At this year’s convocation and other campus events, MSU honored the legacy of hundreds of former Morgan State students who played a pivotal role in the sit-in movement seven years before the widespread launch of the tactic.

Back in 1953, Morgan State students were lining up daily at a lunch counter in Read’s Drugstore in Baltimore, demanding desegregation. A manager or waitress would try to lure the daily protesting bunch from their seats by reading Maryland’s trespassing statute. The students didn’t budge.

Picketing, sit-ins, and hundreds of arrests eventually led to some changes in segregated Baltimore. As a result of Morgan State’s relentless student activism, in 1955 owners of Read’s Drugstore opened their lunch counter to Blacks; in 1959 Arundel Ice Cream also began to change their practices.

This year’s festivities, surrounding the commemoration of the brave MSU alumni, were accompanied by a range of students, faculty, visitors, and influential Black leaders from around the country. A list of attendees included John Lewis, the Freedom Rider-turned-congressman; Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings; Lt. Governor Anthony Brown; and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

“It is important that our students know the legacy of their school and whose footsteps they are walking today,” said MSU President David Wilson as he stood at the unveiling ceremony of the recreated lunch counter at Read’s Drugstore. Along the walls near the lunch counter exhibit is a stunning pictorial display that takes viewers on a tour of Civil Rights activism in Baltimore from 1947-1963.

University of Maryland law professor Larry S. Gibson, the person responsible for the timeless exhibit, donated his collection to MSU and it will remain in the main hall of the University Student Center.

While speaking to a crowd at Morgan’s campus Gibson said, “Finally we’re going to get some history straight.”

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The network said Wednesday it will air a documentary in February culled primarily from local news footage in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights leader was murdered on April 4, 1968. Most of the footage hasn’t been seen on television since it originally aired.

Many such moments are lost since local television stations usually taped over old broadcasts or threw away film reels, said David Royle, executive producer at the Smithsonian Channel. But some University of Memphis professors sensed in March 1968 that civil rights history was happening with a strike of local sanitation workers, the event that drew King to Memphis, and they collected footage of the events through King’s murder and its aftermath.

“What they were doing was absolutely visionary — and very unusual,” Royle said.

It enabled the production of a documentary with a vivid, “you-are-there” feel and the uncovering of some fascinating moments.

Royle said he was drawn, for instance, to coverage of King’s famed “mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple the night before the assassination. Cameras followed King after the speech to where he slumped in a chair, and viewers could sense the man’s fragility.

The producer said he recognized how the existence of such film was unusual when he researched an older documentary on Sam Ervin, the North Carolina senator who chaired the Watergate investigative committee in the 1970s. Royle said he traveled across North Carolina and could find only a minute and a half of tape of Ervin in his home state.

Another stroke of luck for Tom Jennings, who produced “MLK: The Assassination Tapes,” was finding Vince Hughes, who was a 20-year-old Memphis police dispatcher on his second day of work when King was killed. Hughes kept audiotapes of police calls on that day and crime scene photos from where King was shot, and the material was made available for the film.

Jennings also went to radio station WDIA to collect interviews from black Memphis residents at the time. The white-owned and operated TV stations at the time had little such material, Royle said.

“This (documentary) plunges you into the immediacy of the period and allows you to absorb it the way people at the time absorbed it,” Royle said. “There’s something that’s electric about that. It gets you to sit up and pay attention.”

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Byron de la Beckwith. Sam Bowers. Bobby Frank Cherry. Edgar Ray Killen. James Ford Seale.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, and age and infirmity offer no refuge for the guilty, these cases have proved. But if justice has an enemy, it is time. And now, officials are conceding that the spectacle of juries passing judgment on such aging killers is just about past.

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The Department of Justice, under its 5-year-old “Cold Case Initiative” and the 2007 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, has combed through that dark period of American history, seeking any cases that could still be prosecuted. Isolating 111 incidents involving 124 deaths, investigators have sought to determine whether those who died were victims of racially motivated crimes – and then whether there’s anyone left to charge.

In about two-thirds of those cases, FBI agents have hand-delivered letters to next of kin, informing them that the government had taken things as far as they could.

In some cases, all of the suspects are dead; in others, suspect individuals have been acquitted in the past and cannot legally be retried. In a few, the agency can find no evidence that a crime was racially motivated – or even that the death resulted from foul play.

“We regret to inform you that we are unable to proceed further with a federal criminal investigation of this matter …, ” a DOJ official wrote to the daughter of Harry and Harriette Moore, who died following the dynamiting of their Florida home six decades ago. “Please accept our sincere condolences on the loss of your parents.”

Roughly three dozen of the reviewed investigations – including the oldest, the Florida lynching of Claude Neal in 1934 – remain open.

Although DOJ reported to Congress recently that some state prosecutions are “potentially viable,” the passage of time and other “impediments” make the prospect of trials unlikely.

“Few, if any, of these cases will be prosecuted,” the agency acknowledged.

Civil rights activist Alvin Sykes, who did as much as anyone to push for this effort, is disappointed.

“I said, `The American people won’t believe you made a full-faith effort if there wasn’t a manhunt,’” says the head of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, named for the 14-year-old black boy whose lynching in Mississippi helped spark the modern civil rights movement. “They made some efforts, but they didn’t make an outreach, a manhunt.”

But Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says it was clear from the outset that “most of the cases that were solvable have been solved.” Even without new prosecutions, he says, a page has been turned.

“I think there is some utility in closing cases, if for no better reason than to assure the families that what can be done at this late date has been done,” says Potok, director of the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization’s Intelligence Project. “These are people who have been completely left out of the justice process for many decades. So the government does owe them a debt of attention. So I wouldn’t say that it was a total waste of taxpayer money.”

During the darkest days of the civil rights struggle, when all-white juries acquitted obvious perpetrators or Southern state officials flat refused to prosecute racial killings, families could still turn to the federal government for some modicum of justice. A few years in prison for a federal civil rights violation was better than no punishment at all.

Decades later, when prosecutors in the “new South” began reopening some of those old cases, the Department of Justice again stepped forward. Although the statutes of limitations on most federal crimes had long since run out, the FBI’s files were filled with yellowed statements from witnesses or informants, some long dead, that might help locals build a case.

These collaborations – combined with the work of some dogged reporters, activists and persistent family members – produced some stunning convictions in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. The most recent was the June 2007 conviction of Seale, a reputed former Ku Klux Klansman whom many had believed long dead.

A federal jury in Jackson, Miss., convicted Seale, then 72, of kidnapping and conspiracy in the torture and drowning of two black youths in 1964. He was sentenced to three life terms and died Aug. 2 in an Indiana prison.

The bureau also “lent its assistance” in the case of former Alabama state trooper James Fowler, who last year pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the Feb. 18, 1965, shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson following a protest march in Marion, Ala. Fowler, 77, was sentenced to six months in jail.

After Killen was convicted of manslaughter in 2005 in the so-called “Mississippi Burning” case, activists pushed for charges against a list of what they said were viable prosecution targets remaining; this case of three civil rights workers’ 1964 murder remains technically open. “I HOPE we’re not done,” says John Gibson, executive director of the Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center.

On the still-open list are a couple of cases that fall into a peculiar category: Ones in which someone was acquitted by an all-white jury but has now admitted to the killing. So the possibility of vigilantism is among considerations in deciding when to close such cases, says FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who until recently was in charge of the cold-case effort.

“How does the Department of Justice write a letter that SAYS that?” she asks. “The person that killed your father is very much alive, still lives in the hometown where you live, and admitted doing it … and there’s nothing that we can do or the state can do.”

In some cases, like the one against Seale, the Department of Justice used non-civil rights statutes – such as kidnapping resulting in death, or involving killings on federal lands – to overcome the statute of limitations challenge.

But many of those closed seemed already hopelessly cold when the initiative began.

The FBI sent an 8,000-page file to Mississippi officials on the August 1955 slaying of Till, the Chicago boy who was tortured and shot for whistling at a white woman. Photos of Till’s mangled corpse lying in an open coffin outraged the nation and galvanized civil rights activists.

The admitted killers were long dead, but some thought a case could have been made against others who might have played a role before or after the killing. A local grand jury failed to return any indictments, and the case was officially closed in December 2007.

Although the Till act does not require it, the FBI has provided detailed reports to the next of kin in cases that were being closed, “in an effort to nonetheless bring some sense of closure to the family members of these victims.” Despite a media campaign, the agency has managed to locate relatives for only 95 of the 124 victims.

The Associated Press obtained redacted copies of several letters through the Freedom of Information Act. Survivors of some victims agreed to share their letters with AP reporters.

Some families are satisfied that the FBI had done all it could do to bring their loved ones’ killers to justice. Others, who had allowed themselves to hope, feel violated all over again.

