Patillo Beals was born in 1941. Beals was one of the nine African-American students who desegregated Little Rock, Arkansas' Central High School in the fall of 1957. Beals and the other eight African-American students became known as the "Little Rock Nine" and, amidst an atmosphere of potential violence, were admitted to the high school under armed federal escort. In May 1955, the Little Rock School Board decided to integrate Central High School by September 1957, agreeing to comply with the 1954 United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education which ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. Of the 517 African-American students who were eligible to attend Central High School, 17 were admitted by the school board. Of the 17, Beals and eight others decided to matriculate. Beals recalled: "I wanted to go to Central High School because they had more privileges. They had more equipment. They had five floors of opportunities. I understood education before I understood anything else." There was a significant amount of white resistance to the integration of Central High School. White Citizens Councils protested the desegregation plan and Alabama Governor Orval Faubus authorized the state National Guard to prevent Beals and the other students from entering the school. On September 23, 1957 Governor Faubus removed the National Guard and a crowd of 1,000 people surrounded the school, creating the potential for violence. The next day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,200 federal troops to Little Rock to force the integration of Central High School. During the crisis, Beals was assaulted and threatened. "[People yelled] 'get her,' 'kill her,' 'hang her,' 'we got us a nigger'...Parents were hitting, parents were throwing things. You would get tripped. People would just walk up and hit you in the face." On one occasion, Beals had acid sprayed in her eyes by an angry white student. After President Eisenhower sent in troops to force integration, Beals remembered her emotions: "There was a feeling of pride and hope that yes, this is the United States, yes, there is a reason I salute the flag." Melba was an active writer during her trying days at Central High School, and has continued to use that skill. She has written articles for publications including People, Essence and the San Francisco Examineras well as several books, including Warriors Don't Cry and White is a State of Mind. In 1998 she received a Congressional Gold Medal, the legislative branch's highest honor.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Fayer, Steve. Hampton, Henry. Voices of Freedom. New York: Bantham Books (1990): 39-40, 45, 48.
Interview
Frances Belser was born on August 12, 1916. She lived in Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott of 1955 and 1956. She was a participant in the boycott.Belser died in September 1986.
Additional information: Frances Belser United States Social Security Death Index
Interview
Born in 1936 in Itta Bena, Mississippi, James Bevel spent two years in the United States Naval Reserve before attending the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee where he studied under James Lawson and joined the Nashville chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1959 and became very active in the civil rights movement. Bevel was married to Diane Nash for a short time during this period. Bevel worked on the Chicago open-house movement in 1966, the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1967, and the Memphis sanitation workers strike and Poor People's Campaign in 1968. Bevel left SCLC in 1969 to form the Making of a Man clinic in 1970. He later founded Students for Education and Economic Development (SEED). He ran for vice-president in 1992 on Lyndon Larouche's ticket. He also helped organize Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and wrote articles for the Nation of Islam newspaper. In 2006, Rev. Bevel was accused of incest by one of his daughters and was convicted and sentenced to jail for 15 years. He served seven months of his sentence and then died in 2008 of pancreatic cancer while awaiting an appeal on his case.
Bevel, along with John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash, helped to organize student sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. As chairman of the Nashville student movement, Bevel participated in the Freedom Rides and in 1962 set up the SCLC Mississippi Project for voting rights. In 1963, Bevel joined the fight against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama alongside Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth. Bevel led the effort to organize and bring young people into the movement drawing criticism from those who felt it was too dangerous to march children against Bull Connor's dogs and fire hoses. This tactic proved critical, however, in the success of the media battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. Bevel also helped brainstorm the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
HistoryMakers - African American oral history collection
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Interview
Unita Blackwell was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta. She completed the eighth grade and then began work as a sharecropper. In 1964, Blackwell was married, had a child, and taught Sunday school when Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members came to town. Blackwell became a prominent participant in Freedom Summer. Blackwell later received a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and served as a community development specialist for the National Council of Negro Women. In 1979, Blackwell became Mississippi's first black, female mayor when she was elected to serve in Mayersville, MS, her hometown. In 1992, she was named as a recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" awards, largely because of her work as mayor. Her autobiography, "Barefootin': Life Lessons from the Road to Freedom" was published in 2006.
Blackwell joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1964 Freedom Summer and began recruiting people to register to vote. She was a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation that went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ in 1964. This delegation attempted to become the official Mississippi delegates in place of the segregationist delegates from Mississippi's official Democratic Party.
Additional information: One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
MacArthur Fellows Biography
Interview
Harry and Eliza Briggs were instrumental in the destruction of segregation in American public schools. The couple, along with eighteen others, were the plaintiffs in the case Briggs v. Elliott, a class action lawsuit organized by Reverend Joseph DeLaine and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which argued that the segregated schools of Clarendon County, South Carolina were unconstitutional. The case was eventually joined with four other suits to form the case Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Brown case that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, effectively overruling the "separate but equal" legal principle set down by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. After they filed the complaint, Harry Briggs, a Navy veteran, lost his job as a gas station attendant and Eliza Briggs was fired as a domestic worker in a local motel. Mr. Briggs had to move to Florida to find work to support his wife and five children still living in South Carolina. Similarly, DeLaine's home and church were attacked. He eventually left South Carolina and was prohibited from returning.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia - Harry Briggs
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia - Eliza Briggs
Interview
Harry Briggs, Jr.'s parents, Harry and Eliza Briggs were instrumental in the destruction of segregation in American public schools. The couple, along with eighteen others, were the plaintiffs in the case Briggs v. Elliott, a class action lawsuit organized by Reverend Joseph DeLaine and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that argued that the segregated schools of Clarendon County, South Carolina were unconstitutional. The case was eventually joined with four other suits to form the case Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Brown case that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, effectively overruling the "separate but equal" legal principle set down by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. As a young man, Harry Briggs, Jr. attended one of the crowded, small, poorly funded and equipped black schools in Clarendon County. The children would often have to chop wood to heat the school in the winter and they had no transportation and had to walk as much as five or six miles to and from school. Once his parents signed the petition against school segregation and joined the lawsuit that would become Brown v. Board of Education, the entire family suffered retaliation from the local white community. Although the Brown v. Board of Education case was a success, both Briggs' parents lost their jobs and Briggs, Sr. had to leave the state to find work, and Harry Briggs, Jr. had difficulty finding and keeping work years after leaving school due to his recognizable name and connection with the lawsuit.
Interview
Linda Carol Brown was in third grade when her father Oliver Brown brought forth his landmark class-action suit in 1951. The suit is now famously known as the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Oliver Brown was suing partly because eight-year old Linda had to cross railroad tracks to take a bus twenty-one blocks to an all-black school instead of attending a white school that was five blocks from her home. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in this case declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Born in 1904, Herbert Brownell attended the University of Nebraska and Yale Law School. He passed the bar in 1927 and immediately began practicing law in New York City. He quickly became very involved in the Republican Party, and was elected to the New York State Legislature in 1933. He managed the successful gubernatorial campaign of Thomas E. Dewey in 1942, as well as Dewey's unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1944 and 1948. Between 1944 and 1946, he also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Brownell was able to convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to retire from the military and run for President in 1952. Once elected, Eisenhower appointed Brownell Attorney General. In this office Brownell played a major role in the nomination and appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where Warren would oversee and insure unanimity on the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. After the controversy surrounding the integration of Little Rock's Central High School in the fall of 1957, Brownell came under pressure from southerners in Congress angered by his consistent support of civil rights. He stepped down from his position on November 8, but in later years would again serve his country as U.S. Representative to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in addition to numerous other civic offices. He died of cancer in 1996.
Brownell was responsible for developing and presenting the Eisenhower administration's position on Brown v. Board of Education to the Court. President Eisenhower was not prepared to state officially that the federal government believed segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, but Brownell was permitted to state his own opinion as Attorney General. When the question was put to him, Brownell stated that he believed such segregation to be, in fact, unconstitutional. In 1956, Brownell authored a civil rights bill to be presented to Congress. This bill would (1) create a bipartisan Civil Rights Commission, (2) expand the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department into a Civil Rights Division, (3) allow the Attorney General to secure court injunctions in civil rights cases and move such cases from state to federal courts, and (4) grant the Justice Department greater power to enforce voting rights. "Part III" became the most controversial, and it was equated by Georgia Senator Richard Russell with "another Reconstruction at bayonet point of a peaceful and patriotic South." Part III was stricken from what became the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first federal civil rights legislation, to be passed, indeed, since Reconstruction.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
infoplease.com
Interview
Born in Mississippi in 1924, Campbell suffered a near-fatal case of childhood pneumonia. After recovering, Campbell decided to become a minister, and he was ordained at age seventeen before attending Louisiana College and serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Campbell went on to study at Wake Forest, Tulane and Yale, after which he briefly pastored a Baptist church in Taylor, Louisiana.
