The passing of our brother, Avon Rollins this past Wednesday (December 7, 2016), is a loss that is deeply felt within our community of SNCC veterans and the Movement as a whole.  Like so many of us, activism pulled Avon into the freedom struggle while still in his teens. Just a few weeks after the Greensboro sit-ins erupted, Avon, a Knoxville, Tennessee native, then a high school student, joined other students, mainly from Knoxville College, in launching a sit-in movement. He was one of the youngest in this group of protesters.

 

Barely a year later he joined Marion Barry in enrolling in the recently desegregated University of Tennessee. By then his interest in SNCC, which he considered "the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement," had grown. By the summer of 1963 he was a member of SNCC's executive committee. That year he went to Danville, Virginia as a SNCC organizer to support the burgeoning movement there. He stayed there a year. 

January 8, 1939- October 11, 2020.   

 

Born in New York City and raised in Pleasantville, NY, Betty Garman moved to Atlanta in March 1964 to work full-time in the SNCC Office.  She was the Northern Friends of SNCC Coordinator. During her years with SNCC, Betty Garman was chairman of the University of California, Berkeley, Friends of SNCC chapter and then for two years a member of the SNCC staff – at the organization’s national office in Atlanta, Georgia, and in Greenwood, Mississippi, and later at the Washington SNCC Office.  In 1972 she moved to Baltimore to work in a factory, organizing a rank and file movement within the union.  For eighteen years after that she worked in public health, first as a researcher in occupational medicine at Baltimore City Hospitals and then at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health as a researcher on injury prevention and HIV-AIDS studies.  In 2003 she was one of ten Baltimoreans to receive an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship.  Her project was to popularize the history of social justice organizing in Baltimore.  Previously, she was the Lead Organizer for the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA) which organizes communities to take action on quality of life issues in the Baltimore region.  She worked with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national organization calling white people in to work for racial justice. In November 2017 she was appointed to serve on the Baltimore City Civilian Review Board. Betty is co-editor of "Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC"  (University of Illinois Press, 2010).  She served on the SNCC 60th Anniversary Conference Planning Committee.  Betty is survived by her daughters Tanya and Keisha, and three grandchildren. 

Read more:  https://snccdigital.org/people/betty-garman-robinson/

Library of Congress interview: https://www.loc.gov/item/2016655415/

CRM vets intervieew: https://www.crmvet.org/vet/garmanb.htm

June 1938 - April 3, 2018.

Retired history professor. Charles F. McDew led his first demonstration in the eighth grade, to protest violations of the religious freedom of Amish students in his hometown of Massillon, Ohio. McDew’s career as an activist expanded in scope while he was a freshman at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Inevitably involved in the newborn sit-in movement, he was elected as student leader by his fellow demonstrators. McDew attended the founding conference  of SNCC at Shaw in April 1960 while a student at South Carolina State and a member of The Orangeburg Movement for Civil Improvement. He served as the second Chairman of SNCC, 1960-1963. McDew has been active in organizations for social and political change, working as a teacher and as a labor organizer, managing anti-poverty programs in Washington, D.C., serving as community organizer and catalyst for change in Boston and San Francisco, as well as other communities. He has appeared on countless radio and television programs as a speaker against racism. McDew recently retired from Metropolitan State University, Minneapolis, MN, where his classes in the history of the civil rights movement, African-American history, and in social and cultural awareness were always oversubscribed.  He served faithfully on the SNCC Legacy Project Board, never missing a meeting.  He is survived by his daughter Eva.

 

Read McDew's obituary in The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/obituaries/charles-mcdew-79-tactician-for-student-civil-rights-group-dies.html

Read McDew's obituary in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

http://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/0000251613/?fullname=charles-frederick-mcdew

Listen to an oral history interview with Chuck McDew:

Clifford A. Vaughs  1937-2016

Clifford A. Vaughs . . . civil rights activist, award-winning photographer and independent filmmaker, designer and builder of the iconic Captain America and Billy bikes and Associate Producer for the film Easy Rider, retired V.P. The Chosen Few MC, jazz lover, one-time manager of the Buddy Miles Band, and long-time single-handed sailer and adventurer died Saturday, July 2, at 8:00 p.m. at his home in Templeton, California, where he lived with his "other half" and mate Daniella Sapriel. He leaves behind four sons, two daughters, and grandchildren. Cliff was a SNCC Field Secretary 1963-65, and a noted photojournalist.  More information will be forthcoming as to a "Celebration of Life" planned for a later date in the Los Angeles area.