James Ware never expected much from the reopening of his brother Virgil’s case.

On Sept. 15, 1963, the two were on their way home from a junkyard outside Birmingham, Ala. They’d just started a new paper route and were looking for parts to cobble together a second bicycle, with dreams of earning enough to buy themselves a used car.

That morning, just a few miles away, four black girls had died when a KKK bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. As they flew down the Docena-Sandusky Road, the Ware brothers – 16-year-old James pedaling, Virgil, 13, balanced on the handlebars – had not heard of the bombing and had no idea how dangerous it was to be out that day.

Michael Farley and Larry Joe Sims, two 16-year-old white boys, were riding a motorbike down the same road, a miniature Confederate flag flapping behind them, when they came across two friends who said they’d seen a couple of black kids throwing rocks up the way. Farley reportedly opened his jacket to reveal a recently purchased .22-caliber, pearl-handled pistol, saying, “We’ll take care of them.”

As they approached the two black boys, Farley handed the pistol to Sims. Sims fired twice, and Virgil fell.

At 64, James Ware’s memory of that day is still vivid.

“Ware,” Virgil gasped as his older brother leaned over him. “I’m shot.”

“No, you’re not,” James recalls saying. “Get up.” But his brother, wounded in the cheek and chest, never moved or spoke again.

Farley and Sims were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Sims, an Eagle Scout, claimed that his eyes were closed when he shot, and that he was only trying to scare the other boys. After a jury convicted Sims of second-degree manslaughter, Farley pleaded guilty to the same charge. Each was sentenced to seven months, suspended.

James Ware received his letter in late March.

Despite the light sentences, the two men could not be retried in state court (“jeopardy has attached”), and a five-year statute of limitations precluded federal civil rights charges against anyone in the case, the letter said.

James Ware never accepted that the shooting was an accident. But he had long ago accepted the apologies of Farley and Sims, and had considered the case closed.

If nothing else, the renewed investigation rescued Virgil from obscurity, he says. “I don’t see what else could be done. He got full recognition. That’s what I wanted for him – to be known about.”

But to some families who have waited decades for justice, the FBI’s letters have brought no peace.

When lounge manager Jasper Greenwood went missing in Vicksburg, Miss., on June 21, 1964, his family immediately suspected foul play. The FBI was told that Greenwood was allegedly last seen in the company of two white men.

By the time his body was found eight days later on a road outside Vicksburg, it was badly decomposed. A coroner’s inquest failed to identify a cause of death.

Linda Galvin, Greenwood’s granddaughter, says it was a cover-up. “The black funeral home told me that he was castrated and he had what looked to be a stab wound in his throat area,” Galvin told the AP. “None of that showed up in the FBI report.”

But according to the FBI’s letter to the family, agents had interviewed funeral home director W.H. Jefferson in 1964, and he “denied that he thought the hole had been caused by anything other than `nature’ …” The bureau obtained a copy of the Vicksburg Police Department’s report, which concluded that Greenwood had suffered a fatal heart attack while meeting with a married woman on the local “lover’s lane.”

Family members have suggested that Greenwood might have been targeted for his close association with assassinated NAACP activist Medgar Evers. But the letter noted that Charles Evers, then the NAACP’s Mississippi field director, told the FBI that Greenwood “was not active in voter registration efforts or the civil rights movement.”

None of that satisfies Greenwood’s daughter, Rosemary Domino of Jacksonville, Fla. “If they say it’s closed, then it’s closed,” she says. “But the FBI can be wrong.”

The families of Adlena Hamlett and Birdia Keglar also have lingering doubts.

Hamlett, 78, was a retired schoolteacher and one of the first blacks to register to vote in Tallahatchie County, Miss. Keglar, 57, was an organizer for the NAACP who had sued the local sheriff after she was prevented from paying her poll tax. Each had testified before a congressional commission in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The women died on Jan. 11, 1966, as they were returning home from a secret meeting in Jackson with then-U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. For years, relatives and certain researchers have insisted that the car was run off the road by the Klan.

Keglar’s granddaughter, Nina Zachery, 76, wept as she described seeing the body at the funeral home. Keglar appeared to have been decapitated.

Zachery was told that the driver of the car, Grafton Gray, supposedly played dead and could hear the women being tortured. “When my family members would try to talk to him, he would not,” she recently told the AP.

The FBI tracked down the wreck’s lone survivor, backseat passenger Richard Simpson, a white activist from Massachusetts, who confirmed the basic details contained in a Mississippi Highway Patrol report, the bureau’s letter said. The accident report said a car on the wrong side of the road struck the activists’ car head-on.

“The impact caused the hood of (the) car to break loose and move through the windshield, fatally injuring” Hamlett and Keglar, the FBI determined.

On a gloriously sunny spring day this year, two FBI agents appeared at 79-year-old Lila Hamlett’s door in Kansas City, Mo., to deliver their letter.

Dated May 27, it said there was “insufficient evidence to indicate that a racially motivated homicide occurred.”

The agents asked if Hamlett had any questions. She had lots, but she didn’t bother asking. If the letter was intended to provide closure, it failed.

“It’s just an unsolved case,” she says. “Whatever it was, it’ll never be revealed now. And I just have to accept it.”

Some families’ refusal to accept what seems like solid evidence is understandable to Patricia A. Turner, a professor of African-American studies and the vice provost for undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis.

The black community hasn’t forgotten longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s reluctance to investigate civil rights violence, or his attempts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr., she says. And when you consider episodes such as the Tuskegee experiments, in which scientists allowed black men with syphilis to go untreated so they could study the effects, it’s easy to believe the government is capable of doing – and covering up – just about anything, she says.

“And certainly anything related to something as major as a death, the family members are going to have come up with a narrative, a story that fits their understanding of the world and who has power in it – and who doesn’t have power in it.” says Turner, author of the 1994 book, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture.”

Activists were elated when the initiative was launched, reviewing the old cases. But much of that joy has since faded.

Lawmakers had promised annual funding over a 10-year span: $10 million per year to the FBI, $2 million for state and local law enforcement, and more. But only a fraction has been appropriated.

“It hasn’t lived up to its potential,” says Sykes. “I’m disappointed.”

So is Juanita Evangeline Moore.

Her father, Harry T. Moore, organized the NAACP’s Brevard County, Fla., branch in 1934 and served as the organization’s first statewide executive secretary. He and his wife taught school in the area south of Cape Canaveral until their activism got them fired.

On Christmas Day 1951 – which was also the couple’s 25th wedding anniversary – a bomb went off beneath the floor in their bedroom. The blast collapsed the front end of their modest frame house; their daughter Annie Rosalea, who was in the next room, found them lying at the bottom of a crater, covered in debris.

Harry Moore died on the way to the hospital. His wife died nine days later.

The FBI investigated at the time, but no one was charged. A state investigation launched in 1991 turned up little new evidence. In 2004, Florida authorities reopened the case. A 20-month investigation produced the names of four likely suspects – all by then dead.

The FBI closed its second investigation into the case in mid-July. In a letter to Moore, Paige M. Fitzgerald, deputy chief in charge of the cold case initiative, reported that four dead men already identified were “the only subjects credibly linked to the bombing.”

“Therefore, we have no choice but to close our investigation,” Fitzgerald concluded.

Moore, who believes the FBI knew about some of these people years ago, says, “They have waited too long and they have bungled the investigations.”

She chokes up as she recalls returning home from Washington, D.C., and standing at the foot of her dying mother’s bed.

“I hate all white people,” she spat. Harriette Moore chided her.

“She said, `Evangeline. You can’t do that. It would make you ugly, and you’ve always been my beautiful daughter. I don’t want to ever hear you say that again.’”

Moore, 81, says her faith has allowed her let go of that hatred of the killers who went unpunished.

“God,” she says, “has already judged them.”

Those who knew him best urged others to continue the tireless example he set, working long after victory in the 1963 campaign to liberate the segregated Southern city he called home. Fellow preachers, foot soldiers from the movement, and members of his family told a crowd gathered at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church that for all of his heroic efforts, the fiery minister’s work remains undone.

Attorney General Eric Holder told the audience: “Without him, there would be no me.”

“We are bound by more than sorrow,” Holder said. “We are united by our shared admiration of Reverend Shuttlesworth, by our deep appreciation of his legacy, and perhaps most importantly by our collective responsibility to carry on his critical work, and to live up to the example of service that he left to us.”

A parade of clergy lined up to give Shuttlesworth his due at the memorial, which lasted nearly three hours. Five decades ago, when a little-known black Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King took the helm of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955, Shuttlesworth was already in Birmingham trying to start a movement, but hardly anyone was paying attention.