He was director of religious life at the University of Mississippi from 1954 to 1956 and then Executive Director of the National Council of Churches' Summer Project in Nashville, Tennessee. There, Campbell participated in a variety of civil rights conferences and direct actions. When nine black students planned to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, Campbell was among four adults who accompanied them on their first attempt, upon which they were turned away. In 1962, Campbell left the National Council of Churches to join the Committee for Southern Churchmen. Campbell preferred spreading a gospel of reconciliation to aggressive public activism. He and his wife Brenda lived on a farm in rural Tennessee where they raised three children, and he was the author of seventeen books including his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, a 1978 finalist for the National Book Award. Campbell died in 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Gordon Carey was born in 1932 in Michigan. His father, a Methodist minister, founded a CORE chapter in Michigan in 1943 and Carey joined CORE himself in 1954. During the sit-ins of 1955-56, he was particularly vital to the civil rights movement, supporting the Greensboro Four and others. As a leader within CORE, he encouraged questioning the law and judiciary. Carey was particularly fundamental to the Freedom Ride effort, having trained several hundred participants in nonviolence. Carey moved to Pasadena, California, where he served as chair of his local CORE chapter. In 1954, he was elected vice chairman of CORE, and in 1958, he was hired as a field secretary for the organization. He was promoted to field director in 1960, and in this capacity oversaw CORE programs, training, and field secretaries. Following the February 1, 1960 sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, Carey was sent to Greensboro, stopping in Durham to assist in planning demonstrations there. In 1961, he helped to organize the Freedom Rides, and he also participated in planning the Freedom Highways Project, the March on Washington, and 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. He left CORE in 1968 and joined Floyd McKissick's efforts to found a utopian community for African Americans in North Carolina, called Soul City.
Additional information: Brooks, Thomas. Walls Come Tumbling Down New York: Prentice Hall, 1974: 159-160.
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Brooks, Thomas. Walls Come Tumbling Down New York: Prentice Hall, 1974: 159-160.
Interview
Stokely Carmichael was born in Trinidad in 1941, and moved to the United States at age 8. In 1960, he started attending Howard University and participated in the Freedom Rides during which he was arrested and was a victim of police violence. Upon graduation, he joined SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was a vital leader in the Freedom Summer project. In 1966, he was named Chairman of SNCC. In the same year, Carmichael organized a march to for racial equality to continue the "Walk Against Fear" begun by James Meredith but halted when Meredith was shot and wounded. During this journey, Carmichael was arrested for the 27th time. Upon his release from prison, he made his famous Black Power speech which declared the importance of black unification and a rejection of American values.
In the following year, he published the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation which met opposition from other leading civil rights groups like the NAACP and SCLC. Carmichael was impatient with the ideas of nonviolence. As a member of SNCC, he had also argued against white membership. His colleagues had disagreed with him, but when he joined the Blank Panther Party, the interference by sympathetic whites was a non-issue. As a member of the Black Panther Party, he advocated for action, and militancy and rejected American values by defying the draft for the Vietnam War. The government revoked his passport in response. Carmichael died in 1998 of cancer.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Interview
Hodding Carter was born 1935 in New Orleans, Louisiana into a family rooted in journalism. His father, Hodding Carter Sr., was a Pulitzer Prize winner and chief editor and publisher of the Greenville, MS based newspaper, Delta Democrat-Times. In 1959, a few years after Carter graduated from Princeton and completed his service to the U.S. Marine Corps, he returned to Greenville to work for his family's journal. During his eighteen-year stint at the paper, Carter was involved in the highly successful presidential campaigns of Lyndon Baynes Johnson and Jimmy Carter. He has served as an anchor and correspondent for numerous political programs for ABC, BBC, CBS, and CNN. Carter was the president, CEO and Trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Carter and his family were attacked by the white segregationist community during the civil rights era. Their strong stance against Jim Crow Laws resulted in death threats and boycotts for their paper. Carter's family value s made a lasting impression on him. Carter employed his journalistic voice to combat the injustices of segregation and advocate civil rights. He later extended his fervor into politics, by helping organize a white and black delegation which traveled to the 1968 Democratic National Conventions and removed the all-white segregationist Mississippi delegation.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
UNC Public Policy – University of North Carolina
Interview
The Hon. Robert C. Carter was born in Careyville, Florida in February 1917, but spent his formative years in New Jersey. He received his LL.B from Howard University in 1940, and his LL.M from Columbia University in 1941. Spending the intervening years in the U.S. Air Force, Carter began working as legal counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1944. With a career that spanned over twenty years, Carter remains most famous for his litigation of Brown v. Board of Education and NAACP v. Alabama. In 1972, President Nixon appointed Carter as a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, a position that Carter still holds today. In addition, Carter remained active on the boards of numerous social service organizations, and continued to publicize the discrimination inherent in America's political and educational institutions.
Carter began his work with the NAACP as an assistant to Thurgood Marshall, often venturing into Southern courtrooms hostile to the presence of black attorneys. In the 1950s, the NAACP's tactics for fighting segregation and discrimination changed, and Carter emerged as one of the leaders behind the new strategy. For the first time, NAACP lawyers confronted the legality of the separate-but-equal doctrine itself, claiming that it was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, they continued to argue that the creation of separate facilities created inequality; only integration could remedy the situation. Carter used this reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the first of the five cases known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Charles Clark was born in Memphis, TN. He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve in World War II and the Korean War. Between the wars and after the Korean War, Clark practiced law in Jackson, MS. In 1969, President Nixon appointed him a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit as part of his "southern strategy" of aligning with opponents of civil rights. Clark became the Chief Judge of this court in 1981 and retired in 1992.
Charles Clark represented the Board of Trustees of the University of Mississippi in the lawsuit over James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi. Clark argued that there was no policy of racial discrimination at the university and that James Meredith had been denied admission because he was not qualified.
Additional information: Charles Clark Inn of Court
Interview
Jim Clark was first elected to the office of Sheriff in Selma, Alabama in 1958. He was at the center of the violent clashes that occurred in Selma in 1965. After his violent response to blacks attempting to register to vote was broadcast around the nation, Clark lost his re-election bid in 1966. After that he worked selling mobile homes in and around Selma, and eventually spent time in prison for selling marijuana. Clark died in June 2007.
In 1965, Jim Clark was the ardently segregationist Sheriff of Selma, Alabama in Dallas County. During that year's SCLC/SNCC protests against voter discrimination in Selma, Mayor Joe Smitherman and Public Safety Commissioner Wilson Baker hoped to blunt the force of the campaign by showing some restraint in dealing with demonstrators. However, the protests centered on the voter registration offices at the county courthouse, which fell under Clark's jurisdiction. Known for his violent temper and his use of Ku Klux Klan members as irregular deputies, Clark lived up to his reputation, beating and manhandling activists like Amelia Boynton, Rev. F.D. Reese and Rev. C.T. Vivian in front of news cameras. During the Bloody Sunday attack on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Clark's mounted officers rode into the crowd, wielding bullwhips. Clark lost his re-election bid to Wilson Baker in the 1966 Democratic primary, largely due to gains in black voter registration under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Brooks, Thomas. Walls Come Tumbling Down. New York: Prentice Hall, 1974: 253-256.
Fleming, John. "In Exile, the King of Dallas County," The Anniston Star, 31 July 2005, Herbers, John.
The Lost Priority. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1970.
Interview
An African-American psychologist, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark was an early civil rights leader who used social science to combat racial segregation. Dr. Clark received national recognition after his research was used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Chief Justice Earl Warren in the Brown v. Board of Education case to argue that racial segregation in public schools was harmful to African-American children. Dr. Clark's research used white and black dolls to study how young African-American children perceived their race. Dr. Clark's work concluded that a majority of African-American children felt racially inferior. The data from the tests showed that a majority of the black children tested favored the white dolls. Dr. Clark and his wife saw the data as "indicative of the dehumanizing effects of racism." Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, accepted Dr. Clark's contention, writing in the Court's opinion that racial separation was "implying inferiority in civil society." For black children, Chief Justice Warren continued, this "feeling of inferiority...may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Warren directly cited Dr. Clark's work in his opinion. Clark was the author of numerous books, including: Dark Ghetto(1965); A Relevant War Against Poverty (1969); A Possible Reality (1972); and Pathos of Power (1974). Dr. Clark died in 2005.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Born in 1920 in Philadelphia, William T. Coleman served as the 4th U.S. Transportation Secretary, becoming the second African American to serve on the cabinet, and played a significant role in major civil rights court cases. Coleman graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Law School and became law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the first African American to serve in that capacity for the nation's highest court. Following his clerkship, Coleman was partner to prominent New York and Philadelphia law firms, developing an expertise in transportation law and becoming involved with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. After serving on the board of directors of multiple large corporations and Presidential commissions under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, Coleman left private practice to serve as Transportation Secretary under President Carter. Coleman returned to the private sector, served on numerous corporate boards of directors, and remained active in civil rights. In 1971 Coleman became President of the NAACP-LDF, and later served as its Chair and then Senior Director. In 1997, he received the Fund's Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award and in 1995 was the recipient of the President's Medal of Freedom in recognition of his many years of public service.
As a lawyer working with the NAACP, Coleman was involved with several cases which eventually led up to Brown v. Board of Education, and was coauthor of the brief in that case. He defended the rights of freedom riders and civil rights workers throughout the South, and served as co-counsel on McLaughlin v. Florida, establishing the constitutionality of interracial marriage. In 1959 President Eisenhower appointed Coleman to serve on the President's Commission on Employment Policy, which dealt with increasing minority hires in government.
Additional information: National Visionary Leadership Project
BlackPast.org
americanpresident.org
Interview
Courtland Cox was an active member of SNCC in the 1960s and participated in organizing in Mississippi. He and Joyce Ladner served as the SNCC representatives on the planning staff for the March on Washington in 1963. He helped make last-minute changes to John Lewis' speech for the March. Cox was also a part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the Atlantic City, NJ Democratic National Convention.
