Bayard Rustin, an important early adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., was a founder of the SCLC and deputy director of the March on Washington. Rustin cofounded and directed the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute and was co-chairman at the time of his death in 1987. He chaired the executive committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, was an active leader in the socialist party and its successor Social Democrats USA, and participated in election monitoring overseas for Freedom House. Throughout his life, he kept a low public profile because he was openly gay at a time of hostility toward gays and lesbians.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Myrlie Evers worked as a secretary for the NAACP with her husband Medgar. After Medgar’s assassination, she continued to press for justice until Byron De La Beckwith’s conviction thirty-one years later in 1994. Her book on Medgar, For Us, the Living, was produced as a television movie in 1982. Evers worked as vice president for an advertising firm in New York and then served as director of community relations for ARCO in Los Angeles. She remarried and after her second husband died, became chairperson of the NAACP. During her tenure, she raised the funds to restore the NAACP’s financial stability. She founded the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. In 2013 Myrlie Evers Williams became the first woman to deliver the invocation prayer at a presidential inauguration.
James Meredith, after graduating from Ole Miss in 1963, spent the next year at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, West Africa. When he returned to this country, he enrolled at Columbia Law School. In 1966, before completing his studies, he led a March Against Fear in Mississippi. He was shot during the march. Civil rights leaders came to take his place but when Meredith recovered, he completed the march alongside them. He graduated from Columbia Law School, ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress as a Republican, and worked for U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Meredith has written two books, Three Years in Mississippi and A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America. He is currently a tree farmer in Jackson, Mississippi.
Amzie Moore remained an important and active leader in the Mississippi NAACP until his death in 1979, at age sixty-nine.
Robert Moses was a SNCC field organizer who coordinated voter registration in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. After leaving SNCC in 1966, he temporarily began using his middle name Parris instead of Moses. He spent two years in Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, taught math in Tanzania, and returned to the United States in 1976. While finishing his PhD dissertation in philosophy at Harvard, he began to teach algebra at his oldest daughter’s school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With funds from a 1982 MacArthur Fellowship, he started The Algebra Project to improve math literacy in the public schools and continues to serve as its president. He coauthored the book Radical Equations: Civil Rights From Mississippi to the Algebra Project and coedited Quality Education as a Constitutional Right. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell and at Princeton. His wife, Dr. Janet Moses, MD, is also a SNCC veteran.
Marion Barry was mayor of Washington, D.C. from 1979 to 1991. He served six months in prison after being convicted of crack cocaine possession. He was reelected as mayor in 1994. He is currently serving an eight-year term on the city council.
Constance Baker Motley, who represented James Meredith on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was elected to the New York State Senate in 1964. President Johnson named her a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1967 and she continued to serve on that court until her death in 2005.
Unita Blackwell, active in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), became the first black woman to be elected mayor in Mississippi. She served as mayor of Mayersville from 1976 to 2001. During her time as mayor, she attended President Carter’s Energy Summit at Camp David, earned a master’s degree in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and in 1990 was the first woman elected president of the National Conference of Black Mayors. She received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 1992. Her memoir, Barefootin’, was published in 2006. Blackwell was diagnosed with dementia in 2008.
Nicholas Katzenbach, who worked in the Justice Department for more than five years as assistant, deputy, acting, and then attorney general, was appointed United States under secretary of state in 1966. He joined IBM in 1969 and remained there until 1986, when he retired as senior vice president for law and external relations. Katzenbach then became a partner in a major law firm based in New Jersey. He died in 2012 at the age of ninety.
John Doar served as first assistant and then assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 1960 to 1967, the critical years of the civil rights movement. He would later serve as special counsel to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, which investigated Watergate and prepared articles of impeachment against President Nixon. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. He still practices law in New York City.