Shuttlesworth was from a small church. His credentials and pedigree made it easy for local whites to dismiss him as a radical. Until King came to Birmingham, Shuttlesworth couldn’t get the national press to recognize his city as the embodiment of the horrors of the segregated South.

He was just another black preacher getting beat up, said former Atlanta mayor, congressman and United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, who worked alongside King and Shuttlesworth in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All three men helped establish the organization in 1957.

“They were sued together, they helped organize SCLC together,” Young said of King and Shuttlesworth. “He wanted the spotlight very much, but there wasn’t but one Martin Luther King.”

It was King who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and went on to become the icon of the civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth, who was overshadowed in life by his comrade in the movement, was again eclipsed by King in death.

Though he died nearly three weeks ago, Shuttlesworth is only now being buried on Monday. The reason for the delay: The dedication of the King Memorial on the National Mall, sending most of Shuttlesworth’s civil rights colleagues to Washington last weekend.

Had they not been there, they would have likely been in Birmingham remembering Shuttlesworth.

“His friends and Martin’s friends were the same,” Young said. “But you don’t have two memorials at the same time if you want your friends to come.” Shuttlesworth’s funeral will be Monday.

Among the events held in Shuttlesworth’s honor was a public viewing of his body at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and a panel discussion at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

In tribute, many at the 16th Street Baptist Church — where four black girls were killed in a bombing before Sunday services on September 15, 1963 — recalled Shuttlesworth’s courage but also called on those left to mourn him to be courageous. Holder said Shuttlesworth was a warrior for justice and advocate for peace who has left behind a legacy for the country to follow.

The attorney general used the occasion to point out Alabama’s strict new immigration, considered the toughest crackdown in the nation. He said too many in Alabama “are willing to turn their backs on our immigrant past” and he would not let that happen. The Obama administration is among the parties suing the state to block the law.

The Rev. Tommie Lewis urged Holder to remember Alabama in his duties.

“We got some serious issues down here,” Lewis said, looking at the attorney general. “Our issues are not going to be handled between these mountains, down in this valley.”

There was also candlelight vigil for Shuttlesworth across the street in Kelly Ingram Park, made famous the same year when news footage of policemen and firemen unleashing dogs and blasting water hoses on defenseless civil rights marchers was broadcast to a shocked international audience.

Long before the television cameras arrived, Shuttlesworth was there, organizing many such nonviolent protests.

Shuttlesworth survived a Christmas 1956 bombing that destroyed his home, an assault during a 1957 protest, chest injuries when Birmingham authorities turned the hoses on demonstrators in 1963 and countless arrests. He moved to Ohio to pastor a church in the early 1960s, but returned frequently to Alabama for key protests. He came back to live in the Birmingham area after he retired a few years ago.

“He was able to see how the civil rights struggle kept reinventing itself in different forms,” said Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.”

“He was always there to make it clear that this was a continuous struggle.”

McWhorter said she never got the sense that Shuttlesworth was bitter about King overpowering the narrative of the movement, and that he never badmouthed King to her.

“He had a huge ego … but he never said anything like, ‘Oh, I should’ve been the leader of the movement,’” she said. “He kind of recognized that he couldn’t have done what King did. But he was just such a key ingredient that it couldn’t have happened without him, either.”

Quoting from his book, “My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South,” former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, a Birmingham native, said at Sunday’s panel: “King’s name would’ve never touched immortality had it not been for Birmingham.”

In his 1963 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” King himself called Shuttlesworth “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters.”

After Shuttlesworth’s death on Oct. 5 — the same week the Rev. Joseph Lowery turned 89 and the Rev. Jesse Jackson turned 70 — Alabama lowered its state flags to half-mast.

“I really do feel like he has sort of gotten his due more and more over the last number of years,” McWhorter said. “Partly because he’s outlasted everybody, with distinction and class.”

Young agreed that Shuttlesworth ultimately received his due, and is recognized as one of the true heroes of the movement. Besides, he pointed out, attention is no substitute for longevity.

“Yes, Martin overshadowed him,” Young said of Shuttlesworth. “But he got to live to 89. Martin didn’t make it to 40.”

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala.— The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who was bombed, beaten and repeatedly arrested in the fight for civil rights and hailed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for his courage and energy, has died. He was 89.

Princeton Baptist Medical Center spokeswoman Jennifer Dodd confirmed he died at the Birmingham hospital Wednesday morning.

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Shuttlesworth, a former truck driver who studied religion at night, became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1953 and soon was an outspoken leader in the fight for racial equality.

“My church was a beehive,” Shuttlesworth once said. “I made the movement. I made the challenge. Birmingham was the citadel of segregation, and the people wanted to march.”

In his 1963 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” King called Shuttlesworth “one of the nation’s the most courageous freedom fighters … a wiry, energetic and indomitable man.”

He survived a 1956 bombing, an assault during a 1957 demonstration, chest injuries when Birmingham authorities turned fire hoses on demonstrators in 1963, and countless arrests.

“I went to jail 30 or 40 times, not for fighting or stealing or drugs,” Shuttlesworth told grade school students in 1997. “I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference.”

He visited frequently and remained active in the movement in Alabama even after moving in 1961 to Cincinnati, where he was a pastor for most of the next 47 years. He moved back to Birmingham in February 2008 for rehabilitation after a mild stroke. That summer, the once-segregated city honored him with a four-day tribute and named its airport after him; his statue stands outside the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

And in November 2008, Shuttlesworth watched from a hospital bed as Sen. Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first African-American president. The year before, Obama had pushed Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during a commemoration of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.

In the early 1960s, Shuttlesworth had invited King back to Birmingham. Televised scenes of police dogs and fire hoses being turned on black marchers, including children, in spring 1963 helped the rest of the nation grasp the depth of racial animosity in the Deep South.

“He marched into the jaws of death every day in Birmingham before we got there,” Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador who was an aide to King, said Wednesday.

Young said it was Shuttlesworth’s fearlessness that persuaded King to take the fight for equality to Birmingham.

“We shouldn’t have been strong enough to take on Birmingham … But God had a plan that was far better than our plan,” Young said. “Fred didn’t invite us to come to Birmingham. He told us we had to come.”

Referring to the city’s notoriously racist safety commissioner, Shuttlesworth would tell followers, “We’re telling ol’ ‘Bull’ Connor right here tonight that we’re on the march and we’re not going to stop marching until we get our rights.”

According to a May 1963 New York Times profile of Shuttlesworth, Connor responded to the word Shuttlesworth had been injured by the spray of fire hoses by saying: “I’m sorry I missed it. … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”

Fellow civil rights pioneer the Rev. Joseph Lowery said Shuttlesworth a courageous and determined leader.

“When God made Bull Connor, one of the real negative forces in this country, He was sure to make Fred Shuttlesworth.” Lowery said Wednesday.

While King went on to international fame, Shuttlesworth was relatively little known outside Alabama. But he was a key figure in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “4 Little Girls,” about the September 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black children.

He also gained attention in Diane McWhorter’s book “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

Shuttlesworth was born March 18, 1922, near Montgomery and grew up in Birmingham.

As a child, he knew he would either be a minister or a doctor and by 1943, he decided to enter the ministry. He began taking theological courses at night while working as a truck driver and cement worker during the day. He was licensed to preach in 1944 and ordained in 1948.

It was 1954 when King, then a pastor in Montgomery, came to Birmingham to give a speech and asked to stop by Bethel Baptist and meet Shuttlesworth. Shuttlesworth already knew the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who became a key aide to King, as they both attended Alabama State College, later known as Selma University.

Meanwhile, in Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in late 1955, prompting the boycott led by King that gave new life to the civil rights movement.

In January 1956, King’s Montgomery home was bombed while he attended a rally. Eleven months later, on Christmas night 1956, 16 sticks of dynamite were detonated outside Shuttlesworth’s bedroom as he slept at the Bethel Baptist parsonage. No one was injured in either bombing, although shards of glass and wood pierced Shuttleworth’s coat and hat, which were hanging on a hook.

The next day, Shuttlesworth led 250 people in a protest of segregation on buses in Birmingham.

In 1957, he was beaten by a mob when he tried to enroll two of his children in an all-white school in Birmingham.

In Cincinnati, Shuttlesworth left Revelation Baptist Church and became pastor of the Greater New Light Baptist Church in 1966. He also founded a foundation to help low-income people make down payments on homes.

In 2004, he was president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for about three months. The troubled organization’s board had suspended Shuttlesworth without giving a reason after he tried to fire a longtime official. He resigned, saying board members tried to micromanage the organization.

He was 84 when he retired as the pastor of Greater New Light in 2006. “The best thing we can do is be a servant of God,” he said in his final sermon. “It does good to stand up and serve others.”

