Mamie Till (Bradley) Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, taught in the Chicago public schools for twenty-five years and received a master’s degree in administration in 1976. She died in 2003 at the age of eighty-one. In the same year, her autobiography, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, was published.
CHAPTER THREE
Jo Ann Robinson, the English professor who helped plan and launch the Montgomery bus boycott, resigned from Alabama State in 1960 because of the school’s objections to faculty participation in civil rights protests. She later moved to Los Angeles, where she taught in the public schools until her retirement in 1976. Her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, was published in 1987. She died in 1992.
E. D. Nixon, a key organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott and longtime activist in A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, served as director of a housing project recreation program in Montgomery. He retired as president of the Alabama NAACP in 1977 and died in Montgomery in 1987. The Montgomery County public school system recognized his civil rights work by naming an elementary school after him in 2001.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated bus launched the Montgomery boycott, was fired from her job as a seamstress shortly after her arrest. She remained without a steady job for over a year. She eventually moved to Detroit, where for more than twenty years she was a secretary and receptionist in the Michigan office of United States congressman John Conyers. She started a foundation, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, and wrote two memoirs. Starting in 1956, Parks appeared regularly as an honored guest at many civil rights functions. She received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1979, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. When she died in 2005, she became the first woman to lie in repose in the United States Capitol Rotunda. A U.S. postage stamp, a statue in the Capitol Rotunda, and many events marked the one hundredth anniversary of her birth in 2013.
Clifford Durr, the white lawyer who supported the Montgomery boycott, continued to work on civil and human rights cases. In 1966 he received the Civil Liberties Award from the New York Civil Liberties Union. Durr died in 1975.
Virginia Durr remained a supporter of civil rights causes and in 1985 published her autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle. President Bill Clinton praised her after her death in 1999: “Her courage, outspokenness, and steely conviction in the early days of the civil rights movement helped change this nation forever.” In 2003 a collection of her civil rights correspondence was published and in 2006 she was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.
Fred Gray, the black attorney who represented Rosa Parks in Montgomery, has remained an active civil rights lawyer in Alabama. In 1970 he was elected to the Alabama state legislature and served until 1974. Gray obtained a $10 million settlement in 1974 from the United States government on behalf of the black men who had unknowingly participated in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a forty-year clinical trial to study the effects of untreated syphilis. He was named president of the National Bar Association in 1985 and in 2002 became the first black president of the Alabama Bar Association. He is the author of two books, Bus Ride to Justice, first published in 1995, and The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, published in 1998.
Martin Luther King, Jr., continued as a leader of the civil rights movement until he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. His birthday, January 15, is now a federal holiday.
Ralph Abernathy headed the SCLC from 1968 to 1977, when he resigned to run for Congress. Abernathy lost the election, but continued to serve as pastor of Atlanta’s West Hunter Street Baptist Church. Abernathy’s autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, was published in 1989. He died in 1990, five weeks before his sixty-fourth birthday.
CHAPTER FOUR
Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP in 1957, shared the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal the following year with the nine students who first integrated Little Rock’s Central High School. In 1972, Bates led an attack on President Nixon’s decision to cut funds for economic opportunity programs in Mitchellville, Arkansas. Bates revived the Arkansas State Press in 1984 and sold it in 1987. Her memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, first published in 1962 and reprinted in 1986, became the first reprinted book to win an American Book Award. She died in Little Rock in 1999. Arkansas designated the third Monday in February as a state holiday to honor Daisy Gatson Bates.
Orval Faubus, a Democrat, became governor of Arkansas in 1955 and was reelected five times, serving until 1967. Faubus ran for governor in 1970, 1974, and 1986, but lost each time. He died in 1994.
Wiley Branton, after serving as chief counsel for the Little Rock Nine, became director of the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project. From 1965 to 1967 he served as special assistant to United States attorneys general Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark. At the time of his death in 1988, he was a partner in a Washington D.C. law firm.
Ernest Green graduated from Central High School in 1958. After earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from Michigan State University, Green worked in New York with the A. Philip Randolph Institute, attempting to get more blacks into apprenticeships in the building trades. President Jimmy Carter appointed Green assistant secretary of labor for employment and training. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded the Little Rock Nine the Congressional Gold Medal. Green retired in 2009 as managing director for municipal finance at Barclays Capital (formerly Lehman Brothers) in Washington D.C.
Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, graduated from San Francisco State University. She received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University then worked for six years as a news reporter for NBC in San Francisco. She is the author of two memoirs, Warriors Don’t Cry, based on her diaries at Central High, and White is a State of Mind. She received a doctorate degree in education from the University of San Francisco and is Chair Emeritus of Communications and Media Studies at Dominican University of California.
Winthrop Rockefeller, a Republican who worked with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and tried to resolve the Little Rock crisis before it escalated, was himself elected governor of Arkansas in 1967. He served until 1971. Rockefeller died in 1973.