 

 

1933-2020

Connie Curry died June 20, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia.  She was 87 years old. Connie attended the 1960 founding conference of SNCC at Shaw University as a delegate of the National Student Association's Southern Student Human Relations Project. She was named an 'adult adviser' to SNCC and was an active supporter of SNCC ever since. She was an emeritus member of the SNCC Legacy Project Board.

 

 From 1964 to 1975, she worked as a field representative for the American Friends Services Committee. She served as  the City of Atlanta’s Director of Human Services from 1975-1990. 

 

Curry is the author of several works, including her award winning book, Silver Rights (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995; Paper back Harcourt Brace, 1996), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for nonfiction in 1996; was a finalist for the 1996 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; was recommended by the New York Times for summer reading in 1996; and was named the Outstanding Book on the subject of Human Rights in North America by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights.

 

She collaborated with Bob Zellner on his memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (2008)

 

She is the author of Mississippi Harmony with Ms. Winson Hudson, published fall 2002 by Palgrave/St, Martin's press. Mississippi Harmony tells the life story of Mrs. Hudson, a civil rights leader from Leake County, Miss.,who also challenged segregation in the 1960s. Curry also collaborated in and edited Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and the book Aaron Henry: the Fire Ever Burning (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

 

Read more about Connie Curry at:

Watch Connie Curry speak about the legacy of Ms. Ella Baker.  Starts at 40:50. https://snccdigital.org/people/connie-curry/

 

Cornelius J. Jones of Mendenhall, MS died October 11, 2018 at the age of 74.  Born in Pennsylvania, CJ (as we was known) came to Mississippi in the early 60's , attended Tougaloo College and later Tuskegee University, majoring in economics.  He helped organize the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights  in Alabama.  He served as a  SNCC Field Secretary at Tuskegee and in Lowndes County.  CJ later worked with the Mendenhall Ministries and Voice of Calvary Ministries. He marched in the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March, and the Meredith March of 1966.  CJ leaves his wife, three children, and three grandchildren.    Last year CJ was honored with an award from the Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement for his lifetime of service.

 

 A native of Washington, DC, Cynthia joined the Nonviolent Action Group while a student at Howard University.  She worked as a SNCC Field Secretary, and was project director in Bolivar County, MS during the 1964 Summer Project.  In 1965 she directed a SNCC organizing project in Greene County, Alabama.  Later she returned to D.C. and worked for NASA.She died in 2014.  See https://snccdigital.org/people/cynthia-washington/

 

 

 

October 12, 1932 – August 19, 2017

 

Dick Gregory, a pioneering force of comedy in the 1960s who parlayed his career as a stand-up comic into a life of social and political activism, died Saturday of heart failure. He was 84.   Although he was never on SNCC staff, he was an early and long-time friend of SNCC and the civil rights movement.

 

Gregory used his  fame to become a civil-rights activist and opponent of the Vietnam War. He made friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; honored a request from Medgar Evers to speak at a voter-registration rally in Jackson, Miss.; raised money for SNCC; delivered food to NAACP offices in the South; marched in Selma, Ala.; got shot while trying to keep the peace during the 1965 Watts riots; was arrested in Washington for protesting Vietnam; performed benefit shows for the Congress of Racial Equality; and traveled to Tehran, Iran, in 1980 to attempt to negotiate the hostages' release.

Gregory ran for mayor of Chicago in 1967 but lost to Richard Daley, then entered the race for U.S. president a year later. A write-in candidate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, he received some 47,000 votes.  Gregory performed in Jackson, Mississippi at the 50th Anniversary Conference of Mississippi Freedom Summer.