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Maxine McNair, the mother of one of the young victims at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, joined hands with others as a crowd sang “We Shall Overcome” at the dedication. Bells tolled, the girls’ names were read out loud and a group of about 100 people went outside to view a stone tablet etched with the names of the victims and a Bible verse. The marker was erected along an outside wall at the spot where the powerful explosive was planted.

Church spokeswoman Carolyn McKinstry said tens of thousands of visitors stop each year at the church and often ask where the bomb was placed. The girls’ deaths shocked the nation and came to symbolize the depth of racial animosities in the South at the time of the nascent civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“Not a day goes by that we don’t have people coming by to ask,” said McKinstry, a childhood friend of the slain girls.

The bomb went off just before a Sunday morning worship service on Sept. 15, 1963, killing Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. Two more black youths, Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson, were shot to death later that day in violence that ensued.

The bombing occurred during a period when civil rights demonstrators were trying to end legalized racial segregation in Birmingham’s schools and other public areas. Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were convicted years later in the bombing, and one remains imprisoned.

At a ceremony in the sanctuary attended by about 100 people, the church bell tolled as Rev. Arthur Price read the names of the victims.

“Just as 9/11 has become a day of remembrance for our nation … the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church reminds us of the state of emergency that our nation was in in 1963,” Price told those gathered for the dedication.

The church is located across the street from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and draws many interested in the history of the civil rights era.

With the approach of the 50th anniversary of civil rights protests that saw authorities unleash fire hoses and police dogs on black youths marching for equal rights, the city has installed signs along a downtown Birmingham walking tour that include photographs taken during the demonstrations, some of which were led by the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“There is just a fascination with all the things that took place in Birmingham,” McKinstry said.

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The film intercuts archival footage shot by two Swedish television journalists who set out to chronicle the Black Power Movement in America between 1967 and 1975, reports HuffingtonPost.com

VIDEO:

We need to see these national identifiable heroes and see how they are speaking, their mannerisms, their clothes,” Glover said. “These were people involved in a journey. They’re not articulating theory, they’re articulating the practice.”

Read more at HuffingtonPost.com

An attorney for the state countered that convictions are presumed to be valid, and the justices should side with a judge who rejected the Rev. James L. Bevel’s bid for posthumous relief after hearing emotional testimony from the daughter he abused.

“The presumption of innocence that goes with a criminal defendant is gone once that person is convicted,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Virginia Theisen told the justices.

A ruling is likely in early November.

Bevel was the architect of the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala. He enlisted black schoolchildren to join in civil rights protests, and television images of them being knocked down by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs helped sway the public against segregation.

When he died in December 2008, he had served a few months of a 15-year sentence. The 72-year-old had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was appealing his conviction.

His attorney, Bonnie Hoffman, is seeking what’s known as an abatement, which is based on the theory that a conviction is not final until the appeals process is complete.

“An appeal is a fundamental step in the process,” Hoffman said. “When it’s terminated by death, the conviction should be abated.”

Abatement is an accepted concept in federal court and in many states. Virginia law is unclear, although Hoffman said the state Supreme Court has routinely abated the convictions of deceased appellants in the past.

Bevel’s case differs from most, however, because of his daughter’s testimony at a 2009 hearing. Aaralyn Mills, whose abuse as a teenager in the 1990s was the subject of her father’s trial, told Loudoun County Circuit Judge Burke McCahill that the conviction had given her closure.

“I wish I could just abate my memories and abate the whole experience, but the reality is it did happen,” Mills testified.

Mills, one of Bevel’s 16 children, was among a group of daughters who came forward in an effort to protect their youngest sister. According to trial testimony, Bevel considered it the parents’ duty to “sexually orient” their children. The four-day trial divided members of Bevel’s large family, with relatives testifying for both the prosecutor and defense.

The Associated Press does not usually identify victims of sex crimes, but Mills had agreed to make her name public.

McCahill praised Mills for her courage in coming forward and said her rights had to be considered. His ruling denying the abatement was upheld by the Virginia Court of Appeals.

Theisen argued that the concept of abatement is outdated, largely because of the criminal justice system’s growing interest in protecting victims’ rights.

Hoffman, who has said she has an ethical responsibility to her client to pursue the abatement, told the justices that she is sensitive to the plight of victims, but cases have to be decided on their merits.

A Baptist minister, Bevel was a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, two of the stalwart organizations that led efforts in the 1960s to desegregate the South. Decades later, he also helped organize the Million Man March.

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At the same time, civil rights veterans are taking time to remember Bayard Rustin, the march’s chief organizer.

The Washington Post reports:

“When the anniversary comes around, frankly I think of Bayard as much as I think of King,” says Eleanor Holmes Norton. “King could hardly have given the speech if the march had not been so well attended and so well organized. If there had been any kind of disturbance, that would have been the story.”

Read more at the Washington Post.

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The pardons were presented by Mayor William Bell during a city council meeting Tuesday morning. The pardons were authorized by an act approved by the Alabama Legislature in 2006.

The pardoned women are Betty J. King, Carolyn Louise King, Gwendolyn L. King, Patricia Rose Wooding, Sandra R. Wooding and Mariea Wooding. In 1964, Carolyn King, now known as C. Tasmiya King-Miller, integrated Jones Valley High School.

The six women were active in civil-rights era protests in Birmingham and all participated in the historic March on Washington in 1963.

There is no just comparison between America’s struggle to overcome the evils of slavery and the promotion of the lifestyle of homosexuality. It is preposterous for Mayor Bloomberg to degrade and minimize the plight of African-Americans in this civil rights struggle by equating it with the effort to push to legalize homosexual marriage.

Black Americans should not sit back and let Mayor Bloomberg compare the long struggle of their ancestors against American slavery to the current fight for a lifestyle choice. The effort to redefine marriage to include a man and a man or a woman and a woman can never be compared to the struggle against slavery.

Read The Whole Story

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The New York Times writes:

It is hard to imagine a feature film conveying the events with a more vivid sense of drama or suspense. The commentators — the riders themselves, historians, politicians, civil rights leaders — have mostly been chosen for an uncanny ability to convey the tension in a present-tense reconstruction. Blowhards and professors of the obvious have been excised, and the archival photographs and news clips have been edited down to those most affecting and lyrical.

WATCH THE FULL DOCUMENTARY AT PBS ONLINE

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Almena Lomax

Los Angeles, California– Almena Lomax, a civil rights activist and founder of the Los Angeles Tribune died March 25th at 95 years old.

Her son Michael Lomax, who is the president of the United Negro College Fund says that she died after a short illness.

She and her family moved from Los Angeles to the Deep South in the ’60s to be a part of the civil rights movement.

“She was a terrific writer…the only one of all the black newspapers at the time who really was fearless about exposing things as they were. She didn’t soft-pedal anything,” said veteran civil rights lawyer Leo Branton Jr.

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An editorial in this week’s New York Amsterdam News, the legendary Black newspaper of New York, highlights the rise of Rev. Al Sharpton’s storied civil rights organization The National Action Network, which will celebrate its 20th year of operation April 6-9 at their national convention in New York City.

Related: NewsOne Columnist Rev. Al Sharpton named one of the “Top 15 Civil Rights Leaders of the 21st Century”

The editorial, written by the publisher and editor-in-chief of the paper Elinor Tatum, talks about the birth of the National Action Network in 1991. Tatum called the organization “the heart” of the continuing civil rights movement. She views Sharpton’s group as the premier civil rights organization of her generation in the same way that the NAACP and the National Urban League were to her parents.

“Happy birthday, National Action Network. For many of us, we literally might not be here without you.” Elinor Tatum

Founded by Sharpton in 1991, the organization was one of the first civil rights groups of the 21st century. From the onset, the organization’s mission has been to to address the social and economic injustice experienced by Blacks in the United States. The main focus of Sharpton’s organization has been to tackle three key areas affecting minorities in America  — the criminal justice system, social justice issues, and reducing verbal indecency within the African-American community.

The National Action Network is headquartered in Harlem, New York, but currently has over forty active chapters nationwide.

Key Moments:

- The National Action Network is widely credited with drawing national attention to such critical issues as racial profiling, police brutality, and the US Naval bombing exercises on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Notably, the organization was prominently involved with the police brutality cases of Amadou Diallo (New York), Abner Louima (New York) and Patrick Dorismond (New York). Sharpton also took the lead in protesting the Jena 6 case in Jena, Louisiana which garnered national attention. This past year, Sharpton held a march in Washington D.C. called “Reclaim The Dream” which thousands attended.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON AMSTERDAMNEWS.COM

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Activists staged the annual commemoration of the historic demonstration by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River on Sunday afternoon. Participants included U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who was injured in the melee in 1965, as well as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Law enforcement officers attacked civil rights demonstrators marching toward Montgomery across the bridge on March 7, 1965. The movement only grew, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march was held later in response.