CHAPTER FIVE
James Lawson, who led the Nashville workshops on nonviolence, went on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in 1965. He participated in many antiwar protests. In 1968 he was chairman of the Memphis sanitation strike. Remaining active in the SCLC, in 1986 he hosted Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa on his visit to Los Angeles. Lawson was president of the Los Angeles chapter of the SCLC from 1979 to 1993. He served as pastor of the Holman United Methodist Church for twenty-five years until his retirement in 1999. After being expelled from Nashville’s Vanderbilt University for his civil rights work in 1960, Lawson joined the faculty as distinguished visiting professor from 2006 to 2009. He donated his civil rights papers to Vanderbilt in 2013.
John Lewis, chairman of SNCC from 1963 to 1966, resigned from that organization in 1966 because of its increasing militancy. (He was replaced by Stokely Carmichael.) He later served as director of community organization projects for the Southern Regional Council. In 1970 Lewis was named director of the Voter Education Project. He first ran for Congress in 1986 and in the Democratic primary he unexpectedly defeated his closest rival—another former SNCC worker, Julian Bond. He continues to represent Georgia’s 5th District in Congress. In 2013 Congressman Lewis and Vice President Joe Biden walked with more than five thousand people across Selma, Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the forty-eighth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” and the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Diane Nash, a leader of the sit-in movement, moved to Chicago shortly after the Selma to Montgomery march. She became active in the antiwar movement and traveled to Hanoi as a guest of Vietnam’s women’s union in 1967. She was formerly married to fellow civil rights work
er James Bevel. Nash continues to lecture on civil and human rights issues.
Ezell Blair, Jr., one of the first sit-in participants, was among thirteen founders of the National Conference on Black Power. He remained active in the civil rights movement, lecturing and working in a variety of positions. In 1970 he changed his name to Jibreel A-A. K-A. Khazan. He has worked with developmentally disabled people in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he has lived since 1965. North Carolina A&T State University, his alma mater, holds an annual breakfast to commemorate the sit-in. Part of the Woolworth’s lunch counter is now at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
Ella Baker remained a key SNCC adviser and sat on the board of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF). She was the subject of a documentary called Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, which aired on PBS. In 1980 New York City held a tribute to Baker, who continued to live in Harlem until her death in 1986. SNCC Freedom Singer Bernice Johnson Reagon composed Ella’s Song in her memory. The lyrics include Ella’s own words: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.”
Harris Wofford was assistant director of the Peace Corps from 1964 to 1966. He served as president of Bryn Mawr College from 1970 to 1978 and practiced law in Philadelphia for seven years. He rejoined government as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Labor and Industry from 1987 to 1991, as a United States Senator from 1991 to 1994, and as chief executive officer of the federal agency that oversees domestic volunteer programs such as AmeriCorps from 1995 to 2001. Since his retirement in 2001, he has taught at the University of Maryland and volunteered for various charitable and service organizations. He received the 2012 Presidential Citizens Medal from President Obama.
Z. Alexander Looby, the attorney for the Nashville sit-in protestors whose home was bombed in 1961, became a Nashville city councilman. Looby died in 1972.
Ben West was Nashville’s mayor from 1951 to 1963. He later served on several transportation boards, including the National Safety Council, and was a member of the President’s Commission on Traffic Safety. West died in 1974.
James Farmer, who founded CORE in 1941 and served as its national director from 1961–1966, worked for a short time as assistant secretary for administration for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Nixon administration. In 1975 he cofounded the Fund for an Open Society. His autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, was published in 1985. He taught at Mary Washington College from 1984 to 1999. In 1998 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton. Farmer died in 1999 in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Bull Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner, was forced out of office in 1963. In 1966, he suffered a stroke that left him confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1973.
James Peck filed suit against the FBI for failing to prevent the beating he received during the 1961 Freedom Ride. In 1975 Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr. testified to a Senate committee that while he was working as an undercover FBI informant, he participated in the beating and informed the FBI in advance that the local police were going to allow the beating to occur. A Federal judge granted Peck a settlement of $25,000 in 1983. That same year Peck suffered a stroke, which left him paralyzed on one side of his body. He died ten years later in a nursing home in Minneapolis.
John Seigenthaler began working for The Tennessean as a reporter in 1949. He left in 1961 to serve as administrative assistant to attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. Seigenthaler returned to the newspaper as editor in 1962 and later served as publisher and president until his retirement in 1991. From 1982 to 1991 he also served as founding editorial director of USA Today. The John Seigenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University houses the First Amendment Center, which he founded in 1991. He is currently host of the Nashville public television series A Word on Words.