After Courtland Cox's involvement in SNCC, he worked in Washington, D.C. for the United States government and as a private consultant. In Washington, D.C., Cox served as Director of the Minority Business Opportunity Commission, Director of the Office of International Business, and Special Assistant to the Mayor for Economic Development. He also worked for the Department of Commerce as Director of the Minority Business Development Agency and the Director of the Office of Civil Rights. Cox later worked as the Director of Local, Small and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Development for the Washington, D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission.
Additional information: One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Interview
Carl Daniels was a Birmingham, Alabama native who became a well-known local radio and television journalist. He worked as a reporter for the African-American radio station WJLD before becoming the first black newscaster in Birmingham to work for a white-owned station, WSGN. He also worked for television station WVTM (Channel 13) and radio station WERC.
Additional information: Tuscaloosa News
Interview
John H. Daniels was a participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interviewed by Blackside about his experience.
Interview
Dave Dennis worked closely with Bob Moses in Mississippi civil rights activism. He later worked for the Algebra Project, an organization founded by Moses to improve minority children's mathematics education.
Dave Dennis was a Freedom Rider and Co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in Mississippi. Dennis was the Mississippi director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), but he worked with SNCC members and other civil rights activists in Mississippi under the COFO umbrella to avoid intra-organizational conflicts. COFO organized activists for a Mississippi voter registration drive during the Freedom Summer. Dennis spoke at the funeral of James Chaney, and he worked closely with both Bob Moses and Medgar Evers.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Interview
Annie Devine was born in Canton, Mississippi. She graduated from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Devine was an insurance executive who became increasingly interested in, and committed to, the struggle for civil rights. Her determination and desire to initiate resistance to the status quo marked her as a unique and fighting spirit. Devine also worked as a volunteer with the Head Start program in Mississippi.
Annie Devine co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) with Fannie Lou Hammer and Victoria Gray Adams. This party, unlike the Democratic Party in Mississippi, included blacks and invited their participation in the political process. The MFDP sought to gain seats as part of the Mississippi delegation for the 1964 National Democratic Convention. They hoped to replace Mississippi politicians who had gained access to the delegation through corrupt voting procedures. Devine, Hamer, and Adams were the first black women to sit on the floor of the House of Representatives when they made their accusations to the House about Mississippi's discriminatory voting practices. Though the party were not seated at the Convention, they did successfully pressure the national government. President Johnson responded to their claims and actions, as well as those of other civil rights leaders and participants by pushing for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Additional information: One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Charles Diggs, Jr. was born on December 2, 1922 in Detroit Michigan, the only son of Charles Diggs, Sr., a prominent African American business man and the first African American elected to the state senate. Charles Diggs Jr. served in a segregated unit in the Air Force, where he gained the commission of second lieutenant. He took up his career in public service after the Michigan senate refused to seat his father, who had been convicted on charges of bribery. Diggs entered the special election for his father's seat, won, and served for three years in the state senate before entering and winning the race for the U.S. House in 1954, becoming the first African American Representative from Michigan. Allegations of corruption forced his resignation in 1980. His political career was distinguished by a sustained commitment to civil rights, the promotion of home rule of the District of Columbia, the promotion of increased aid to Africa, and the exposure of abuses perpetuated by the Apartheid regime of South Africa.
Shortly after taking up his seat in the U.S. House, Diggs traveled to Mississippi to attend the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Till, where even as a Congressman, he was forced to seat in a segregated section with black reporters. Much of Diggs' congressional career was focused on the issue of civil rights. He urged President Eisenhower to convene a special session of Congress to address civil rights, and was an outspoken advocate for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In April 1955, he gave a well-received speech to a crowd of about 10,000 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi at the annual conference of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and used his position to expose race discrimination in federally funded programs throughout the south. He proposed withholding funding for schools which refused to abide by the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Additional information: Historian – U.S. House of Representatives
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Los Angeles Sentinel
New York Times
BlackPast.org
Interview
Dr. William Dinkins was one of two African-American doctors at Selma, Alabama's Good Samaritan Hospital. On February 18, 1965 in nearby Marion, Alabama, a large number of African-Americans held a nighttime demonstration outside of the city jail that ended with a confrontation with state troopers. One of these state troopers, later revealed to be James Bonard Fowler, shot 26 year old Jimmie Lee Jackson at the nearby Mack's Café. Jackson was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where Dr. Dinkins treated him.
Jackson died on February 26. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at Jackson's funeral, and Jackson's death gave impetus for the multiple marches in Selma that took place in early March 1965. The police-led violence at these marches (notably the "Bloody Sunday" march on March 7) led directly to President Lyndon Johnson's submission of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Congress. In 2004, James Bonard Fowler admitted to John Fleming, a reporter for the Anniston, Alabama Star, that he had shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, allegedly in self-defense. Two grand juries in the 1960s had chosen not to indict Fowler, identified then only by his last name. After an indictment in 2007, Fowler eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2010.
Additional information: New York Times
Tuscaloosa News
Interview
John Doar attended St. Paul's Academy in Minneapolis, MN and received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He earned a law degree at Boalt Hall in Berkeley, and he served in the Air Force during World War II. Doar served as Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division from 1960-1967. Doar later served as Special Counsel to the House of Representatives and went on to be the senior partner in a private law firm in New York.
John Doar spent most of this time in the Justice Department investigating civil rights abuses in the South and bringing suit against violations of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He began by filing suits over voter intimidation in Tennessee. In early 1961, he and fellow Department of Justice attorney Bob Owen began investigating voter discrimination in southwest Mississippi with Bob Moses' help. He also accompanied James Meredith as he enrolled in Ole' Miss in September of 1962, staying with Meredith in his dorm room for several weeks and accompanying him to his classes with federal marshals. In 1964, Doar was involved in the investigation of the murder of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman during Freedom Summer. He authorized the F.B.I. to investigate the case, and he was the lead attorney in the federal trial that led to the conviction of several people for violating the civil rights of the three civil rights workers. Doar also investigated and successfully prosecuted the murder of Viola Luizzo, who was killed while bringing marchers back to Selma from Montgomery. Doar had been present during the entirety of that march. One of Doar's most famous actions occurred after the death of Medgar Evers. Mourners wanted to march up the main street in Jackson, MS, but they were stopped by police. When marchers began throwing bottles and bricks and county police were brought in with shot-guns, Doar stepped between the two groups and convinced the marchers to disperse peacefully.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Washington Post
Interview
Ivanhoe Donaldson was a very active member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1968, Donaldson helped found Afro-American Resources, Inc. which ran the Drum and Spear Bookstore, Drum and Spear Press, and the Center for Black Education in Washington, DC. He was also a visiting lecturer for Afro-American courses at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. Donaldson advised and worked for Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry for many years, but in 1985 he pleaded guilty to embezzling funds from the Washington, DC government. Donaldson later worked as a vice-president for PWRT Services. He continued to support SNCC related activities and served on the advisory committee for an October 2005 conference called, "Tell the Story: The Chicago SNCC History Project, 1960 -1965."
Ivanhoe Donaldson worked for SNCC as an organizer and held leadership positions within the organization. In 1960-62, as a SNCC field secretary, Donaldson collected food in Michigan and Kentucky and brought it to Mississippi to help sharecroppers and tenant farmers who had been kicked off their land for attempting to register to vote. In 1963 he was active in demonstrations in Danville, VA. Donaldson was also active during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, though he felt ambivalent about the participation of northern white students. After the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began planning a march from Selma, AL to Montgomery, AL in 1965, Donaldson became one of the SNCC organizers in Selma.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Interview 1979 | Interview 1986
Virginia Foster Durr was born in Alabama in 1903. She is remembered for having overcome her own personal racism and striving to make others aware of their prejudices. Durr attended Wellesley College where she was hesitant to sit near, and eat with, African-American students. Being in a different environment from the segregated South changed Durr's perspective, and she began to see how the society she'd been raised in was constructed to keep groups of people separate. She eventually returned to Montgomery and married attorney Clifford Durr. The couple moved to Washington D.C. where in 1938, Durr was a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and worked with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to combat racism. In the 1940's the Durrs came under suspicion and were under FBI surveillance due to their political beliefs and because Clifford took on clients who were members of the Communist Party. They moved to Colorado briefly and then back to Montgomery, where they became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Durr continued to work for social justice throughout her life and wrote an autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr which was published in 1985. A book of her correspondence Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, was published in 2003. In her later years, she protested against nuclear weapons. She and Clifford raised four daughters and she died in February, 1999.
After moving back to Montgomery, Alabama, Clifford opened a law practice where Virginia worked as a secretary. Virginia became friends with Rosa Parks and arranged for Parks to study at Highlander School in Tennessee. The Highlander School was an organization where union members and civil rights leaders held meetings and conducted educational training. Shortly after that, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on Montgomery bus for a white man. The Durrs and E.D. Nixon bailed Parks out of jail. The Durrs supported the boycott which resulted from Parks' actions. She and her husband eventually became outcasts in the white Birmingham community because of their political beliefs and actions. Virginia later supported Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers by housing many volunteers who came to Montgomery to work on voter registration issues.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
TeacherLINK - Champions of Resistance
Interview
Dr. Robert Ellis was the Director of Registration at the University of Mississippi while James Meredith had applied for admission. Meredith, while not the first African American to apply for admission to the University, joined with the NAACP to sue the university for admission upon his denial. As the case proceeded within the courts, Governor Ross Barnett inserted himself in the process, even going so far as calling Dr. Ellis before he gave his testimony before the court, and vowing to shut down the University should Meredith win his appeal. Before Meredith had been officially registered at the University, riots broke out on the Oxford campus, leading to the activation of the National Guard to restore order. The next morning, Dr. Ellis registered James Meredith, now the first African-American to enter the University, in his office. Blackside interviewed Dr. Ellis on his recollections of the entire event.