The march is credited with helping build momentum for passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.

But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer.

On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders, including Dr. King.

Read more at NYTimes

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Roland Martin appears in The Situation Room with CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux and Ed Rollins to discusses Glenn Beck’s efforts to “take back the civil rights movement” at a rally in Washington.

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Kanye West recently was on the radio discussing the VMA incident and he compared the backlash he faced to the murder of Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager who was killed for whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi. Check out the entire interview at TheUrbanDaily.

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William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Filmmakers Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler explore the life of their father, the late radical civil rights lawyer. In the 1960s and 70s, Kunstler fought for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. and represented the famed “Chicago 8” activists who protested the Vietnam War. When the inmates took over Attica prison, or when the American Indian Movement stood up to the federal government at Wounded Knee, they asked Kunstler to be their lawyer.

To his daughters, it seemed that he was at the center of everything important that had ever happened. But when they were growing up, Kunstler represented some of the most reviled members of society, including rapists and assassins. This powerful film not only recounts the historic causes that Kunstler fought for; it also reveals a man that even his own daughters did not always understand, a man who risked public outrage and the safety of his family so that justice could serve all.

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William Moses Kunstler (July 7, 1919 – September 4, 1995) was an American self-described “radical lawyer” and civil rights activist, known for his controversial clients. Kunstler was a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the co-founder of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the “leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country”.

Kunstler’s successful defense of the “Chicago Seven” made him the most famous and controversial lawyer in the United States. Kunstler is also well-known for his frequent defense of members of the Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters, and the American Indian Movement. He also won a de facto segregation case regarding the District of Columbia’s public schools and “disinterred, singlehandedly” the concept of federal removal jurisdiction in the 1960s. Kunstler refused to defend right-wing groups like the Minutemen, on the grounds that: “I only defend those whose goals I share. I’m not a lawyer for hire. I only defend those I love”.

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He was a polarizing figure: many on the right wished to see him disbarred; many of the left admired him as a “symbol of a certain kind of radical lawyer”. Even some other civil rights lawyers regarded Kunstler as a “publicity hound and a hit-and-run lawyer” who “brings cases on Page 1 and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, Inc. wins them on Page 68″. Legal writer Sidney Zion quipped that Kunstler was “one of the few lawyers in town who knows how to talk to the press. His stories always check out and he’s not afraid to talk to you, and he’s got credibility—although you’ve got to ask sometimes, ‘Bill, is it really true?”

The Full Documentary can be streamed online until September 21, 2010.

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From NYTimes.com:

It’s unwise to be sniffy about popular culture.

Television — the idiot box, the boob tube — was best of friends with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, bringing its valiant images, week after week, into American homes. Pictorial glossies like Life and Look had done a similar service a decade earlier.

Were such corporate media acting on unsuspected reserves of social good will? For the most part, no. They had news to sell, and the illustrations for that news — images of people subjected to violence and then gathering together in the largest mass meeting the country had ever seen — happened to be sensational. You had to pay attention. You couldn’t not have a reaction.

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But how, exactly, did the delivery of such images come about? And why? An exhibition called “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights” at the International Center of Photography is here to give some answers, backed up by a second show, “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Click here to read more.

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NEW YORK — Evelyn Cunningham, a pioneering journalist who covered the birth of the 1960s civil rights movement and later served as an aide to New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, died Wednesday. She was 94.

She died of natural causes at the Jewish Home and Hospital in Manhattan, said her niece, Gigi Freeman.

Cunningham was a reporter and editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, an influential black newspaper, from the 1940s through the early 1960s. She earned the nickname “the lynching editor” for her reporting on lynchings in the segregated South.

She interviewed prominent civil rights figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and produced a three-part series on the King family.

In 1998, Cunningham and other Courier staff members accepted a George Polk Award for the paper’s civil rights coverage. In an interview with The New York Times at the time of the award, Cunningham recalled walking up to Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham, Ala. police commissioner who had ordered fire hoses turned on civil rights workers, and asking for an interview. He used a racial epithet and walked away.

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“Actually, I didn’t anticipate he would give me the interview,” she said. “But as a reporter, I had to give it a shot.”

RELATED: Civil Rights Activist Dorothy Height Dies At 98

She also interviewed sports and entertainment figures.

When she visited Louis Armstrong at his home in Queens, she asked him about the classical music he was listening to.

“It’s Beethoven,” Armstrong said. “Y’know, I play a lot of it. You can learn a lot from them cats.”

Cunningham also hosted a radio show on WLIB in New York before turning to government service.

She served as a special assistant to Rockefeller for community relations and was named director of the Women’s Unit of the state of New York in 1969. She followed Rockefeller to Washington when he was Gerald Ford’s vice president.

Cunningham was a Harlem fixture for decades and a supporter of cultural institutions, including the Apollo Theater, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

“Evelyn was a visionary and her good works touched many people,” said Jonelle Procope, Apollo Theater Foundation president and CEO. “This is a great loss for the African-American community.”

Cunningham was appointed to numerous government task forces and commissions. Mayor Michael Bloomberg named her to the New York City Commission on Women’s Issues in 2002.

RELATED: Benjamin Hooks, Head Of NAACP & Champion For The Poor, Dies At 85

Bloomberg said in a statement: “With the passing of Evelyn Cunningham, all New Yorkers and all Americans who value our ideals of liberty and justice for all have lost a good friend and a fearless champion.”

She told the Daily News in a November 2009 interview that the election of Barack Obama to president was hard to believe.

“No, I did not see it happening,” she said. “I met him right here in this apartment. He came up to see me when he first visited the city. I adored him. He was a natural born leader.”

Cunningham’s four marriages ended in divorce. She told The Times: “Each one of my husbands tried to diminish my independence and my work.”

She is survived by her niece, Freeman, who served as her caregiver.

ATLANTA — The recent deaths of Dorothy Height and Benjamin Hooks, two icons of the civil rights era, nudge those who have come behind them closer to the control for which they have clamored.

It is a prospect that is at once enticing and intimidating for the movement’s heirs, who have waited years for their turn and a chance to further the progress of black America. Those years have caught up with both groups, as the graying civil rights generation has no choice but to step aside.

The next generation must decide whether they will step up as the nature of the struggle is in question and the future fight takes on a new identity.

It’s put up or shut up now, said the Rev. Al Sharpton.

“I remember for years we said, ‘Give us a chance,’” Sharpton said. “Well, we’re center stage now. What are we gonna do?”

At 55, Sharpton is considered young among civil rights activists. He was groomed by people like Height and Hooks to lead after they left.

“They knew the struggle would continue beyond them,” said Sharpton, who founded his National Action Network nearly 20 years ago. “We are facing more institutional inequities. These matters are not as dramatic as they were in their time, but they’re just as insidious.”

RELATED: Obama: Dorothy Height Was “Godmother Of Civil Rights Movement”

For years, the heroes of the 1950s and 1960s kept us connected to a time when the battle for equality in this country was real and present for millions of black Americans, decades away from the election of the first black president.

The larger-than-life examples of Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery and John Lewis – who marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and lived to tell us about it year after year – were constant reminders that the fight is not over.

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When she died Tuesday at 98, Height was one of the few female voices of the movement. Her activism stretched from the New Deal to marching alongside King before she witnessed the historic election of President Barack Obama.

Hooks led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 15 years after he was inspired to fight against social injustice and bigotry as a young soldier guarding Italian prisoners of war while serving overseas in the Army during World War II. Foreign prisoners could eat in “for whites only” restaurants but he could not. He died Thursday at the age of 85.

The struggle they leave behind is far different from the one they inherited under a segregated America. Today, the Rev. Raphael Warnock of MLK’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is carrying the mantle of social justice theology, fighting for voting rights and financial literacy and against disparities in the criminal justice system – without the permission of his elders.

RELATED: Benjamin Hooks, NAACP Head & Champion Of The Poor Dies At 85

“I don’t know that anybody handed that generation the leadership,” said the 40-year-old Warnock. “I think they took it. And the onus is on us to assume leadership and not wait on somebody to give it to us. We are clearly witnessing the changing of the guard.”

This generation does not live in fear of biting dogs or the sting of a fire hose, but must still fight to ensure equal access to education and employment. Hundreds of black elected officials across the country do not eliminate the need to advocate the right to vote.

“Losing Dr. Height hurts immeasurably, but it also inspires unconditionally,” said Julianne Malveaux, president of the all-female, historically black Bennett College. “When we think about the struggles she identified with and the work that she did, she’s really left us with a social, economic and legislative agenda.”