John Salter has been engaged in activist-oriented community organization in the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, upstate New York, and the Navajo Nation, among other places. He retired in 1994 as professor of American Indian studies at the University of North Dakota and is author of Jackson, Mississippi, An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism. He changed his name to John Hunter Gray and then to Hunter Gray to reflect his father’s Native American ancestral name before his father’s adoption by a white family named Salter. He is also known as Hunter Bear and lives in Idaho with his wife Eldri.
Charles Evers assumed the post of field director of the Mississippi NAACP after his brother Medgar was assassinated. He was mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, from 1969 to 1981 and from 1985 to 1989. He was the first black man since Reconstruction to be elected to any office in Mississippi. He was unsuccessful in campaigns for governor and for the United States Senate. Have No Fear, his autobiography written with Andrew Szanton, was published in 1997.
William Simmons was active in organizing the Jackson Citizens’ Council and devoted much of his time to promoting the Citizens’ Council movement, appearing on television and speaking before audiences through the United States. For many years he worked to establish independent schools through the South and served as president of the Southern Independent School Association. In later years he established The Fairview Inn, an award-winning bed and breakfast inn in his childhood family home in Jackson, which he operated until shortly before his death in 2007.
Allard Lowenstein was elected to the 91st Congress as a representative from the Fifth District of New York. He was a member of the Democratic National Committee from 1972 to 1976, an adviser to California governor Jerry Brown in 1975, and the United States representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1977. Lowenstein was murdered in 1980.
Stokely Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966 and was an advocate of black power. He left SNCC the following year and briefly joined the Black Panther Party. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to pay homage to African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure. In lectures across the world, he described himself as a pan-Africanist, believing Africa is home to all black people. He was arrested in his adopted homeland of Guinea in 1986 for allegedly advocating revolution against the military dictatorship of the West African country. He was released from jail after three days and continued to live in Guinea until his death in 1998 at the age of fifty-seven.
Fannie Lou Hamer, vice chairman of the MFDP, continued to work for civil rights in Mississippi. In addition, she started a pig cooperative and day-care center, remained active in state politics, and spoke on feminist and antiwar issues throughout the country. She died in 1977.
Joe Rauh, the counsel for the MFDP in Atlantic City, remained active in liberal politics throughout his life. He was counsel for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and worked with Clarence Mitchell in lobbying for the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, and 1975, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and other civil rights legislation. In 1986, Rauh led the opposition to the n
omination of Justice William Rehnquist for the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court. A year after his death in 1992, President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Lawrence Guyot, chairman of the MFDP, graduated from Rutgers University School of Law in 1972 and served on the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law from 1972 to 1974. In 1982 and 1986, he helped organize the Afro-American Cultural, Technological, and Scientific Olympics (ACTSO). Guyot retired from his work for the city of Washington, D.C., in 2005. He continued to speak out about voting rights and the civil rights movement until his death in 2012, a few weeks after the reelection of President Obama.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Clarence Mitchell, the “101st Senator,” was legislative chairman of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights. In recognition of his pivotal role as a lobbyist for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, he was awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal. He died in 1984.
Sheriff Jim Clark, after losing his bid for reelection in Selma, left that city and wrote a book entitled I Saw Selma Raped. He ran a mobile home dealership in Alexandria, Alabama, until he was arrested for smuggling marijuana and served nine months of a two-year sentence in federal prison. He died in 2007 in an Elba, Alabama, nursing home.
Joseph Smitherman, mayor of Selma during the Selma march, was mayor of that city for thirty-six years. After he renounced segregation, he gained some black support, but in 2000 lost his last race to a black computer consultant. He died in 2005.
Amelia Boynton (Robinson), a local leader of the Selma campaign, continued to work in the Alabama civil rights movement. She spent many years helping black farmers and people with housing difficulties resolve their problems. Bridge Across the Jordan, her autobiography, was published in 1991. She attended the Democratic National Convention in 2012 in a wheelchair at the age of 101. She now lives in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Roy Wilkins was executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 until his retirement in 1977. He died in 1981.