Additional information: University of Mississippi - History of Integration
Waller Funeral Home Website
Interview
Joseph Ellwanger, a Lutheran minister, became pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958. While in Birmingham, Ellwanger led the interracial Birmingham Council on Human Relations and the Concerned White Citizens of Alabama. He was the pastor of Cross Lutheran Church for 34 years before his retirement in 2001. Currently, Ellwanger works for WISDOM, a faith-based affiliation of groups working for social causes in southeast Wisconsin.
The Reverend Joseph Ellwanger was one of the few white Southern ministers involved in civil rights work. Ellwanger worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to plan the Birmingham demonstrations. On the Sunday when the 16th Street Church in Birmingham was bombed, Ellwanger was giving a service in his church a mile down the road. Denise McNair, one of the children who died in the bombing, was the daughter of one of his parishioners and Ellwanger spoke at the funeral. Ellwanger was the president of The Birmingham Council on Human Relations, which provided behind-the-scenes support for civil rights work. On Saturday, March 6, 1965, Ellwanger organized a march in Selma, Alabama to support voting rights. He and 72 white Alabamans who wanted to openly support voting rights marched to the courthouse steps in Selma, where they were confronted by hostile whites singing "Dixie." They came and left without any violence that day, and Ellwanger himself returned to march in Selma on "Turnaround Tuesday."
Additional information: Bhamwiki
Strength for the Struggle - Book website
Interview
Harold Engstrom grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas and attended public schools there. In 1939, he received a degree in civil engineering from the University of Arkansas. He worked at Arkansas Foundry Company (AFCO) and in 1965 was named vice president of the company. In 1971 he was inducted into the College of Engineering Hall of Fame. He remained the vice president at AFCO until he left the company in 1978. He died on February 11, 2002.
Harold Engstrom was not only a talented engineer; he was also an important leader in the Little Rock area at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. Besides serving as chairman of the Little Rock City Building Code Appeals board and as the national director of the Society of Professional Engineers in Arkansas, Mr. Engstrom was also the president of the Little Rock School Board in 1957 when Central High School was being desegregated. National and local leaders battled on the issue of desegregation at Central High, but in the end, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in 1,200 federal troops to force integration upon the people at Central High and upon the Governor Orval Faubus. Engstrom was there on the School Board when all of this happened, and when it was over he thanked President Eisenhower for his help.
Additional information: TheFreeLibrary.com
Interview
Don Evans was fifteen when Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led the Birmingham demonstrations in 1963. As a resident of Birmingham, Evans experienced the brutality of the city's response and was attacked by dogs and firehoses when demonstrating.
Interview
Darrell Evers was born in Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1953. Nine years later, his father was murdered outside their house in Jackson, Mississippi. Byron De La Beckwith was arrested for the murder in 1964, but the case ended in a mistrial, with an all-white jury. After new evidence came to light in the 1990s, De La Beckwith was tried and convicted for the murder. Evers studied painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. He and his wife Lauren founded Intellikey Labs. He died of colon cancer in February 2001 at age 47.
In 1962, Evers was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenged segregation the Mississippi school system. Evers also played himself in the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi that documented the tragedy of his father's death and more generally, racism in the South. Evers continued his father's work by becoming the Chairman Emeritus of the NAACP National Board of Directors.
Additional information: Washington Post
Excerpt from The New Crisis article
Interview
Myrlie Beasley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on March 17, 1933. She attended Alcorn A&M College, hoping to become a school teacher and follow in the footsteps of both the grandmother and aunt who had raised her. Her plans changed, however, when she met upperclassman Medgar Evers. The two were married a year later and Myrlie left school. Medgar had been passionately dedicated to and involved in the struggle for civil rights for some time and helped inspire a similar passion in his wife. Medgar Evers was assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith in 1963. Following that tragic event, Myrlie moved her family to Claremont, California, where she studied sociology at Pomona College and earned her degree in 1968. Evers stayed on in academia and became assistant director of planning and development for the Claremont College system. In 1975, Myrlie married her second husband, Walter Williams. She then moved to Los Angeles and worked as consumer affairs director for the Atlantic Richfield Company. In 1988, she was the first black woman to be appointed to the five-member Los Angeles Board of Public Works, which oversaw a budget of nearly $1 billion as well as five thousand employees. From 1995 to 1998, Myrlie Evers-Williams served as the first woman chairperson of the NAACP. She published her memoirs, entitled Watch me Fly: What I learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I was Meant to Be, in 1999.
When Medgar became the Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP, Myrlie worked as his secretary and together they organized boycotts, demonstrations, and voter registration drives, making them prime targets for reactionary segregationist violence. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech to the nation in which he announced his intention to submit new civil rights legislation for passage by Congress. This elevated the tension in the South to a breaking point. At 12:30 that night, Medgar returned home and was approaching his front porch when he was shot through the back by a military rifle that would later be found 150 feet from the scene. Medgar died fifty minutes later, after being taken to a hospital that initially refused to admit a black patient. The rifle belonged to Byron De La Beckwith, whose fingerprints were found on the weapon's scope. Beckwith was a dedicated segregationist and member of the White Citizens' Council. Although he publicly denied responsibility for the murder, bringing forth three policemen to testify that he had been playing cards with them at the time the crime was committed and claiming that the rifle had been stolen from him some time before, he felt no shame in saying he was glad Evers was dead. Beckwith's trial led to two hung juries and he was allowed to go free. However, since he was not officially exonerated of the crime, double jeopardy did not apply and Myrlie lived for decades with the hope that the case would be reopened and Beckwith convicted. Finally, in 1989, her long-standing hopes came to fruition when she found several witnesses willing to testify that Byron De La Beckwith had in fact been in Jackson the night of Medgar's murder, contradicting the testimony of police officers whose card game had allegedly taken place sixty miles away in Greenwood. This, among other new evidence, prompted Mississippi prosecutors to reopen the case. In 1994, Beckwith was finally convicted of Medgar's murder. He died serving a life sentence in 2001.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Mississippi Writers Page at the University of Mississippi
Biography.com
Interview
An early civil rights leader, James Farmer helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. Farmer was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and practiced his teachings of non-violent protest. A supporter of racial integration in civil rights organizations, Farmer recruited both whites and blacks as CORE volunteers. Farmer and other CORE leaders organized the 1961 Freedom Rides.
As the Director of CORE, Farmer and other CORE members organized the 1961 Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides called for an interracial group of protestors to take two interstate buses throughout the South. The Rides were conducted to test the federal government's willingness to enforce the United States Supreme Court's 1960 ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that racial segregation in public interstate travel facilities was unconstitutional. In Alabama, one of the buses was firebombed and many activists were beaten – acts that were nationally televised. Nashville activists went to Alabama in an effort to continue the Freedom Rides. These Riders rode from Birmingham, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. After Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked civil rights leaders to postpone the Rides so everybody could "cool off," Farmer declined, responding: "We have been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off any more, we'd be in a deep freeze." The new Riders were also met with violence and most were arrested. Though the Riders were prevented from reaching New Orleans by bus, a committee was formed to coordinate more rides. In late May 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission officially banned segregation in all facilities under its control. During the Rides, Farmer spent 40 days in Mississippi jails. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, three CORE members named James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner who worked with Farmer were killed by Ku Klux Klan members. Farmer left CORE in 1966 and, in 1998, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Reporting Civil Rights - Library of America
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Orval Eugene Faubus was born in the rural hills of Madison County, Arkansas, in 1910. His father, Sam Faubus, was a left-wing activist, having organized a local chapter of the Socialist Party of America and chosen Orval's middle name in honor of Eugene V. Debs, one of Sam's personal heroes. In 1918, Sam was arrested for "distributing seditious material" in opposition to American involvement in World War I. Orval shared his father's passion for politics, though his views were more moderate. In 1936, he ran as a Democrat for the Arkansas General Assembly. While he lost this particular race, he was not discouraged and soon managed to secure two terms as circuit clerk and recorder. During World War II, Faubus served in Europe as an intelligence officer under General George S. Patton. Upon returning home to Arkansas, Faubus resumed his involvement in the Democratic Party, serving as chairman of the state's highway commission under progressive governor Sid McMath. When he ran for Governor in 1954, it was at the tail end of the McCarthy era, and his opponents pointed to his leftist upbringing in an attempt to label him a "dangerous radical." Although Faubus' promises to increase spending on schools and roads proved a more effective campaign tactic, the attacks apparently struck a personal nerve. In the early years of his administration, Faubus integrated public transportation and investigated the possibility of integrated schools. When these moves prompted further bitter attacks from the right, Faubus apparently felt compelled to demonstrate a swing in the opposite direction as soon as the opportune moment presented itself. This moment came when Little Rock's school board made plans to begin the process of gradual integration, which Faubus bitterly opposed. While Faubus realized that integration was inevitable and that the federal order would have to be enforced, his opposition to the integration of Little Rock Central High School won him record support in many parts of the state, enabling him to serve an unprecedented six terms as Arkansas' governor. However, after the poll tax was eliminated in 1964, and especially following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the increasing influence of African-American voters brought more progressive voices to prominence. Faubus declined to run for a seventh term in 1966, but he ran ill-fated reelection campaigns in 1970, 1974, and 1980. In 1988, he endorsed Rev. Jesse Jackson for president. In the late 1970s and early '80s, Faubus had severe financial problems, and was forced to sell his home and work as a bank teller. Orval Faubus died of cancer in 1994.