Malveaux said that many young people are respectful of history and may be ready to carry on with Height’s mission, but others may see her labor as part of a bygone era.

“They have been seduced by our progress to feel that the civil rights movement may not be necessary,” she said.

The call to action now extends not to an aging few, but to countless blacks from 18 to 70 – still young, compared to the those who were stirred to action in the last century. Already there are those who have answered. The NAACP has at its helm the youngest president and chairwoman in its 101-year history. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is preparing to install as its new leader Bernice King, the youngest daughter of King, the organization’s most famous founder. And the executive director of Sharpton’s National Action Network is under 30.

Whether they can rally their peers as their predecessors rallied for the betterment of a people remains to be seen. But after years of asking, they will soon get their wish.

From NYTimes.com:

Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.

The death, at Howard University Hospital, was announced jointly by the hospital and the National Council of Negro Women, which Ms. Height had led for four decades. A longtime Washington resident, Ms. Height was the council’s president emerita at her death.

One of the last living links to the social activism of the New Deal era, Ms. Height had a career in civil rights that spanned nearly 80 years, from anti-lynching protests in the early 1930s to the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. That the American social landscape looks as it does today owes in no small part to her work.

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Originally trained as a social worker, Ms. Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1997, overseeing a range of programs on issues like voting rights, poverty and in later years AIDS. A longtime executive of the Y.W.C.A., she presided over the integration of its facilities nationwide in the 1940s.

With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and others, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. Over the decades, she advised a string of American presidents on civil rights.

If Ms. Height was less well known than her contemporaries in either the civil rights or women’s movement, it was perhaps because she was doubly marginalized, pushed offstage by women’s groups because of her race and by black groups because of her sex.

Click here to read more.

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From the New York Times:

On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.

But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.

Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.

Last week Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The honor sent the little-selling title shooting up 500 spots on Amazon.com’s sales list and immediately thrust Ms. Colvin, 70, back into the cultural conversation.

Click here to read more.

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The Kennedy brothers endeared themselves to the Black community during the height of the Civil Rights era. During his 1960 campaign for the presidency, John supported integration and famously reached out to a jailed Martin Luther King, Jr. Once in office, he and Robert—then Attorney General—worked to create the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would put an end to the era of Jim Crow. But both Jack and Bobby had their lives cut tragically short, assassinated in 1963 and 1968, respectively. In death, they left much important work yet to be done toward ensuring that the American dream was truly within reach for people of all races.

Enter Ted Kennedy. He took up the mantle of Civil Rights in his brothers’ absence, and went on to spend 47 years in the Senate working tirelessly for the rights and the dignity of Black people. His accomplishments in that vein are numerous and significant. Ted devoted himself to passing the civil rights bill that JFK introduced, and later oversaw the passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988. He was also a strong supporter of the Voting Rights Act in 1968 and again in 1982, when he fought against Ronald Reagan’s efforts to weaken it.

Ted devoted himself to a number of other issues important to Black Americans, including health care, HIV/AIDS treatment, education, economic safety net initiatives, and inner city programs.

Not content to support Black people only at home, Ted took his fight against racism global by addressing the problem of South African apartheid. He held an illegal protest outside the prison where Nelson Mandela was held, and initiated a ban on all American investments in South Africa.

Even after all of his important work from the 1960s until the end of the century, Ted never faded from the political scene—he was a steadfast supporter of liberal initiatives, court justices, and candidates until the very end of his career. Indeed, one of his most potent symbolic gestures came only last year.

In 1968, Bobby Kennedy predicted that “a black man could be president in 40 years”—Ted played a personal role in seeing his brother’s vision realized. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama was one of the most significant of the Democratic primary.

But beyond any verbal expression of support, the work Ted Kennedy spent his whole life doing—fighting for equal rights and justice for African Americans and other minorities—helped produce the change that allowed a Black American to be elected president of the United States.

That, more than any particular speech or piece of legislation, is the legacy Ted Kennedy leaves behind: An America that is a few steps closer to realizing its ideal of equal opportunity for all.

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Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies At Age 77

VIDEO: President Obama Speaks About Ted Kennedy

From TheRoot.com:

For the longest time, besides family, black people would only put three pictures up on the wall: Jesus Christ, Nipsey Russell and John F. Kennedy. The Kennedys, in general, have always had a soft spot in the hearts of many black folks because they have always been, as old timers say, “good white folk.” The kind of white person you didn’t have to worry about giving you the soul handshake (WTF?), talking black jive to get along or dropping the “N” bomb by accident. They were the kind of white people who are at ease with everyone; white people you could have over to dinner. The Kennedys as Irishmen, knew how it felt to be marginalized and, despite their wealth, this marginalization seemed to inform the politics of the whole family. The passing of Edward “Ted” Kennedy last night doesn’t just leave a gap in the Democratic Party. Who will bring his empathy and compassion for the rest of America? Who will take up his causes?

To read more, click here.

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Sen. Edward M. Kennedy Dies At Age 77

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the last surviving brother in a political dynasty and one of the most influential senators in history, died Tuesday night at his home on Cape Cod after a year-long struggle with brain cancer. He was 77.

In nearly 50 years in the Senate, Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, served alongside 10 presidents — his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy among them — compiling an impressive list of legislative achievements on health care, civil rights, education, immigration and more.

His only run for the White House ended in defeat in 1980. More than a quarter-century later, he handed then-Sen. Barack Obama an endorsement at a critical point in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, explicitly likening the young contender to President Kennedy.

To the American public, Kennedy was best known as the last surviving son of America’s most glamorous political family, father figure and, memorably, eulogist of an Irish-American clan plagued again and again by tragedy.

Kennedy’s death triggered an outpouring of superlatives, from Democrats and Republicans as well as foreign leaders.

“An important chapter in our history has come to an end. Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States senator of our time,” Obama said in a written statement.

“For five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well being of the American peoplebore his name and resulted from his efforts,” said Obama, vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast.

Kennedy’s family announced his death in a brief statement released early Wednesday.

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the statement said. “We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all.”

A few hours later, two vans left the family compound at Hyannis Port in pre-dawn darkness. Both bore hearse license plates — with the word “hearse” blacked out.

There was no immediate word on funeral arrangements. Two of Kennedy’s brothers, John and Robert, are buried at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada issued a statement that said, “It was the thrill of my lifetime to work with Ted Kennedy…..The liberal lion’s mighty roar may now fall silent, but his dream shall never die.”

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan said that her husband and Kennedy “could always find common ground, and they had great respect for one another.”

Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1962, taking the seat that his brother John had occupied before winning the White House, and served longer than all but two senators in history.

His own hopes of reaching the White House were damaged — perhaps doomed — in 1969 by the scandal that came to be known as Chappaquiddick, an auto accident that left a young woman dead. He sought the White House more than a decade later, lost the Democratic nomination to President Jimmy Carter, and bowed out with a stirring valedictory that echoed across the decades: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

Kennedy was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor in May 2008 and underwent surgery and a grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy.

He made a surprise return to the Capitol last summer to cast the decisive vote for the Democrats on Medicare. He made sure he was there again last January to see his former Senate colleague Barack Obamasworn in as the nation’s first black president, but suffered a seizure at a celebratory luncheon afterward.

He also made a surprise and forceful appearance at last summer’s Democratic National Convention, where he spoke of his own illness and said health care was the cause of his life. His death occurred precisely one year later, almost to the hour.

He was away from the Senate for much of this year, leaving Republicans and Democrats to speculate about the impact what his absence meant for the fate of Obama’s health care proposals.

Under state law, Kennedy’s successor will be chosen by special election. In his last known public act, the senator urged state officials to give Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick the power to name an interim replacement. But that appears unlikely, leaving Democrats in Washington with one less vote for the next several months as they struggle to pass Obama’s health care legislation.

His death came less than two weeks after that of his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver on Aug. 11. Kennedy was not present for the funeral, an indication of the precariousness of his own health.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Kennedy’s son Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., said his father had defied the predictions of doctors by surviving more than a year with his fight against brain cancer.

The younger Kennedy said that gave family members a surprise blessing, as they were able to spend more time with the senator and to tell him how much he had meant to their lives.

“There are very few people who have touched the life of this nation in the same breadth and the same order of magnitude,” Obama said in April as he signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act into law.

Kennedy arrived at his place in the Senate after a string of family tragedies. He was the only one of the four Kennedy brothers to die of natural causes.

Kennedy’s eldest brother, Joseph, was killed in a plane crash in World War II. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles as he campaigned for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Years later, in 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. was killed in a plane crash at age 38 along with his wife.

It fell to Ted Kennedy to deliver the eulogies, to comfort his brothers’ widows, to mentor fatherless nieces and nephews. It was Ted Kennedy who walked JFK‘s daughter, Caroline, down the aisle at her wedding.