Joseph Ellwanger was pastor of the Cross Lutheran Church in Milwaukee for thirty-four years until he retired in 2001. He was involved in the sanctuary movement for Guatemalan refugees. He wrote Let My People Go, a book on black history. Reverend Ellwanger and his wife Joyce received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice in 2012.
Sheyann Webb, who at age eight marched in Selma, coauthored a book, Selma, Lord, Selma, which was made into an ABC television movie in 1999. She started the K.E.E.P. Productions Youth Development Program in 1982. Sheyann Webb Christburg continues to speak across the country about her experiences during the Selma march. She is currently coordinator of student activities for Alabama State University.
Hosea Williams was national executive director of the SCLC from 1969 to 1971 and again from 1977 to 1979. In 1971 he founded the service organization Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless, which he ran for almost thirty years. In 1972 he became pastor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. People’s Church of Love; The Atlanta Constitution reported that it had no sanctuary but did have a large bingo operation. In 1974, Williams was elected to the Georgia legislature and was a member until 1985. He later served on the Atlanta City Council and the DeKalb County Commission. In later years, he was arrested for traffic violations and served time in prison for leaving the scene of two accidents. Before he died in 2000, an Atlanta street was renamed Hosea L. Williams Drive.
George Wallace was reelected governor of Alabama in 1970, 1974, and 1982, the last with support from black voters. He survived an attempted assassination in 1972 but was paralyzed for life. He ran for president of the United States four times without success. He died in Montgomery, Alabama in 1998.
Orloff Miller, the Unitarian minister who traveled with James Reeb in Selma, created a ministry for AIDS patients in San Francisco as a field secretary for the AIDS Interfaith Network. There he met a German woman who became his wife. After his retirement as a Unitarian minister in 1991, Miller and his wife moved to southwestern Germany, where he served as minister at large for European Unitarians from 1993 to 2000. He currently lives in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
Notes
The primary sources used to compile this account of the American civil rights movement appear below. The interviews have been separated into two sections—those original to this project, and those from other oral-history collections. The chronologically shifting emphasis from books to interviews to magazine and newspaper coverage reflects the increased attention the media paid to the movement.
Some books were consulted for several chapters. These include Before the Mayflower, by Lerone Bennett, Jr.; In Struggle, by Clayborne Carson; Encyclopedia of Black America, edited by W. Augustus Low and Virgil A. Clift; The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, by Aldon D. Morris; Let the Trumpet Sound, by Stephen B. Oates; My Soul Is Rested, by Howell Raines; and Fire in the Streets, by Milton Viorst. Although used for general reference throughout this project, these books appear only in the chapter(s) for which they were a primary reference.
Chapter One
Books: Unlikely Heroes, by Jack Bass; Before the Mayflower, by Lerone Bennett, Jr.; Eisenhower and Black Civil Rights, by Robert Frederick Burk; The Southern Case for School Segregation, by James Kilpatrick; Portrait of a Decade, by Anthony Lewis; Groundwork, by Genna Rae McNeil; Inside the Warren Court, by Bernard Schwartz; They Closed Their Schools, by Bob Smith; Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins, by Roy Wilkins.
We would specifically like to note Richard Kluger’s book, Simple Justice, a masterful work without which we could not have written this chapter.
Articles: “The South Will Go Along,” by Harold Fleming in The New Republic, May 31, 1954; “Attitudes Toward Desegregation,” by Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley, in Scientific American, December, 1956; “The Climax of an Era,” by Carey McWilliams, in The Nation, May 29, 1954; “Segregation and the Supreme Court,” by Arthur Sutherland, in The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1954.
Newspapers: Birmingham Post Herald, May 19, 1954; New York Times, May 18, 1954; Washington Post, May 19, 1954.
Interviews: From the Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, housed at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, we drew interviews with Wiley Branton, Dr. Kenneth Clark, William Coleman, Charles Duncan, Arthur Fletcher, George Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, James Nabrit, Herbert Reed, Frank Reeves, and June Schagaloff.
