A portrait of civil rights pioneer Barbara Johns was unveiled this week in our nation's capitol:Johns, then 16, led a 1951 student strike in Prince Edward County that led to the inclusion of Virginia in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation.
The portrait depicts Johns on April 23, 1951, the day of the student strike. It was painted by Richmond native Louis Briel.
In 2007, Mr. Thomas told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that prayer had helped him through the integration struggle. He said that one Sunday at church he heard the hymn “Lord, Don’t Move My Mountain, Just Give Me the Strength to Climb,” inspiring him to pray for strength, rather than for the acceptance of his classmates.
“It seemed that overnight, things stopped being so bad,” he said. “The same things were happening, but they didn’t hurt me as much. I didn’t feel like I was a failure. I felt victorious because I made it through the day.”
The FBI’s investigation into the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers may represent the nation’s last and best chance to prosecute unpunished killings from the nation’s civil rights era.
"It is one of the very few viable cases left," said former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones of Birmingham, who led the successful prosecution of two former Klansmen for a 1963 church bombing that killed four girls.
"The door is closing quickly," he said. "There's not much time left."
From 1958 to 1965, he trained his lens on the unfolding drama of civil rights as a news photographer for the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser and Life magazine.
His shockingly graphic images -- of police dogs attacking protesters or marchers being assaulted by powerful water hoses -- helped propel what had been a regional dispute onto the national stage.
As his photographs created national outrage, they quickened the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to John Kaplan, a University of Florida journalism professor who wrote his master's thesis on Moore.
"He had the courage to stand up in the face of danger and let Americans know what was really happening, through his work," Kaplan told The Times. "That is why he is an unsung hero."
So far the authors haven't been able to track down two phone calls made to Mississippi. Each number was unlisted.
One was to south Jackson: (601) 372-3537.
The other was to Laurel: (601) 428-8829.
In those days, Laurel was the headquarters of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi and the home of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. Bowers' business, Sambo Amusement, had an unlisted number then.
FBI records mention the White Knights' offer of a $100,000 bounty to kill King — a bounty that Ray may have believed he would get if he killed King.
Georgia Congressman John Lewis strolled to the middle of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday and remembered the incident 45 years ago when he and other marchers were beaten on the day known as "Bloody Sunday."
Lewis spoke about the beating he and other marchers received during the 1965 march. He then joined about 10,000 in a recreation of the 1965 march. Marchers included Civil Rights foot soldiers and civil rights leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
"Almighty God ... is listening and is recording your acts, thoughts and deeds. One by one you will give account to him," Killen wrote in a six-page letter obtained by The Clarion-Ledger from a Klansman. His lawyer confirmed the letter is indeed Killen's.
District Attorney Mark Duncan, who along with Attorney General Jim Hood prosecuted Killen, responded, "I don't have any trouble standing before God with my role in it."
In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Killen, now 85, on three counts of manslaughter for his role in the Klan's June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, commonly known as the Mississippi Burning case.
The FBI is reexamining the killings. Four suspects in the case are still alive.
In 1950, Topeka, Kan. resident Oliver Brown tried to enroll his daughter in an all-white school. She was denied, but that paved the way to the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka.
"[Brown] didn't understand why he had to walk his little daughter by a school to get a to another school to get an education," says Denny Whayne, who knew the Brown family.
Brown lent his name to what became the landmark civil rights. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled separate but equal wasn't equal.
"They didn't have the types of facilities and the types of equipment and books and things," says Wes Pratt, Coordinator of Diversity Outreach and Recruitment at Missouri State University.
Shortly after, Springfield schools were integrated. The city's black high school, Lincoln, had its last graduating class in 1955.
"So the, if the seniors wanted to graduate from Lincoln, they could, then they closed it," says Whayne.
Four years later, Oliver Brown become pastor of a Springfield's Benton Ave. AME Church. His girls entered the Springfield School system.
"Easy to get along with. They didn't try to act better than anybody. They didn't try to put the bourgeois on us because they were involved in the case," says Whayne, who graduated from Central High School in 1963.
Linda Brown graduated from Central in 1961. Her father died in 1961... a month after seeing his daughter graduate from an integrated school.
Brown benefited from the same education as Springfield's white students, and with it, walked into the history books Springfield students now study.
"I think it shows a lot about the school and how it's progressed historically," says Taylor Fairbank, Central High School senior.
"The fact that Linda Brown went here, just shows that Central's diverse background has some support, and we've always been a diverse school," says senior Delanie Cooper.
Central's a school that's proud of its diversity.
"I don't see people in races. I just see them as potential bus friends. I know that sounds really cheesy," laughs Cooper.