Tragedy had a way of bringing out his eloquence.

Kennedy sketched a dream of a better future as he laid to rest his brother Robert in 1968: “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

After John Jr.’s death, the senator said: “We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedywould live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”

His own legacy was blighted on the night of July 18, 1969, when Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and into a pond on Chappaquiddick Island, on Martha’s Vineyard. Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old worker with RFK’s campaign, was found dead in the submerged car’s back seat 10 hours later.

Kennedy, then 37, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended sentence and a year’s probation. A judge eventually determined there was “probable cause to believe that Kennedy operated his motor vehicle negligently … and that such operation appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.”

At the height of the scandal, Kennedy went on national television to explain himself in an extraordinary 13-minute address in which he denied driving drunk and rejected rumors of “immoral conduct” with Ms. Kopechne. He said he was haunted by “irrational” thoughts immediately after the accident, and wondered “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” He said his failure to report the accident right away was “indefensible.”

After Chappaquiddick especially, Kennedy gained a reputation as a heavy drinker and a womanizer, a tragically flawed figure haunted by the fear that he did not quite measure up to his brothers. As his weight ballooned, he was lampooned by comics and cartoonists in the 1980s and ’90s as the very embodiment of government waste, bloat and decadence.

But in his later years, after he had remarried, he came to be regarded as a statesman on Capitol Hill, seen as one of the most effective, hardworking lawmakers Washington has ever seen.

A barrel-chested figure with a swath of white hair, a booming voice and a thick, widely imitated Boston accent, he coupled fist-pumping floor speeches with his well-honed Irish charm and formidable negotiating skills. He was both a passionate liberal and a clear-eyed pragmatist, willing to reach across the aisle to get things done.

Kennedy’s speech in accepting defeat to Carter electrified the Democratic convention and turned out to be a defining moment. At 48, he seemed liberated from the towering expectations and high hopes invested in him after the death of his brothers, and he plunged into his work in the Senate.

First elected to the Senate in 1962 to his brother John‘s seat, easily re-elected in 2006, Kennedy served close to 47 years, longer than all but two senators in history: Robert Byrd of West Virginia (50 years and counting) and the late Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who died after a tenure of nearly 47 1/2 years. Kennedy’s career spanned 10 presidencies.

His legislative achievements included bills to provide health insurance for children of the working poor, the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, Meals on Wheels for the elderly, abortion clinic access, family leave, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

He was also a key negotiator on legislation creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit for senior citizens and was a driving force for peace in Ireland and a persistent critic of the war in Iraq.

Kennedy did not always prevail. In late 2008, he unsuccessfully lobbied for niece Caroline’s appointment to the Senate from New York. New York Gov. David Paterson chose then-Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand instead.

Wildly popular among Democrats, Kennedy routinely won re-election by large margins. He grew comfortable in his role as Republican foil and leader of his party’s liberal wing.

President George W. Bush welcomed Kennedy to the Rose Garden on several occasions as he signed bills that the Democrat helped write.

“He’s the kind of person who will state his case, sometimes quite eloquently and vociferously, and then on another issue will come along and you can work with him,” Bush said shortly before his first term began in 2001.

But Bush was also the target of some of Kennedy’s sharpest attacks. Kennedy assailed the Iraq war as Bush’s Vietnam, a conflict “made up in Texas” and marketed by the Bush administration for political gain.

Kennedy and his niece Caroline shook up the Democratic establishment in January 2008 when they endorsed Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton for the nomination for president.

After Obama won in November, Kennedy renewed words once spoken by his brother John, declaring: “The world is changing. The old ways will not do. … It is time for a new generation of leadership.”

Born in 1932, the youngest of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, Edward Moore Kennedy was part of a family bristling with political ambition, beginning with maternal grandfather John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a congressman and mayor of Boston.

Round-cheeked Teddy was thrown out of Harvard in 1951 for cheating, after arranging for a classmate to take a freshman Spanish exam for him. He eventually returned, earning his degree in 1956.

He went on to the University of Virginia Law School, and in 1962, while his brother John was president, announced plans to run for the Senate seat JFK had vacated in 1960. A family friend had held the seat in the interim because Kennedy was not yet 30, the minimum age for a senator.

Kennedy was immediately involved in a bruising primary campaign against state Attorney General Edward J. McCormack, a nephew of U.S. House Speaker John W. McCormack.

“If your name was simply Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke,” chided McCormack.

Kennedy won the primary by 300,000 votes and went on to overwhelmingly defeat Republican George Cabot Lodge, son of the late Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, in the general election.

Devastated by his brothers’ assassinations and injured in a 1964 plane crash that left him with back pain that would plague him for decades, Kennedy temporarily withdrew from public life in 1968. But he re-emerged in 1969 to be elected majority whip of the Senate.

Then came Chappaquiddick.

Kennedy still handily won re-election in 1970, but he lost his leadership job. He remained outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam War and support of social programs but ruled out a 1976 presidential bid.

In the summer of 1978, a Gallup Poll showed that Democrats preferred Kennedy over President Carter 54 percent to 32 percent. A year later, Kennedy decided to run for the White House with a campaign that accused Carter of turning his back on the Democratic agenda.

The difficult task of dislodging a sitting president was compounded by Kennedy’s fumbling answer to a question posed by CBS’ Roger Mudd: Why do you want to be president?

“Well, it’s um, you know you have to come to grips with the different issues that, ah, we’re facing,” Kennedy said. “I mean, we can, we have to deal with each of the various questions of the economy, whether it’s in the area of energy …”

He bowed out of the race after getting roundly beaten by Carter in the primaries and losing a rules battle at the Democratic convention. Later, when asked to assess the campaign, he replied: “Well, I learned to lose, and for a Kennedy that’s hard.”

Kennedy married Virginia Joan Bennett, known as Joan, in 1958. They divorced in 1982. In 1992, he married Washington lawyer Victoria Reggie. His survivors include a daughter, Kara Kennedy Allen; two sons, Edward Jr. and Patrick, a congressman from Rhode Island; and two stepchildren, Caroline and Curran Raclin.

In 1991, Kennedy roused his nephew William Kennedy Smith and his son Patrick from bed to go out for drinks while staying at the family’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate. Later that night, a woman Smith met at a bar accused him of raping her at the home.

Smith was acquitted, but the senator’s carousing — and testimony about him wandering about the house in his shirttails and no pants — further damaged his reputation.

Kennedy offered a mea culpa in a speech at Harvard that October, recognizing “my own shortcomings, the faults in the conduct of my private life.”

Later on, his second wife appeared to have a calming influence on him, helping him rehabilitate his image.

Kennedy’s family life has been marked by illness.

Edward Jr. lost a leg to bone cancer in 1973 at age 12. Kara had a cancerous tumor removed from her lung in 2003. In 1988, Patrick had a noncancerous tumor pressing on his spine removed. He has also struggled with depression and addiction and announced in June that he was re-entering rehab.

Kennedy’s memoir, “True Compass,” is set to be published in the fall.

In Mississippi, where mention of the civil rights movement evokes images of bombings, beatings and the Ku Klux Klan, public schools are preparing to test a program that will ultimately teach students about the subject in every grade from kindergarten through high school.

Many experts believe the effort will make Mississippi the first state to mandate civil rights instruction for all k-12 students.

So far, four school systems have asked to be part of a pilot effort to test the curriculum in high schools. In September, the Mississippi Department of Education will name the systems that have been approved for the pilot. By the 2010-2011 school year, the program should be in place at all grade levels as part of social studies courses.

Advocacy groups such as the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and Washington-based Teaching for Change are preparing to train Mississippi teachers to tell the “untold story” of the civil rights struggle to the nearly half million students in the state’s public schools.

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“Now more than ever we are engaged in national debates about race and so much of those debates are impoverished in their understanding of history,” said Susan Glissen of the Winter Institute. “We want to emphasize the grass-roots nature of civil rights and the institution of racism.”

The program is the outgrowth of a law passed in 2006 by the Legislature. The state moves forward with statewide implementation in the 2010-2011 school year, despite an unsuccessful legislative effort to eliminate the plan this year.

Education officials looked to other states for a model, but couldn’t find one that included anything as comprehensive as what Mississippi has in mind, said Chauncey Spears, who works in the curriculum and instruction office of Mississippi’s education agency.

The Education Commission of the States didn’t know of any other state with a such a program, although it does not specifically track social studies curriculum.

Some states, including Alabama, Georgia and Arkansas, have placed an emphasis on civil rights instruction. New Jersey created an Amistad Commission to ensure the history of slavery is taught in schools. Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia school district requires students to complete an African-American history course before graduation.