Governor Orval Faubus opposed the integration of Little Rock Central High School. After unsuccessful litigation, Faubus deployed National Guard troops to keep out the nine black students who had been selected to attend Central High School. While he claimed that his actions were prompted by reliable intelligence leading him to believe that violence would erupt if the black students were allowed into Central High School, he initiated a dramatic, high-profile confrontation between the state and federal governments. At the height of the tension, Faubus' picture could be seen on the cover of Time magazine. President Eisenhower tried for eighteen days to persuade Faubus to allow the integration of Central High. When negotiations failed, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, ordered them back to their barracks, and brought in the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the safe matriculation of the nine black students. Faubus publicly referred to these troops as an occupying power in order to stir up resentment against Eisenhower and support for himself. In a 1958 poll, Faubus was voted one of the ten most admired men in the world.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture
Interview
Mrs. Folgate was an otherwise unidentified participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interviewed briefly by Blackside on the streets of Birmingham about her experience.
Interview
James Forman was raised in Chicago and Mississippi by his grandmother, mother and stepfather. He graduated from Englewood High School in 1947 and served in the U. S. Air Force during the Korean War. Forman attended the University of Southern California, but left after being accosted by police. He graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1956. Forman became involved in the Civil Rights Movement when he covered the Little Rock school desegregation crisis for the Chicago Defender and participated in a Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) project in Tennessee. He was the Executive Secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1961 to 1966. After he left SNCC in 1966, he espoused Black Nationalist causes. He earned an M.A. from Cornell University in 1980 and then a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities. Forman is the author of several books, including The Making of Black Revolutionaries. He died on January 10, 2005.
James Forman worked for CORE in Fayette County, Tennessee helping sharecroppers who had been evicted for attempting to register to vote. He joined SNCC in 1961 and was soon jailed for his participation in the Freedom Rides. He became the Executive Secretary of SNCC soon after and his leadership abilities earned him the respect of fellow SNCC members. Highlights of his tenure as Executive Secretary of SNCC include the Selma voting rights campaign, demonstrations in Montgomery, and training SNCC volunteers during Freedom Summer. He also participated in the planning of the March on Washington and helped John Lewis, the chairperson of SNCC at the time, write and rewrite his speech for this event.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
BlackPast.org
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Interview
A.G. Gaston, a black millionaire, represented the conservative interests of Birmingham's black community during the protests and demonstrations of 1963. Born in 1892 in a rural Alabama town to impoverished parents, Gaston became one of the richest black men in the United States. His enterprises ranged from banking and insurance to real estate and business colleges. By the end of his life, beneficiaries of his charitable activities included the YMCA, the A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club, the Tuskegee University and other educational institutions.
A member of the Chamber of Commerce with political connections of his own, Gaston initially resented Martin Luther King's intrusion into local affairs during the 1963 Birmingham protests. Earlier that year, the city had adopted a different form of municipal government, and the notorious Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor lost his election bid. Consequently, Gaston and other businessmen wanted to give the new mayor an opportunity to address black grievances. Despite his unhappiness with elements of King's involvement, Gaston continued to provide financial support to Birmingham's black leaders. His ambivalence would change, however, after the violence of May 1963. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had designated May 2 as "D-Day," organizing hundreds of black schoolchildren who marched from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to protest segregation in downtown Birmingham. Retaining his power as Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Connor arrested over six hundred children, but another thousand marched on May 3. The SCLC recruited youth marchers because their arrests would not destroy family incomes, but on May 3, the march erupted into violence. Connor ordered police dogs to attack the children, and fire hoses blasted marchers with enough pressure to strip the bark from trees. After this violent attack on children Gaston and other undecided members of the black community fully backed the SCLC's demand for racial justice and equality in Birmingham. Gaston remained active in the black community long after the successful conclusion of the protests, as his numerous charitable commitments demonstrated. He died in 1996 at the age of 103.
Additional information: One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Jenkins, Carol and Elizabeth Gardner Hines. Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black Millionaire. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Viking, 1987.
Interview 1979 | Interview 1986
Georgia Gilmore lived in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Gilmore walked to and from work each day and raised money to support the boycott. She formed the "club from nowhere," which collected money for the boycott from people who supported it but did not attend the mass meetings of the Montgomery Improvement Association. As the sole officer, Gilmore was responsible for collecting all of the money raised by the club members. She said that she would usually take in about $125-200 each week, which she would deposit in the collection plate at the mass meetings. Gilmore was also known for baking food to sell to raise money for the boycott.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Born in Lexington, Massachusetts to a family with a long affiliation with the Unitarian church, Greeley became a Unitarian minister himself, and president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He attended the Harvard Divinity School and served as minister to the Arlington Street Church of Boston from 1937 to 1958, where Martin Luther King would occasionally attend while a student at Boston University School of Theology. After 1969, Greeley became a visiting professor at the Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago and President of the International Association for Religious Freedom. In 1970 Greeley returned to local church work at the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, and would continue his participation in national and international peace and humanitarian summits.
After the death of Jim Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, Greeley accepted the call made by King for men of faith to come down to Selma Alabama, and assist in the campaign for civil rights there. While in Selma alongside Martin Luther King, the Reverend Greeley gave sermons and helped to organize marches. He would continue to work with Dr. King throughout the movement.
Additional information: Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography
Interview
Ernest Green was born in 1941 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. He was the first black student to graduate from Central High. Green went on to attend Michigan State University, earning a B.A. in 1962 and an M.A. in 1964. After graduating, he was an apprentice at the Adolph Institute helping minority women in the South obtain professional careers and training. He served as the Director of the A. Philip Randolph Education Fund from 1968 to 1976. During Jimmy Carter's administration he was the Assistant Secretary of Labor (1977-1981). After this he joined the private sector and began working for Lehman Brothers in 1985. He is married to Phyllis Green and is the father of three. Green has received several awards including the NAACP Spingarn Medal and the Rockefeller Public Service Award. He has served on several boards, including the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and the African Development Foundation. Green and the other members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 by President Bill Clinton.
In September of 1957, Green with eight others arrived at Central High School. The school system in Little Rock remained segregated despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Nine black students had enrolled despite the protestations of local citizens groups who wanted the school to remain segregated. On September 4, Governor Orval Faubus summoned National Guard soldiers to prevent the black students from entering the school, in defiance of federal law. Green and the other students were met with a mob on the first day of school and were not able to enter. A standoff occurred between the state and the federal government. A court order was issued ordering the National Guard to stand down. Faubus complied but replaced the Guard with the local police force. Hundreds of protestors and police were outside the school on September 23 when the black students were escorted into the school via a side door. Once the protestors in the crowd realized the students were inside a riot threatened to break out and the students were escorted from the school. After these clashes, President Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students to and from school. The Little Rock Nine were able to attend Central High, but were subjected to verbal and physical harassment from many of the students. Green and the other black students remained under federal protection for the remainder of the school year.
Additional information: HistoryMakers - African American oral history collection
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Lawrence Guyot was born in 1939 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. As a student at Tougaloo University he encountered his first serious incidents of racism. Guyot earned a law degree from Rutgers University and entered public service with the District of Columbia's Department of Health and Human Services. Guyot has often conducted leadership training conferences at organizations and institutions including AmeriCorps, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and Georgetown University.
Guyot joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1962 and was an active member, particularly in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He helped organize and develop voter registration drives throughout Mississippi. He was arrested twice during his time with SNCC, both times after he asked local police to intervene on behalf of African-Americans who were being discriminated against. He was a chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and a delegate to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He could not attend, however, because he had been arrested during a protest in Hattiesburg. Throughout his life, Guyot remained a strong advocate of the protest techniques employed by SNCC.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Interview
Patricia Harris was only nine or ten years old when she took part in the Birmingham youth marches in May, 1963. Harris' mother had been active in the movement for some time, and Harris, having noticed discrimination around her, decided to take part. While not physically assaulted during the demonstrations, young Harris was subjected to much verbal abuse. Despite this, she would continue to live in Birmingham, becoming a nurse. She recounted her memory of these events for Blackside.
Interview
Wendell Harris worked for Birmingham, Alabama's WAPI radio and television stations during the 1950s and 60s. Harris attended the University of Alabama, and began working for WAPI-AM in 1954, then WAPI-TV in 1960. After working for WAPI, he moved to Texas, first as the general manager of Austin's KTBC-TV then as the vice president of Dallas's KDFW-TV. Harris died on June 5, 2012 at age 78.