CHAPTER SIX
Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the original Freedom Singers from Albany, Georgia, was formerly married to fellow singer Cordell Reagon. They had two children, Toshi and Kwan. After their divorce, Reagon finished her undergraduate degree at Spelman College and earned a doctorate in history at Howard University. She was founder and artistic director of the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock from 1973 to 2004. In 1974, she began working at the Smithsonian Institution, where she founded the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History and served as curator of the Division of Community Life until 1993. While at the Smithsonian, she organized national conferences on the music of the civil rights movement and produced the three-volume recording Voices of the Civil Rights Movement. She earned a Peabody Award for her work on the National Public Radio series Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions and composed the score for the Peabody Award–winning television series Africans in America. Reagon is professor emeritus at American University. She and her daughter Toshi performed at the White House for President Obama in 2010 as part of a program on the music of the civil rights movement. Reagon continues to speak about the intersection of her work as an activist, scholar, performer, and composer.
Charles Sherrod, who helped organize the Albany community in 1961, left SNCC and Georgia to obtain a master’s degree in sacred theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He returned to Georgia and, with his wife Shirley, cofounded the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education and a land trust for black farmers. From 1976 to 1990, he was a member of Albany’s Board of City Commissioners. He also served as a prison chaplain and taught at Albany State University, which had banned him from campus during his days as a SNCC organizer. Sherrod currently is on the board of the Albany Civil Rights Institute.
Laurie Pritchett, the chief of police in Albany, Georgia, left that city in 1966 to become the police chief in High Point, North Carolina. He retired in 1974 and died in 2000.
Asa Kelley served as a judge in the Superior Court of Dougherty County, Georgia, from 1968 until his death in 1997. He was an advocate for prisoner rehabilitation and alternative sentencing for nonviolent criminals that included treatment for substance abuse and community service.
Andrew Young, executive vice president of the SCLC from 1967 to 1970, became a member of the Georgia delegation to the United States House of Representatives in 1972. He served as United States ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter administration. In 1981 he was elected mayor of Atlanta and was reelected for a second term in 1985. He lost in the Democratic primary for governor of Georgia in 1990. Young cochaired the committee that brought the Olympics to Atlanta in 1996. He has written two books, started the Andrew Young Foundation, and cofounded Why Tuesday, an organization that is proposing to move voting from Tuesday to the weekend to increase voter participation.
Wyatt T. Walker was chief of staff of the SCLC from 1960 to 1964. In 1964 he served as vice president of Educational Heritage, Inc., a publishing company. He has also been vice president of the Greater New York YMCA and special assistant to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Walker retired as pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem in 2004 after thirty-seven years. He currently lives in Virginia.
Tom Hayden, who worked with SNCC, was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a California state assemblyman for ten years and a state senator for eight years. He has written or edited nineteen books and lectures frequently on a broad range of political issues. Hayden is currently director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California.
Casey Hayden, a former SNCC staff worker in Mississippi, worked as a city administrator while Andrew Young was mayor of Atlanta. Her 1965 paper, written with fellow SNCC worker Mary King, “Sex and Caste: A King of Memo” influenced white feminists. Two memoirs of her work with SNCC have been included in the anthologies Deep in Our Hearts and Hands on the Freedom Plow. Formerly married to Tom Hayden, she now uses her birth name Sandra Cason and lives with her husband Paul Buckwalter in Tuscon, Arizona.
Bob Zellner, one of the first white Southerners to join SNCC, became an organizer for the Southern Conference Education
al Fund as well as a union organizer in New Orleans. While finishing his PhD dissertation on the Southern civil rights movement, he taught at colleges in Pennsylvania and Long Island. His memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement is the basis of the 2013 Spike Lee film Son of the South. Zellner now lives in Southampton, New York.
Burke Marshall, former assistant attorney general, edited a book, The Supreme Court and Human Rights in 1982. At the time of his death in 2003, he was professor emeritus at Yale Law School, where he had taught since 1970.
Fred Shuttlesworth, founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and a co-founder of the SCLC, served as pastor of the Greater New Light Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, for forty years until he retired in 2006. He returned to live in Birmingham in 2008 for stroke treatment and died there in 2011. The Shuttlesworth Archive is based in the Cincinnati church he founded. The Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport was renamed in his honor.
A. G. Gaston, the grandson of slaves, was one of the most successful black businessmen in the United States. His business enterprises included real estate, insurance, banking, and communications. He continued to be involved in his string of businesses until his death in 1996 at the age of 103.
James Bevel, an early Nashville student activist and a key SCLC worker in charge of direct action, became involved with the antiwar movement and influenced Dr. King’s decision to come out against the war. After King’s death, he was forced to leave the SCLC. He was Lyndon LaRouche’s running mate in the 1992 presidential election and helped plan the Million Man March in 1995. Bevel was convicted of incest in 2008 and died the same year of pancreatic cancer.
The March on Washington
A. Philip Randolph, after the March on Washington in 1963, continued as president of the Negro American Labor Council. He was a founder and the first president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute of New York City, an organization that sponsors educational projects and fights for jobs in the skilled trades for blacks. Randolph died in 1979 at the age of ninety.
Eyes on the Prize Page 35