“We’re behind time. Students don’t know about what blacks did. They’re not taught anything about culture, about our history,” said Ollye Shirley, a member of the commission created to research the Mississippi curriculum and a former Jackson Public School board member.

History classes will be the proving ground this fall, and the state Board of Education is expected to approve expansion of the curriculum to other grade levels in spring 2010, said Spears.

Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change, said it’s important to help students understand that Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. weren’t the only important figures in the civil rights movement.

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“The traditional version would be that it started in 1954, thereby leaving out the fact that a lot of groundwork had to be done before that,” Menkart said. “The other part that gets left out is the struggle for economic justice, like Martin Luther King’s support of the sanitation workers in Memphis.”

Menkart said classrooms activities can include role-playing in which students act out civil rights protests such as the Montgomery bus boycott, improving their critical thinking and social interaction.

Those are the types of lessons being taught in Vickie Malone’s “Local Cultures” class in the McComb School District, which began civil rights studies before the law was passed. The state’s curricula will be modeled, in part, after the district.

Classroom assignments for Malone’s students, who sit around tables rather than desks, include interviewing local activists, questioning their relatives about their role in the fight for integration, or studying the plight of migrant workers. The students are reading “Mississippi Trial, 1955,” a fictionalized account of the murder of Emmett Till, a Chicago youth who was mutilated in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.

Kindergartners in McComb are introduced to the subject through lessons on diversity, discussing differences such as hair texture and skin tone, Malone said.

“It helps kids understand that however you are that’s a great way to be,” Malone said.

Spears said the curriculum changes don’t require new textbooks and teachers will be allowed to develop their own lesson plans. There will be added achievement goals for students. For instance, high school students should be able to evaluate the impact of the civil rights movement in expanding democracy in the U.S.

Spears said teachers can also call upon people in their community who lived through these historic events.

“There are people in local communities who can give great insight into the civil rights movement. There are various things that teachers can do to incorporate this into their classrooms.”

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Corey Carter could hear snippets of music in his head — a calm and subtle melody that hadn’t found its shape. The 19-year-old college student simply needed a hero to visualize before he could finish his composition for wind ensemble.

He found inspiration in an unexpected place. And instead of a hero, he found a heroine.

Standing in line at a Walgreens’ one day a few months ago, he casually flipped through a book about African-American history in his hometown of Jackson, Miss. There, he ran across the 1961 mug shotof a jailed civil-rights worker.

The 19-year-old white woman had a calm but determined gaze. Her hair was neatly bobby-pinned, revealing a delicate earring in the shape of a cross. She wore her Sunday-best dress, a gingham check reminiscent of Dorothy’s in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Around her neck hung a board with booking information for the Jackson city jail. She and other Freedom Riders had been arrested and charged with breach of peace after traveling in an integrated group, by train, from New Orleans.

“It was just a very powerful image,” Carter recalled.

The woman in the mug shot was Joan Trumpauer, who grew up in northern Virginia and spent three years in the early 1960s working for racial equality in Mississippi, then one of the most defiantly segregated states in the nation.

Carter, a University of Southern Mississippi music major and aspiring film composer, saw a woman who did more than talk about racial equality — she lived it.

“Once I was kind of thinking about that story, it took a turn where it all kind of morphed together and I could see where the piece was going,” he said. “I knew the piece then had something that there was a goal to.”

In a matter of weeks, his “Power of Conviction” was dotted with the heroic refrains of trumpets, the clarion calls of trombones. Carter’s six-minute personal project was complete.

____

Trumpauer — who would later marry and become Joan Trumpauer Mulholland — left Duke University in 1961. Defying the wishes of relatives who were steeped in a culture of segregation, she headed to Mississippi to work in the civil rights movement. She was inspired, she said, by the Bible’s call to love thy neighbor and the belief that all men are created equal.

“What brought me to the movement was, basically, you could see the inequalities in life and the contradictions,” she told The Associated Press in a recent interview from her home in Arlington, Va.

She served her first three sweaty summer months for the breach-of-peace arrest in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, now infamous for the beatings and other abuse Freedom Riders endured there.

After being released, she helped register voters and earned her degree as one of the few white students at traditionally black Tougaloo College in Jackson, a school that in the 1960s was a hub of activity for the expanding civil-rights movement.

One of her most frightening experiences came on May 28, 1963, when she helped challenge a whites-only policy at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. Her assignment fromMississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers — who would be assassinated about two weeks later — was to observe other civil-rights workers at a picket line elsewhere in downtown Jackson.

The picketers were quickly arrested, so Trumpauer Mulholland decided to see what was happening at Woolworth’s. The black college students trying to integrate the lunch counter were soon attacked by white teenagers and adults.

Anne Moody recalled in her memoir that she and fellow Tougaloo students Pearlena Lewis and MemphisNorman started praying at the lunch counter — and then “all hell broke loose.”

“A man rushed forward, threw Memphis from his seat, and slapped my face,” Moody wrote in the memoir, “Coming of Age in Mississippi.” “Then another man who worked in the store threw me against an adjoining counter.”

Blood ran from the corners of Norman’s mouth as he lay on the floor, trying to protect his face as the man who threw him down repeatedly kicked him in the head. The workers, trained in a Gandhi-inspired discipline of nonviolence, never fought back.

“If he had worn hard-soled shoes instead of sneakers, the first kick probably would have killed Memphis,” Moody wrote. “Finally a man dressed in plain clothes identified himself as a police officer and arrested Memphis and his attacker.”

Trumpauer Mulholland said she and John Salter, a white Tougaloo professor who was active in the NAACP, went to the Woolworth’s counter to sit with the black civil-rights volunteers who were still there. The threat of violence was palpable.

“The students that came down to observe us, the white high school students, started grabbing everything they could off the counter — mustard and ketchup and vinegar and salt and pepper and sugar. And some brass knuckles came into play, and cigarettes on the guys,” Trumpauer Mulholland said.

“And once they ran out of condiments, they started grabbing things off the open counters, little junky things like they sell at dollar stores today, and throwing them at us and spray painting our backs and just generally tearing up the place and using it to attack us,” she said.

Several journalists recorded the scene, including photographer Fred Blackwell from the local Jackson Daily News. One of his images circulated worldwide on The Associated Press wire. It showed Salter, Trumpauer Mulholland and Moody sitting, apparently calmly, as they were doused with condiments and taunted by the mob for three hours. She said the media presence not only told the world what happened, but likely prevented the violence from escalating.

The civil-rights workers were able to leave in relative safety when the store closed that night, but only because Tougaloo president A.D. Biettel came to escort them out. Moody said in her memoir that outside the store, about 90 Jackson police officers formed a line between the small group and an angry white mob.

Trumpauer Mulholland, 67, says now that she felt as if she had a “disembodied spirit” during the sit-in.

“The real me had left and was sort of keeping me safe,” she said. “And it was just the body there.”

____

This May, Trumpauer Mulholland flew to Mississippi for her Tougaloo class reunion, and she did something she never thought she’d do: She met a young, white Mississippian who admired and publicly honored her civil-rights work.

She heard an ensemble play the piece Carter wrote in her honor, “Power of Conviction,” at Jackson Academy, where about 98 percent of the 1,300 students are white. The academy is among hundreds of private schools that sprang up across the South after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that racially segregated public schools were unequal.

In Jackson, 97.6 percent of public school students are black; the more integrated schools are in nearby suburbs.

Carter is a graduate of Jackson Academy, and his father, Bruce Carter, has been band director there for 20 years. As the stage band learned “Power of Conviction,” Bruce Carter would show the young musicians themug shot and Woolworth’s photo of Trumpauer Mulholland for inspiration.

Trumpauer Mulholland was astonished when the academy’s students gave her a standing ovation after she spoke at the band assembly — something she later said would’ve been unthinkable in a city where a previous generation of white high school students turned to mob violence to try to protect a segregated way of life.

The former Freedom Rider said her civil rights work prepared her well for her career as a teacher and made her a role model for her children and grandchildren. However, a rift grew between her and many of her relatives in the South. While younger relatives are cordial now, Trumpauer Mulholland said the connection with cousins her own age “pretty much fell apart.”

“My family, to the extent that I ever heard anything, really were upset with me and close to disowned me because I had just gone against everything they had grown up believing and feeling. And I was a traitor,” she said. “I think in many ways that made it easier as a white demonstrator, a white Southern demonstrator. Once you take a stand, there’s no turning back, so you may as well keep going forward.”

On his show, Rush Limbaugh said that the Republican Party is an “oppressed minority” and that the GOP was in need of a “Civil Rights Movement.” He also referred to the Sheriff Bull Connor as a Democrat and said that  Democrats use dogs and hoses on Republicans

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