Additional information: Alabama Media Group
Alabama Weather Blog
Interview
Casey Hayden, born Sandra Cason, was a leading activist for Civil Rights during the 1960s. Born in a segregated part of Eastern Texas, Hayden attended the University of Texas at Austin and graduated in 1960. Hayden was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). She went on to work as a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Hayden, who married Tom Hayden in the 1960s, was a major SNCC contributor, first in Atlanta and then Mississippi. Casey Hayden worked in Mississippi as a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during Freedom Summer in 1963. She worked closely with Bob Moses and Jim Forman in coordinating the influx of volunteers into Mississippi to help get African Americans registered to vote. Hayden was in Jackson when three volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared. Hayden is also remembered for her popular memo, "Sex and Caste," which she co-wrote with Mary King in 1965. The memo was distributed within SDS and SNCC and challenged activists to be aware of gender inequality in the Movement and the country. She is also a co-author of Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Joan C. Browning, another author of this book, commented that, "Casey was articulate, poised…I saw in her depth of commitment and generous affection, the embodiment of the beloved community."
Additional information: Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement (1965) Norton publishing
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Born in Detroit in 1939, Tom Hayden attended the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the school's student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. Hayden was active in the civil rights movement from the 1950s to the 1970s. He turned to politics in the 1970s, running an unsuccessful challenge campaign against Democratic U.S. Senator John V. Tunney in 1976. Hayden was successfully elected to the California State Assembly in 1982, where he remained a member until he was elected to the State Senate in 1992. He retired from official politics in 1999, but remained a vocal spokesman for the American left, writing books and serving as co-director for the No More Sweatshops! Coalition.
In 1959, Hayden helped to found the left-wing activist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as draft the group's manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement. SDS's first protest was in support of the 1960 Greensboro sit-in. Hayden himself took part in the Freedom Rides. In 1961, he married Casey Hayden, a civil rights activist from Texas who was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1964, Hayden moved to Newark, New Jersey, where he worked with local residents on the Newark Community Union Project. The race riots he witnessed during his stay in Newark formed the focus of Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. In 1968, Hayden took part in the massive protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Following the violence that ensued, Hayden was among the "Chicago 8" who were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot. In 1971, Hayden permanently relocated to Los Angeles, California. A prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, Hayden made several visits to North Vietnam, including an especially controversial visit in 1972 with Jane Fonda, whom he would later marry.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
tomhayden.com
Reporting Civil Rights - Library of America
Interview
James L. Hicks was born in Akron, Ohio on May 9, 1915. He attended the University of Akron and Howard University. In 1935 he got his first job in journalism as a reporter in Cleveland for a publication called Call and Post. In the U.S. Army he earned three battle stars and was promoted to captain. Hicks became the Washington Bureau Chief for the National Negro Press Association. From 1955 to 1966 and then again from 1972-1977 he was the editor of the Amsterdam News. In between, Hicks was a public relations officer for the National Urban League. In 1977, Hicks was named editor of the New York Voice. He died in Manhattan on January 19, 1986.
While working at the Amsterdam News, Hicks covered the Emmett Till case. He also reported on the desegregation efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas and Oxford, Mississippi. While working on all of these stories, Hicks constantly faced threats of violence. Wherever he went, he and other black reporters were confronted by angry white mobs, and at times they were physically harmed. While covering the Emmett Till case, Hicks found an overwhelming amount of evidence that should have convicted the men that were on trial, but it was never brought forward in the trial. Through his writing however, Hicks was able to expose this evidence as well as the corruption of the law and judicial system in Sumner, Mississippi.
Additional information: New York Times obituary
Interview
James Hoffman was an otherwise unidentified participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interviewed briefly by Blackside on the streets of Birmingham about his experience.
Interview
Journalist and novelist William Bradford Huie was born in Hartselle, Alabama on November 13, 1910. He was valedictorian of his senior class and went on to become a journalist in Birmingham, Alabama. He served in the Navy during World War II, and these experiences became the basis for one of his fictional works, The Americanization of Emily. Huie is primarily known for his non-fiction and journalism work. His book, The Outsider, about one of the flag-raisers at Iwo Jima, Ira Hayes, was made into a film starring Tony Curtis. His writing also extended to working for periodicals including conservative journal The American Mercury. He was very active as a journalist during the Civil Rights Movement and continued to work up till his death on November 20, 1986. Huie began documenting the civil rights movement, beginning with the shocking murder of Emmett Till. After the trial was over and the defendants had been acquitted, Huie interviewed the defendants Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and they confessed to the crime, since they could not be tried again. The subsequent article was printed in Look Magazine. Huie was criticized for paying Bryant and Milam for their interviews at the time, but the interview is considered an important source of information on the case which was later reopened. Huie continued his work documenting the civil rights movement by covering the killings of the Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. He went on to write He Slew the Dreamer, an investigation of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Huie then collaborated with Zora Neale Hurston on Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail, which dealt with the murder trial of McCollum, a black woman who was on trial for murdering her white lover. This controversial book was banned in Florida and Huie was jailed for contempt. He also was a target of the Ku Klux Klan who burned a cross on his lawn in 1967.
Additional information: Reporting Civil Rights - Library of America
Interview
Rutha Mae Jackson, married to Willie Hill Jackson, lived near Greenwood, Mississippi during the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Though she was not involved with the Till case, her family left town shortly afterwards.
Willie Hill Jackson, married to Rutha Mae Jackson, lived near Greenwood, Mississippi during the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. He was not involved with the case, but he recalls seeing Roy Bryant, one of the acquitted murders, around town.
Interview
Erle Johnston, born on October 10, 1917, grew up in Granada, Mississippi. After graduating from high school, Johnston became involved with a number of local newspapers, eventually working for the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. Later, Johnston served as publicity director for Ross Barnett's failed campaign for Governor of Mississippi in 1955 and his successful attempt in 1959. In 1960, Barnett appointed Johnston as the Director of Public Relations for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The Sovereignty Commission, established in 1956 under Governor James Coleman, used a variety of strategies to prevent integration and resist federal civil rights legislation and court rulings. The Commission also gave grants to the Citizens' Council. Johnston, who attempted to counter his agency's negative image, became the Commission's executive director in 1963 and held the position until 1968. Johnston was working for the Commission and when the Supreme Court ruled the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) must admit African-American James Meredith. Although Governor Barnett attempted to prevent Meredith from enrolling, the Kennedy administration pressured Barnett to accept the court's ruling. Despite the presence of the National Guard and U.S. Marshals, rioting broke out on the Oxford, Mississippi campus, resulting in the death of two. Later, Johnston served as the mayor of Forest, Mississippi from 1981 to 1985. He published three books: I Rolled with Ross: A Political Portrait(1980), Mississippi's Defiant Years: 1953-1973 (1990), and Politics: Mississippi Style (1993). Johnston was co-chairman of Tougaloo College's Committee on the Preservation of Civil Rights Activities. He died on September 27, 1995.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
University of Southern Mississippi -- Historical Manuscripts Collection
University of Southern Mississippi -- Historical Manuscripts Collection
Journal of American History - Oxford Journals
Interview
Curtis Jones was one of Emmett Till's cousins. Jones was visiting his grandfather Mose Wright in Money, Mississippi along with Till and cousin Wheeler Parker in August 1955. On August 24, Till and Jones snuck out of church to go to Greenwood, Mississippi. There, according to Jones, the 14 year old Till entered a grocery store owned by Roy Bryant, bought candy, and said, "Bye, baby" to Carolyn Bryant, Roy's wife. (The exact details of the exchange between Till and Bryant are disputed.) In the early hours of August 28, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam kidnapped and murdered Till, mutilating his body and throwing him in the Tallahatchie River weighted by a cotton gin fan. After waking up that morning, Jones asked Wright if the men had returned Till. Jones soon called the sheriff and his family in Chicago. The trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in Sumner, Mississippi remains one of the most infamous moments of the early civil rights movement. After deliberating for only 67 minutes, the all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant of murder. Unable to face charges again because of Mississippi's double jeopardy rules, Milam and Bryant later confessed the crime to William Bradford Huie in a Look Magazine article controversial because of Huie's decision to pay the interviewees and a later FBI investigation that noted some inconsistencies in their account. The Emmett Till case was widely publicized by the black media and helped spark the growth of the civil rights movement in the late 50s.
Additional information: Publishers website for book: Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement
Interview
Donie Jones lived in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. She was a participant in the boycott, and she attended some of the meetings held at Montgomery churches.
Interview
Nicholas Katzenbach was born on January 17, 1922. Native of Philadelphia, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, went on to Princeton University and then to Yale Law School. In 1950 he began working as an attorney for Gildea and Rudner and acted as the attorney-advisor for the U.S. Air Force. Katzenbach was Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1961 to 1962 and Deputy Attorney General from 1962 to 1965. On February 11, 1965 Lyndon Johnson selected Katzenbach as Attorney General of the United States and he remained in office until 1966. That same year, he became Secretary of State, a position he held until 1969.
While serving as Attorney General, Katzenbach was involved in drafting the Voting Rights Act. Katzenbach decided to step down from his position as Attorney General due to the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's controversial unauthorized wiretaps of key civil rights figures including Martin Luther King. Katzenbach justified his decision to resign by asserting he "could no longer effectively serve as attorney general because of Mr. Hoover's obvious resentment of me."