Eyes on the Prize Interviews: We spoke with James Bash, Eliza Briggs, Harry Briggs, Jr., Harry Briggs, Sr., Herbert Brownell, Robert Carter, Dr. Kenneth Clark, William Coleman, Linda Brown Smith, Vanessa Venable, Thomas R. Waring, Robert Williams, Paul E. Wilson, and Judge John Minor Wisdom.
Chapter Two
Books: Time Bomb, by Olive Arnold Adams; Wolfwhistle, by William Bradford Huie; Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody.
Articles: “Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” by William Bradford Huie, in Look, January 24, 1956; “What Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?” by William Bradford Huie, in Look, January 22, 1957; “Reflections on a Murder: The Emmett Till Case,” by William M. Simpson, in Southern Miscellany: Essays on History in Honor of Glover Moore.
Newspapers: Chicago Defender, July 2, 9, 1955; August 13, 20, 27, 1955; September 7, 10, 17, 24, 1955; Cleveland Call and Post, September 24, 1955; October 1, 8, 15, 22, 1955; Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, September 21, 1955; Greenwood Commonwealth, September 21, 22, 1955; Pittsburg Courier, August 20, 27, 1955; September 10, 17, 1955; October 1, 8, 1955.
Eyes on the Prize Interviews: Charles Diggs, Myrlie Evers, James L. Hicks, William B. Huie, Curtis Jones.
Chapter Three
Books: Outside the Magic Circle, by Virginia Foster Durr; Stride Toward Freedom, by Martin Luther King, Jr.; King: A Critical Biography, by David Lewis; The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, by Aldon D. Morris; Let the Trumpet Sound, by Stephen B. Oates; My Soul is Rested, by Howell Raines; Odyssey: Journey Through Black America, by Earl and Miriam Selby.
Articles: “Origin
s of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” by David J. Garrow, in Southern Changes, October-December, 1985; “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956,” by J. Mills Thornton, in Alabama History Review, July 1980; “The Walking City, A History of the Montgomery Boycott,” a series by Norman W. Walton, in The Negro History Bulletin, October 6, 1956, November 20, 1956, February 20, 1957, April 20, 1957, and January 21, 1958.
Newspapers: Montgomery Advertiser, December 1955 through April 1956.
Eyes on the Prize Interviews: Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Azbell, Virginia Durr, Georgia Gilmore, Donie Jones, Coretta Scott King, Rufus A. Lewis, E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson.
Chapter Four
Books: The Long Shadow of Little Rock, by Daisy Bates; Crisis in the South: A Selection of Editorials from the Arkansas Gazette: Growing Up Southern, edited by Chris Mayfield; The Little Rock Crisis, by Tony Freyer; Crisis at Central High, by Elizabeth Huckaby; Little Rock U.S.A.: Materials for Analysis, by Wilson Record and Jane Cassels Record.
Articles: Time, September 23, 1957 and October 7, 1957.
Newspapers: Arkansas Democrat, September 23, 1957; New York Times, September 23–26, 1957; Washington Post, September 22, 1957; Washington Star, September 25, 26, 1957.
Interviews: From the Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center: Wiley Branton, Luther Hodges.
Eyes on the Prize Interviews: Harold Engstrom, Orval Faubus, Ernest Green, Marcia Webb Lecky, Melba Patullo Beals, Craig Rains, Arthur Shores.
Chapter Five
Books: Transformation of Southern Politics, by Jack Bass and Walter De Vries; John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, by Carl Brauer; In Struggle, by Clayborne Carson; Nashville Since the 1920s, by Don H. Doyle; Lay Bare the Heart, by James Farmer; Black Protest, edited by Joanne Grant; Black Ballots, by Steven F. Lawson; The New Negro, edited by LeRoy Locke; CORE, by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick; Kennedy Justice, by Victor Navasky; Freedom Ride, by James Peck; My Soul Is Rested, by Howell Raines; A Thousand Days, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; Negroes With Guns, by Robert F. Williams; Of Kennedys and Kings, by Harris Wofford.
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