And it's proud of its history.
"It's about the history. She was part of history, involved in Central High School. Her family was one of the many families that made it happen, that fought, that fight the good fight, in order to see that everybody was treated equally," says Whayne.
Linda Brown-Thompson now lives back in Topeka, Kan. She declined to be interviewed for this story.
She now tours the country, giving lectures on the case, emphasizing that her family was just one of thirteen involved.
Edgar Ray Killen, an 85-year-old former saw mill operator and one-time Baptist preacher, was convicted in 2005 of manslaughter based in part on testimony from a mistrial 40 years ago in Mississippi.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court seeks millions of dollars in damages and a declaration that Killen's rights were violated when the FBI allegedly used a gangster known as "The Grim Reaper" during its investigation.
"Money is secondary, we really just want the truth out," said Robert A. Ratliff of Mobile, Ala., who represents Killen. "What we're looking for is the complete, unredacted FBI file. Stand up and tell us what happened."
Killen has maintained his innocence in the killings. He is serving a 60-year sentence at a prison in central Mississippi.
Ratliff said one of the defense lawyers, the late Clayton Lewis, who represented Killen and several others in a 1967 federal trial was a paid FBI informant.
And, he said, known gangster and killer Gregory Scarpa Sr. was hired by the FBI allegedly for $30,000 to coerce witnesses to tell where the bodies were buried and who put them there.
The FBI has never acknowledged using Scarpa. FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden had not seen the lawsuit and had no immediate comment.
Killen walked out of federal court in 1967 because the jury couldn't reach a verdict.
Some of the information and testimony from that trial was later used to convict him, when many witnesses were dead and he no longer had the chance to question his accusers, Ratliff said. Some of that testimony was based on information gathered by Lewis and Scarpa, he said.
Stories about Scarpa, who died in 1994, has been the stuff of gangland lore. But in 2007, Scarpa's mistress testified in an unrelated case involving an FBI agent.
Linda Schiro said she came to Mississippi with Scarpa and he once shoved a gun into a Klansman's mouth to get information for the FBI. Her entire testimony during that trial was later questioned, though, and an FBI agent accused of conspiring in a mob murder spree was cleared.
Still, after that trial, New York Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach said he was troubled by Schiro's testimony and referenced the Mississippi Klansman story.
"That a thug like Scarpa would be employed by the federal government to beat witnesses and threaten them at gunpoint to obtain information ... is a shocking demonstration of the government's unacceptable willingness to employ criminality to fight crime," the judge said.
The lawsuit also claims Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who helped prosecute Killen in 2005, was complacent in a "conspiracy of silence" for knowing about the FBI's alleged improper conduct.
John Lewis knew he was talking to students, so he came to Charlotte's Central Piedmont Community College on Thursday with a simple prod.
His generation of students, he told them, "got in the way and got in trouble - but good trouble."
Against their parents' wishes, they sat at "whites-only" lunch counters in Southern dime stores asking for service and refusing to leave until they got it. They rode buses into the Deep South to test a Supreme Court ban on segregated bus stations. They marched to vote.
Many were beaten, and some died for it.
Much good came from their "trouble-making" - segregated restrooms, hotels, theaters and restaurants were banned after the 1964 Civil Rights Act; literacy tests and poll taxes were outlawed by the Voting Rights Act a year later.
"When people are not treated right, you have an obligation to do something about it," said Lewis, the 12-term U.S. House member from Georgia and civil rights warrior who walked arm-in-arm with the movement's titans.
" ... So get in the way, get in trouble - but good trouble."
About a hundred had exited the church when they heard the voice of Sheriff T.O. Harris, amplified over a loudspeaker: "This is an unlawful assembly. You are hereby ordered to disperse. Go home or go back in the church."
James Dobynes, a church minister, called out: "May we pray before we go back?"
Harris did not respond. Suddenly, all the streetlights went out. Within seconds, reporters began to hear wood cracking against bone, thudding into flesh, people screaming. Using their clubs, two state troopers began beating the minister, who had gone to his knees to pray and now cried out: "Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Have mercy. Jesus!"
Local thugs joined in the melee, attacking churchgoers as well as reporters and photographers. NBC reporter Richard Valeriani was clubbed and suffered a bloody head wound. Someone slugged UPI photographer Pete Fisher while others took his camera and smashed it on the ground. Other photographers had their cameras sprayed with black paint. As a result, not one photo of this bloody police riot was taken. (Many years later, artist Jonathan Frost created a series of paintings based on historical accounts of the riot and events that followed.)