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Joseph William Kellum was born in 1911. At age of 28, in 1939, Kellum passed Mississippi's bar exam, despite not having gone to college. He was one of five defense attorneys for J.W. Milam and Ron Bryant in the Emmett Till trial of September 1955. Emmett Till, a 14 year old from Chicago, had been kidnapped, murdered, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River a few days after flirting (though the exact events are disputed) with Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant's wife, in Bryant's grocery near Till's great uncle's house in Money, Mississippi. During the trial, Kellum famously told the jury that they were "absolutely the custodians of American civilization" and implored them to acquit Milam and Bryant. After deliberating for only 67 minutes, the all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant. Unable to face charges again because of Mississippi's double jeopardy rules, Milam and Bryant later confessed the murder to William Bradford Huie in a Look Magazine article controversial because of Huie's decision to pay the interviewees and a later FBI investigation that noted some inconsistencies in their account. The Emmett Till case was widely publicized by the black media and helped spark the growth of the civil rights movement in the late 50s. Kellum continued practicing law for many decades across the street from the Sumner courthouse where he defended Milam and Bryant. Kellum died in 1996.
Additional information: New York Times Magazine
Publishers website for book: Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement
Interview
Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927 in Heiberger, Alabama. Having attended segregated schools, Scott graduated from Lincoln High School and enrolled to study music at Antioch College as one of the first black students. There, she became politically active and was a member of the local NAACP. Scott went on to study at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she met her future husband Martin Luther King, Jr., who was studying theology at Boston University. They married on June 18, 1953, moving to Montgomery, Alabama as soon as Scott King graduated. There, King began work as a minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Scott King not only raised their four children but became an active and essential part of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, often independent of her husband. Scott King assisted the Montgomery Improvement Association, of which King was president, and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Scott King fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Continuing her musicianship, Scott King performed in the Freedom Concerts which benefitted the SCLC. Scott King attended the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1962 as a representative of the Women's Strike for Peace. After her husband's assassination on April 4, 1968, Scott King founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and became an even more outspoken critic of injustice. Scott King was a participant in Poor People's Campaign, her husband's final major program of action. She published My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1969. Scott King allied herself with women's rights, world peace, anti-apartheid, and, later, LGBT activists. She also dedicated herself to preserving her husband's memory, leading many memorial marches and gatherings and advocating for the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change has been expanded to become Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Site. Scott King died on January 30, 2006.
During the 1960s civil rights movement, Scott King handled many of the administrative tasks of her husband's organizations, and often accompanied him during his visits around the world. Scott King assisted her husband when he was unexpectedly selected as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which helped orchestrate the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-6. She also assisted him during his tenure in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Scott King raised funds for the SCLC and occasionally gave speeches on King's behalf or independently. Following her husband's death, she worked tirelessly to preserve his memory and to continue his work.
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Encyclopedia of Alabama
AP obituary
Interview
The son of a Methodist minister, James Lawson was born in Pennsylvania in 1928. In 1947 he graduated from high school and also received his preacher's license. While attending a Methodist college in Ohio, Lawson became involved with nonviolent student groups including the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Lawson was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, but he refused to go. He spent thirteen months in prison because of this refusal. When he was released, he earned his B.A. and then went to Nagpur, India to serve as a campus minister at a college. During his time in India, Lawson became interested in the nonviolent teaching of Gandhi. He also stayed informed about the nonviolent efforts for civil rights in the United States. He returned to the United States in 1956, and in 1957 he enrolled in the Vanderbilt Divinity School. While in Nashville, he established a FOR office and began to teach students nonviolent methods of effecting change in their communities through sit-ins and other nonviolent methods. Nashville was a semi-segregated city, and Lawson sought to fully desegregate it through nonviolent demonstrations. He saw segregation as an immoral institution, and he believed that the United States would have to face this immorality and change its ways. After his work in Nashville, Lawson also helped organize the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966. In 1968, while working as a minister in Memphis, Lawson helped organize the sanitation workers strike. He invited Martin Luther King Jr. to aid the strikers in Memphis. King came and delivered his "Mountaintop" speech on April 3, 1968. A day later, King was assassinated while still in Memphis. In his later years, Lawson moved to Los Angeles and he remained an activist for a number of causes including the fight for immigrants' rights as well as the movement opposed to the war in Iraq.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Marcia Webb Lecky was the secretary of the senior class at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas during the 1957-58 academic school year. She was interviewed by Hampton to offer the perspective of a white student at Central High at the time of the Little Rock Nine's integration of the school. In her interview, Lecky explains that the presence of the black students had little effect on her senior year. The soldiers at the school did not bother her or the other students, and the school was so big that she rarely saw any of the nine black students. In her interview she expresses some regret that she and other students did not reach out to the Little Rock Nine and make them feel more welcome at the school.
Interview
Rudolph Lee was nine years old during the demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963. He witnessed mass meetings at the 16th Street Baptist Church, later bombed, as well as the brutal response to the protests in downtown Birmingham.
Interview
Blackside producers interviewed a number of activists not found in the history books and who had never spoken publicly about their roles in the civil rights movement. One example is Fred Leonard, who participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides, attempting to integrate interstate busing in the south. Frederick Leonard was among the Freedom Riders attacked by an angry mob at a Montgomery, Alabama bus station in 1961. Leonard not among those seriously injured. He was a freshman at Tennessee State University in Nashville at the time. The Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The strategy of the rides was to have black and white passengers ride into the Deep South on interstate buses and challenge the segregation of the bus stations in the region. Segregation in interstate public offices had been outlawed by this time, but several states in the South were refusing to change. Leonard describes the dramatic events of that day. Several clips from Leonard's interview appeared in the third episode of Eyes on the Prize and a number of the show's producers rank the interview as one of the best conducted for the series.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview 1979 | Interview 1985
John Lewis was born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama. He received a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy at Fisk University. In addition, he graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee. Early in his life, Lewis committed himself to the causes and concerns of the civil rights movement. Having attended segregated schools in Pike County, Alabama, he had been exposed first-hand to the reality of racial inequality. John Lewis was a vital personality and leader during the Nashville sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the early 1960s. At age 23, Lewis delivered a keynote address at the March on Washington in 1963. As chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he led some of the most perilous nonviolent protests in the movement, repeatedly putting his life at risk. He was arrested more than 40 times and severely injured several times. With close to 600 protestors, Lewis led crowds across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. After being told to cease walking by the Alabama State Troopers, the police attacked the peaceful protestors. His leadership on Bloody Sunday is partially responsible for President Johnson's responsiveness to the civil rights movement. President Johnson submitted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 within days of the tragedy. Lewis joined Congress in 1986 as a representative for Georgia's 5th Congressional District (Atlanta, GA) and has served as a much respected member since. He is now serving his sixth term in Congress. He currently lives with his wife in Atlanta.
Additional information: U.S. House of Representatives website
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Rufus Lewis was born in 1906 in Montgomery, Alabama. He graduated from Fisk University in 1931 with an A.B. Degree in Business Administration. Lewis spent several years as a member of the faculty at Alabama State Teacher's College and was particularly successful as an athletic coach. Lewis was always interested in black suffrage and was motivated to act when black soldiers returning from World War II were denied the right to vote. He led efforts in Alabama to educate black voters, preparing them for the "literacy tests" which they would be required to pass before registering. He was a leader in political and religious affairs. He founded several groups and organizations like the Montgomery Improvement Association, responsible for the famous Montgomery Bus Boycotts (1955-57) and the Alabama Democratic Conference. During the 1950s, Lewis worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King and his church. He was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1976, but left this office when President Jimmy Carter appointed him as a U.S Marshal. He died in 1999 at age 92.
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
King Center Imaging Project
Interview
Kwame Leo Lillard was a student at Tennessee State University at the time of the sit-ins in Nashville in 1960. He was a Nashville native who eventually became a leader in the sit-ins and marches in his hometown. He saw the sit-in movement as something that the whole of Nashville had to embrace, not just the college students. He also assisted the Freedom Riders in 1961 by driving some of them back home from Birmingham after they were attacked at a bus station.
Additional information: Freedom Riders blog
Interview
Colonel Floyd Mann was appointed the director of Alabama's Department of Public Safety in 1959. At the time of the Freedom Rides, there was concern in Alabama that the riders would not be safe. Attorney General Robert Kennedy wanted the guarantee of Alabama Governor John Patterson that the riders would be protected. Colonel Mann offered to protect the riders if he was given the proper resources. With the understanding that the state and city police of Alabama would offer assistance, Mann went about protecting the riders. However, he soon learned that the Montgomery city police were going to take the day off when the riders went to Montgomery. Aware of this, he stationed one hundred state troopers outside of the city, ready to assist in case of an emergency. As expected, when the riders arrived in Montgomery their bus was attacked. There were no law enforcement officers present except for Mann, and he immediately called for the state troopers. However, before the troopers could get there, several riders were injured severely. Colonel Mann was forced to use his pistol to chase away the attackers and protect the riders. It is likely that if Mann had not been there to protect them, some of the riders, including William Barbee, Jim Zwerg, and Bernard Lafayette, would have been killed. When the state troopers arrived, the mob dispersed and order was restored.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Burke Marshall served as assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. During his tenure as assistant attorney general, Marshall was an aggressive advocate for racial equality and a key figure in the federal government's efforts to desegregate the South. He applied federal pressure to force the University of Mississippi to integrate in 1962 and eased tensions during the 1963 Birmingham Crisis. Marshall was also instrumental in the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations.