 

In the winter of 1963, white authorities cut off commodities in Leflore and Sunflower countieswhere SNCC was making its biggest effort in Mississippi. The optional federal government program permitted poor counties to receive surplus government food or “commodities” for distribution to the poor. In the sharecropped cotton plantation land of the Delta, this food was vital to making it through the winter.

SNCC put out a national call for food. When Dick Gregory heard about the surplus food cut-off, he chartered a plane and sent 14,000 pounds of food to Greenwood. This was a first step that would lead the renowned comedian into increasingly deeper involvement with the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Both the surplus food cutoff and Gregory’s relief, noted Bob Moses, enabled many for the first time to see clearly “the connection between political participation and food on their table.” SNCC staff handed out food and voter registration forms.

In the spring, SNCC organizers invited Gregory to speak at a mass meeting in Greenwood. The community had never heard a Black man speak publicly in the manner that Gregory did. He made fun of the police, calling them, “a bunch of illiterate whites who couldn’t even pass the test themselves.” Gregory also called out the local preachers reluctant to involve themselves with the Movement and said, “These handkerchief heads don’t realize this area is going to break … If you have to pray in the street, it’s better than worshiping with a man who is less than a man!” The meeting erupted into laughter and applause. A week later, 31 ministers signed a statement in support of the voting rights drive.

Gregory did not flinch from putting himself in the path of danger. Once in a mass meeting in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a bomb was tossed through a window, and people started rushing towards the door. Gregory grabbed the microphone, and said, “Where are you going? The man who threw it is outside God’s house. The Man who’s supposed to save you lives here.” Someone picked up the bomb and threw it back outside, and the meeting continued. The Clarksdale police chief denied that his officers were responsible for the bomb, “If one of our men threw that bomb,” he said “you’d better believe it would have gone off.”

Gregory was constantly speaking to white authorities in startling, unexpected ways. During the protests in Greenwood, a police officer dragged Gregory across the street. “Thanks a million,” Gregory told him, “up north police don’t escort me across the street.” On another occasion, he wagged his finger in the faces of white policemen gathered in front of the county courthouse. “Who you calling nigger,” he told them, “You ain’t nothing but niggers yourselves. Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger,” he continued while still wagging his finger.

Gregory continued working with SNCC throughout the sixties. He traveled with SNCC’s Freedom Singers and included jokes about the South in his act. In his memoir, Gregory wrote, “I really hadn’t planned to lead the marching [in Greenwood], but looking at those beautiful faces ready to die for freedom, I knew I couldn’t do less.”  (With thanks to the SNCC Digital Gateway and The Hollywood Reporter).

Donald P. Stone

1935-September 13, 2019

 

We are saddened to announce the death of former SNCC staffer Donald  P. Stone in Atlanta, GA on Friday September 13, 2019.  Stone was a pivotal part of the SNCC Atlanta Vine City Project in 1966-68,   Born in Alabama and a Morehouse graduate, Stone was working in the post office when he joined the Atlanta Student Movement in 1960.  He later served two years in jail for demonstrating at a selective service recruitment office.  For more about Don Stone  see  https://snccdigital.org/people/donald-stone/

Eric Jones passed away on Wednesday morning, January 15, 2020 in Washington, DC.  He was a member of NAG while a student at Howard University, and served with SNCC in Alabama in the mid-1960's.

October 8, 1943 - October 24, 2018

 

1940-2020 Harriet Tanzman was born in  Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Far Rockaway in Queens. Harriet grew up in a predominantly Jewish part of Rockaway, where there was some diversity; the two largest groups were Jews and Blacks.   Harriet remembered being upset at some residents' and fellow high school students' prejudiced comments because they ran counter to the very liberal Jewish set of values with which she had been raised. Harriet chose to continue her studies at the University of Wisconsin because of its reputation for progressive faculty and students. As a member of the W.E.B. DuBois Club, she also worked with the local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter.