The church's doorway was jammed. People could not go back; so, they began to run, seeking refuge in a neighboring funeral parlor, homes and other buildings close to the church. Jimmie Lee tried to shepherd his mother and 82-year-old grandfather to safety, but a trooper knocked the older man to the ground. Jimmie Lee picked him up and carried him into Mack's Cafe, where a dozen or more people had sought sanctuary. On Col. Lingo's orders, state troopers charged into the cafe and began swinging their clubs, smashing the light fixtures, spewing glass throughout the room until all that was left was one bare bulb in a far corner.
One trooper knocked Viola Jackson to the floor. When Jimmie Lee sprang forward to shield his mother, the trooper grabbed Jackson and pushed him into a cigarette machine. Without warning, a second trooper, James Bonard Fowler, drew his revolver and shot Jackson twice in the abdomen. The powder burns on Jackson's torso indicated the unarmed man had been shot at point-blank range.
Phoebe Ferguson found it "daunting" when she learned her grandfather prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case that made segregated schools and even train travel the law of the land.
On the flip side of that case, Keith Plessy is humbled to be the descendant of Homer Plessy, a black man arrested in 1892 when he rode in a white-only railway car in New Orleans.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson became synonymous in the United States with the doctrine of "separate but equal," meaning separate facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were equal. It was applied to schools, restaurants, theaters, restrooms and other public facilities.
Playing for the hometown Dodgers, Bragan was part of the group of players that objected to Jackie Robinson's addition to the Brooklyn club. After spending time with Robinson, Bragan quickly relented. "After just one road trip, I saw the quality of Jackie the man and the player," Bragan told mlb.com in 2005. "I told Mr. Rickey I had changed my mind and I was honored to be a teammate of Jackie Robinson."Bragan quickly relented. "After just one road trip, I saw the quality of Jackie the man and the player. I told Mr. Rickey I had changed my mind and I was honored to be a teammate of Jackie Robinson."
Nash will speak at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 4 in the Benes Rooms of Ohio Wesleyan University’s Hamilton-Williams Campus Center, 40 Rowland Ave., Delaware. Her presentation, “The Civil Rights Movement: A Fifty-Year Perspective,” will include time for audience questions, and is free and open to the public. Her presentation kicks off the university’s commemoration of Black History Month.
“Ms. Nash is a towering figure in the freedom struggle,” said history professor Michael Flamm, Ph.D., who is coordinating her Ohio Wesleyan visit. “She provides a personal and inspirational perspective that no textbook or lecture could. I hope everyone comes to hear her speak about her extraordinary life and her timely thoughts on civil rights and race relations in the 21st century.”
In spring 1960, Nash publicly questioned Mayor Ben West about the morality of segregation, resulting in his pronouncement that Nashville’s lunch counters should be open to everyone. She then helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, through which she planned and publicized lunch counter sit-ins and “freedom rides” throughout the South.
In 1962, while living in Mississippi, Nash was jailed for teaching African American children the techniques of direct nonviolent protest. Her ideas and efforts were instrumental in 1963’s March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Later, she helped to develop the strategy for the Selma, Ala., right-to-vote movement, which led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For her efforts, Nash received a “Rosa Parks Award” from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, presented in 1965 by Dr. King himself.
Duncanwood was a 19-year-old freshman at San Francisco State University in 1964 when she volunteered, out of moral outrage, she said, to go to Mississippi to help with Freedom Summer, a project to encourage black citizens to register to vote.
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Even though her father told her she couldn't go, she got a ride with some other students to Ohio, where they were to be trained.
It didn't take long for fear to set in.
At the training site, Duncanwood said Rita Schwerner, the wife of civil-rights worker Michael Schwerner, addressed the 300 new arrivals and explained her husband and two other workers had been missing for 16 hours and were presumed dead. They'd been murdered, it turned out.
At the week-long training, Duncanwood found out much more about civil-rights abuses in the South. She also was taught how to protect her head if police tried to beat her, and she learned rules to try to be safe, such as always to travel in groups and never to leave home after dark.
When she and other new workers arrived in Mississippi by train, two welcoming parties awaited them, she said. The first was a group of about 50 whites who carried signs and shouted insults. The second was a much larger group of blacks, who were very happy to see them.
The blacks took them to a local church for further orientation. But before long, the sheriff appeared at the church saying he wanted the 80 or so volunteers to report to his office.
There, he lectured them on how they were misguided and ought to just go home, she said. The bad people were the black people, he said. Their men robbed white people and raped women.
Duncanwood said she lived with two other women volunteers in the home of an older black couple who grew cotton on five acres. The house was very simple with an outdoor privy. They bathed in a big tub.
Her hosts were warm but reserved at first, for they'd had no social contact with whites, she said.
In Mississippi, the system was rigged so that very few blacks could ever register to vote.