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
John McLaurin was born in 1926. He represented Rankin County as a Mississippi state senator, and was a representative for Governor Ross Barnett during the controversy surrounding James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). McLaurin was also a member of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, established in 1956 under Governor James Coleman, which attempted to prevent integration and resist federal civil rights legislation and court rulings. McLaurin died in 2004.
Additional information: Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Reverend Orloff Miller was raised in the Methodist church, but became a Unitarian Universalist minister. He grew up in a segregated community in Ohio, but through his work as a Unitarian minister and his contact with the civil rights movement, came to believe in the need to stand up for equality for all people. Miller later lived in the San Francisco area and then Germany, where he served as the European Unitarian Universalists' Minister-at-large Emeritus.
Reverend Orloff Miller first participated in the civil rights movement during the March on Washington. When Martin Luther King, Jr. issued a call from Selma for clergy to come and participate in a march after "Bloody Sunday," Miller flew to Selma. In Selma, he participated in the "Turnaround Tuesday" march on March 9, 1965. Although he had intended to stay in Selma for only one day, he decided to stay longer at King's request. That evening, Miller went to dinner with fellow Unitarian ministers James Reeb and Clark Olsen. After leaving the diner, they were attacked by white men with clubs. Reeb was hit on the head and died from his injuries in a Montgomery hospital. Miller attended Reeb's funeral in Selma and participated in the last day of the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Additional information: Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association
Interview
Former Senator, Vice-President, and Ambassador Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minnesota on January 5, 1928. Mondale first entered politics as an organizer for future vice-president Hubert Humphrey's successful 1948 Senate campaign. Following a period of study at Macalester College and work in Washington, D.C., Mondale graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1951. Mondale served in the army before entering law school at the University of Minnesota. Governor Orville Freeman appointed Mondale as Minnesota attorney general in 1960, a position Mondale held for four years before being appointed to Vice-President elect Hubert Humphrey's vacant Senate seat in 1964. During his 12 year career in the Senate, Mondale was one of Congress's most active liberals, supporting Johnson's Great Society, brokering compromises that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, opposing the Vietnam War (disavowing his earlier support in 1968), chairing the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity and opposing Nixon's anti-busing legislation, lowering the votes necessary for cloture from 66 to 60 (making legislation harder to filibuster), and serving on the Church Commission that investigated FBI and CIA abuses. In 1976, Jimmy Carter selected Walter Mondale as his vice-presidential running. Mondale instituted an activist model for the vice-presidency that remains in place today, establishing an office in the West Wing and envisioning himself as an advisor and assistant to President Carter. Carter and Mondale, confronted with an economic recession and the Iranian hostage situation, lost re-election to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980. In 1984, Mondale received the Democratic nomination for President, and selected Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate. Ferraro was the first woman nominated for vice-president by a major political party. Mondale fared poorly against Reagan, who won with nearly 59% of the popular vote and carried 49 states, the largest margin of victory since Franklin Roosevelt's campaign against Alf Landon in 1936. Mondale returned to private law practice until President Bill Clinton appointed him as Ambassador to Japan in 1993, a position which he held until 1996. Mondale also served as Clinton's special envoy to Indonesia in 1998. In 2002, Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, and Mondale agreed to run in his place in the upcoming election. He lost to Republican Norm Coleman. Mondale remained active as a private citizen, serving on the boards of various organizations and supporting the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
In 1964, Mondale, as the chairman of a subcommittee of the Credentials Committee at the Democratic Convention, promoted a compromise that would have given the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party two at-large seats. The MFDP had journeyed to the Atlantic City convention to protest Mississippi's racially segregated Democratic Party, and felt that the compromise was not enough. Though the compromise was rejected, new rules adopted at the convention as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eventually resulted in more registered black voters and a more integrated Democratic Party. Mondale, supporting Hubert Humphrey's bid for the presidency, attended the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, made infamous by race riots and the outrage of its attendees. Mondale was a prominent supporter of the Fair Housing Act, Section VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of houses and created the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the Department of Housing and Urban Development as an enforcement agency. Mondale was a member of the Church Committee, which published reports to Congress on the abuses of power in the FBI's COINTELPRO and CIA's Project MKUltra. As the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Equal Edu cation Opportunity, Mondale opposed Nixon's anti-busing legislation and supported bilingual education, magnet schools, and special education projects in an effort to combat poor education among citizens of impoverished and racially segregated areas.
Additional information: U.S. Senate website
Minnesota Historical Society
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
Wife of Oliver Brown and mother of Linda Brown, Leola Montgomery found herself in the middle of the Brown vs. Board of Education court case in 1950. In that year, her husband Oliver Brown was one of several plaintiffs in that famous court case that made segregation illegal. Oliver Brown was suing so that his daughter Linda Brown could attend an all-white school that was close to the Brown's home in Topeka, Kansas.
Interview
Amzie Moore was born and raised in Mississippi. Moore's family owned some land, inherited from his grandfather, but they struggled in the Great Depression and eventually lost the property. Moore's mother died when he was fourteen, and he moved to Greenwood, Mississippi where he put himself through high school. Moore worked for the U. S. Post Office from 1935 to 1968, when he retired. During that time, he also opened a service station with a restaurant and a beauty parlor. He served in the U. S. Army for three and a half years in Burma during World War II. Moore was a community leader in Cleveland, Mississippi where he was president of the local NAACP and he encouraged voter registration efforts in the black community. Moore organized the local Head Start, beginning in 1966. He was also responsible for the building of many units of housing for low-income families in Cleveland.
As a president of the NAACP, Amzie Moore was peripherally involved in the Emmett Till murder trial. He also spearheaded voter registration drives in Mississippi and supported the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He brought Bob Moses to Mississippi and served as a host and guide for many other leaders of the civil rights movement working in Mississippi.
Additional information: One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Interview
A young leader in the civil rights movement, Robert Moses was field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the director of the Committee's Mississippi Project. Moses was also one of the leaders of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. A young leader in the civil rights movement, Robert Moses was field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the director of the Committee's Mississippi Project. The Mississippi Project was an effort by SNCC volunteers to register African-American voters in the state of Mississippi. Mississippi was of strategic importance with only 6.7% of eligible African-Americans registered to vote in the early 1960s. Moses was an effective community builder and grass-roots organizer whose efforts united local African-American Civil Rights activists, SNCC field secretaries, and northern white volunteers. In 1962, Moses became co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of Civil Rights groups working in Mississippi. Moses is most well-known for his work in establishing the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. In this campaign, SNCC volunteers and local activists brought approximately 1,000 college students to Mississippi to both register African-American voters and form alternative "Freedom Schools". The Project set up 41 schools and over 3,000 African-Americans attended classes. In addition to registering voters, the campaign hoped to bring national attention to the issue of racial inequality in the South. As Moses and other activists expected, many white residents in Mississippi resisted the Freedom Summer Project. While working in Mississippi, SNCC volunteers and potential African-American voters were frequently attacked by whites. Moses and others were often arrested and jailed for their efforts. During the 1964 Freedom Summer, more than 60 black churches, businesses, schools, and homes were bombed or burned. In June of that summer, three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) workers investigating the burning of a black church were killed by Ku Klux Klan members. Moses was also actively involved in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an effort to challenge the legitimacy of the state's all-white Democratic Party. The MFDP sought to replace the white Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arguing that these delegates represented only the state's white establishment. MFDP members, according to Moses, "were bringing to this country and to the Democratic Party as its major political institution a question of generations of black people who had been denied political process and who were now asking that they get it." Though the MFDP failed to replace the state's white delegates, the incident sent a statement to national politicians that African-Americans demanded full voting rights and helped set the stage for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Additional information: Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia
Freedom Summer 50th
One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights -- the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University
Interview 1985 | Interview 1986
A member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LD F) Constance Baker Motley was a leader in the legal struggle for civil rights. Motley worked on school desegregation cases in addition to cases dealing with equality in public transportation, housing, and public accommodations. Motley is well-known for her role in Meredith v. Fair where she successfully argued in front of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that James H. Meredith should be admitted to the University of Mississippi. In addition to being the first African-American woman to hold several political positions, Motley became the first black female to be appointed to the federal judiciary in 1966.
Motley was one of the first women to argue a case in front of the United States Supreme Court, winning nine of the ten cases she argued in front of the body. After graduating from law school in 1945, Motley became a legal assistant for the LDF. She eventually earned associate counsel status and became the LDF's principal trial attorney. While at the LDF from 1945 to 1964, Motley worked with Thurgood Marshall and others on school desegregation cases throughout the South. Motley was involved in the Brown v. Board Education case that outlawed public school segregation. One of the most famous cases Motley worked on was Meredith v. Fair where, in 1962, she successfully argued to the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that James H. Meredith should be admitted to the University of Mississippi. In addition to school desegregation, Motley was an advocate for racial equality in housing, public accommodations, transportation, voting rights, and public accommodations. Judge Motley was also very active in politics. From 1964 to 1965, she served in the New York State Senate as its first African-American female senator. In 1965, she became the first African-American woman elected to the presidency of the Manhattan borough. In 1966, Motley was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the nation's largest federal bench. This appointment made her the first African-American woman to be appointed to a federal judgeship. In 1982, Judge Motley was made chief judge and, in 1986, she acquired senior status.
Additional information: Columbia Law School tribute to Constance Baker Motley
Biography.com
BlackPast.org
James Meredith Was Controversial Because He Was Denied Admission Where?
Source: http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/bios-a-m.html
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