Ms. Tanzman first considered going south after hearing some Freedom Riders speak in 1961. In the summer of 1963, she heard Gloria Richardson, of the Cambridge, Maryland movement speak during a visit to California about how she endured death threats and physical repression in a violent fight to end school segregation. Tanzman recalls, "She basically invited us. There is this work to be done and you could participate."    In September of 1963, she started a graduate program in Social Work at Wisconsin, but after JFK's assassination in November of that year, she quit school and went to work in the Atlanta Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee office. She worked in Atlanta until January of 1964, and then went back to Wisconsin for a semester of graduate work in history. She remained connected to the civil rights movement through her involvement with CORE. However, after hearing Diane Nash speak on campus, she felt a strong pull to return to the South.

From late 1964 to June 1965, Harriet worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Alabama. She first worked in Gadsden with a black organizer, Ben Luchion. Then, following orders from SCLC leaders, Harriet returned to Selma, teaching reading and other skills to local people from January to June 1965. Later, Harriet worked on a Southern Conference Educational Fund project in New Orleans. Harriet also served as a member of the board of directors of the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Inc.    In her later years, she returned to the South as much as possible and remained involved in local political issues. She worked as a historian and chronicler of the movement with a number of organizations and institutions, including NYU's Tamiment Library. Her most recent activities included work at WBAI, New York's progressive radio station.

Ivanhoe Donaldson  died April 3, 2016 in Washington, DC.  He was born in 1941 in New York City, the son of a policeman.  He graduated from Michigan State University, where he became involved in the civil rights movement by delivering food to Mississippi sharecroppers during the winter of 1962-63, driving a truck loaded with supplies from Michigan to Clarksdale, MS.  He soon began working full-time as a SNCC Field Secretary. Read More

1943-2019

Former Director of the Arkansas SNCC Project 1963-1966, James O. Jones passed away June 1, 2019 at his home in Austin TX.  He was 76 years old.  Jim was the second director of Arkansas SNCC.   A native of Willisville, Arkansas, he was one of the original  nine students (along with Ruthie Buffington) who got expelled from Arkansas AM&N College (now Univ of Arkansas, Pine Bluff). Later on he completed his BA at the Univ of Arkansas (Fayetteville; main campus). After SNCC Jim went on to work for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta and Epes, Alabama, and the Texas Dept. of Agriculture.  For more about James O. Jones, see SNCC Digital at https://snccdigital.org/people/jim-jones/

 

 

 

 

The courage, grace and intelligence of Jean Wiley are sharply etched in our thinking as we remember her today. To say she is greatly missed is to state the obvious. Her very full life incorporated freedom movement activism, especially with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and faculty positions at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, and Tuskegee Institute. She was also the best kind of teacher, in both formal and informal settings: the kind who encouraged and even provoked others to think for themselves. 

Journalism was also an important part of her life. She was one of only three Black women who covered the Angela Davis trial. She was a reporter for the Howard University-based WHUR radio station in Washington, D.C., during its first year of operation, contributed to Essence magazine in its earliest days, and consulted with the Institute for the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.

During Julian Bond’s Georgia state congressional campaign she was SNCC’s temporary Communications Director. She also served on the staff of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, an agency offering legal services to poor people. Jean was a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother.  

She always saw herself as a race woman, committed to the “redemption and vindication of the race”, a concept that emerged within the Marcus Garvey Movement. As her good friend, documentarian Daphne Muse, who was a SNCC volunteer during her student years at Fisk University, puts it: “She navigated the curves and right turns of oppression and transformed the racists’ screams of ‘You can’t’ into the hallelujahs and Black Power of ‘We will. We can.’”

But Jean Wiley cannot be defined or appreciated solely in terms of the struggles against oppression that she was involved with, or the many works she initiated. Her home in Oakland, California, was a place of comfort for many in the Movement—a glass of wine, music, and wide-ranging conversations that covered the world as it was and as we wanted it to be, often mixed with laughter as well as commitment.  In the letter to her son, Cabral, included in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, she concludes: “…dedication to the struggle takes you to places, causes, and people you’d never have dreamed of.  I hope you find your rightful place within our struggle and among the kinds of dedicated activists I found – people with vision, courage, and respect for one another.  The struggle continues.  It must.