For one thing, they had to pay a poll tax, which few could afford.
Then, they were required to pass a test given by the county registrar of voters. The registrar would take a passage from the state constitution and ask the applicant to paraphrase it.
A third barrier was the fear of reprisal for even attempting to register, Duncanwood said.
The primary job assigned to Duncanwood and her roommates was teaching in a Freedom School.
They taught young blacks the history of their race and other subjects designed to help them break out of the apathy that kept them bound.
"They were so hungry to learn," she said.
One night, however, the church where the school was held was firebombed and destroyed — one of 67 bombings and burnings that occurred that summer.
Duncanwood and her friends were convinced the local sheriff was responsible because they saw his car going in the direction of the church and then leaving in the opposite direction just about the time the building burned.
True to the way things were done in Mississippi at that time, the sheriff tried to blame a young black activist for the deed, Duncanwood said.
Freedom School continued, less conveniently, in the churchyard.
She said she experienced hostility from whites many times that summer.
Once, she said she and a couple of other female volunteers tried to worship at the local Episcopal Church. They wanted to participate in Communion.
Soon after they'd sat down, she said, the elders of the church tapped them on the shoulders and told them they weren't welcome.
They walked out to the church's lobby and spoke to the elders there.
Duncanwood said she explained she'd been raised Episcopalian and that she wanted to join in Communion.
She said the men reiterated they should leave. Then they pulled their hands out of their pockets, revealing that they had on brass knuckles. The women went outside and found the tires on their car slashed.
In 1965, Lowery was also instrumental in the 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, where they pushed for voter rights. Before that march, King had said, "We are going to walk non-violent and peacefully, let the world and the nation know that we are tired now."
Lowery remembers that day like it was yesterday.
"I wasn't there bloody Sunday, but I went back and made the march and I carried the demands of the march to Governor Wallace," he said.
Still, he said there's still a lot of work to be done.
"We've got 300 mayors, black mayors, black president, yet within the shadows of city halls and the shadow of the Capitol there are people living in poverty, with little hope," he said.
Lowery said having President Obama in office should help to uplift us all.
"The fact that this country has moved to where they can elect a black president ought to inspire us to work harder to make the country even better," he said.
King's dream is still alive and well today. It lives, "in the hearts of millions of people," Lowery said.
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This week, as North Carolina celebrates King's birth, it will also remember the thousands of students - many of them from North Carolina - who risked beatings and even murder to integrate lunch counters, buses, hotels, schools and voting booths.
"I knew I could be killed, but it didn't matter," remembers the Rev. David Forbes of Raleigh, one of the founding members of SNCC. "It was time. If we had to give up some blood, so be it."
It started with a sit-in
On Feb. 1, 1960, students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now N.C. A&T State University) sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, kicking off a wave of student-led sit-ins that led to violent confrontations, and eventually desegregation, in restaurants across the South. The idea spread like wildfire, mobilizing thousands of students - and King saw an opportunity.
In April 1960, his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pulled together a meeting of student leaders from all over the South. They chose to hold it at Shaw University, home to an active student movement and the alma mater of one of King's top aides, Ella Baker.
The idea was to harness the collective energy of students, who until then had been protesting in isolated groups within their own cities, and coordinate nonviolent protests.
At the time, Forbes was a Shaw student and the head of the Raleigh Sit-In Movement. Earlier that year, he had organized Raleigh's first sit-in at a downtown Woolworth. He had earned the distinction of being the first sit-in protester arrested in the Capital City.
He and hundreds of fellow students were gathering nearly every night to discuss strategy and train in nonviolent protest tactics, inspired by King. Their philosophy was to dress well, treat people respectfully and never to fight back against violent attacks. They learned to cover their heads and turn their backs to the blows.
"As King would say, love is more powerful than dynamite," Forbes said. "White folks use dogs and tanks and dynamite. White folks can quell riots, but they had not had any experience in dealing with love and passivity."
Kerry, D-Mass., said the bill, which failed in 2006, can pass this year in honor of King. "I want the world to know what he stood for," Kerry said. "And I want his personal history preserved and examined by releasing all of his records."
The bill calls for creating a Martin Luther King Records Collection at the National Archives that would include all government records related to King. The bill also would create a five-member independent review board that would identify and make public all documents from agencies including the FBI — just as a review board in 1992 made public documents related to the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination.
ILLUMINATING RECORDS: MLK-LBJ phone conversations
"This is personal for someone who came of age in the civil rights movement and was inspired by Dr. King," Kerry said. "He challenged the conscience of my generation and still moves a new generation of volunteers and activists to speak out against prejudice and suffering, wherever they might take place."