1941-2021

SNCC Veteran Jesse Morris passed away this week in Jackson, Mississippi, age 80.  Jesse was born in Wilmington DE and grew up in California, where he earned a B.A. in economics from the University of California in 1960.  He came to Mississippi in 1963 and worked for SNCC and COFO .  In 1965 he helped form the "Poor People's Corporation", an organization of cooperative factories.  HE served on the Board of the ACLU of Mississippi, and was active in the Freedom Democratic Party, and the State of Mississippi NAACP.

To read  more about Jesse Morris go to

https://snccdigital.org/people/jesse-morris/

1937-2021

 

SNCC Veteran Jimmy Rogers passed away from Coronavirus at his home in Oakland, California on February 5, 2021, age 84.   Jimmy worked with SNCC in Tuskegee and Lowndes, County Alabama from 1961-1967.  

 

 Born in Brooklyn, New York, after finishing five years in the US Air Force in 1959,  Rogers went to work for the New York State Commission Against Discrimination, which was located at 270 Broadway in Manhattan, New York, New York.  

 

After his years in Alabama, Jimmy moved to California and worked as a probation officer until his retirement.  He leaves his wife,  a son and granddaughter.

 

Read more about Jimmy Rogers at

https://www.crmvet.org/nars/stor/s_jimmy.htm

and

https://www.crmvet.org/nars/jimlind1.htm

and

https://www.crmvet.org/vet/rogers.htm

 

Photo: L-R: Jimmy Robers, Ruby Sales, Gloria Larry, September 1965 in Hayneville, Lowndes County,  Alabama.

 

1932-2021

SNCC veteran Joanne Gavin died at home in Houston on February 11, 2021 at age 89.

1940-2020

Congressman John Robert Lewis, who served as the third Chairman of SNCC from 1963-1966, and as a SNCC Field Secretary from 1960-1963, died at his home in Atlanta on Friday July 17, 2020.  Born in Troy, Alabama, he was a leader in the Nashville Student Movement of 1960, was a Freedom Rider in 1961, was an organizer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and went on to direct the Voter Education Project, and the VISTA under President Carter.  He served on the Atlanta City Council, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1986 and served for 34 years in the Congress representing Atlanta's 5th C.D.  Author of many books, including his autobiography WALKING WITH THE WIND, and his graphic memoir MARCH which won the 2016 National Book Award.   He introduced  the legislation that created the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, and he was the last surviving speaker of  the 1963 March on Washington.  John is survived by his son John-Miles.  

 

For more about John Lewis:

His obituary in the New York Times:

 

His obituary in The Atlanta Constitution:

 

His obituary on Atlanta's Fox News:

 

SNCC Digital: https://snccdigital.org/people/john-lewis/

Actor, playwrite, director and cultural activist John M. O'Neal died at his home in New Orleans, today, age 78.  John became a SNCC Field Secretary after his graduation from Southern Illinois University.  He worked for SNCC in Georgia and Mississippi, and was a coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom School program in the summer of 1964.  John, along with two colleagues, founded the Free Southern Theater, an integrated touring repertory company which  gave voice to African-American actors, playwrites, directors, and audiences.    After his work with SNCC, he made his home in New Orleans and founded Junebug Productions, Inc, a cultural orgnaization.   In addition, O'Neal was a visiting professor in theater at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1989-1992, where he taught playwriting.   He was a member of the Actor's Equity Association, the Dramatist Guild, and a founding member of American Festival Project, a national coalition of performing arts organizations.

 

Watch John O'Neal at https://vimeo.com/80959243?fbclid=IwAR0H3cjX1jQnfRfLPv6irBwYuM8OWJkDcpn-sLpgqW-VvPNaWqo1jxQbe2Y

Read more about John O'Neal at:  http://amistadresearchcenter.tulane.edu/archon/?p=creators/creator&id=111

Read the New York Times obituary at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/obituaries/john-oneal-dead.html

Article in Facing South: https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/03/remembering-john-oneal-storytelling-change

John O'Neal performing as Junebug Jabbo Jones

Joseph Charles Jones (August 23, 1937 – December 27, 2019)

 

Charles Jones remained focused on fighting against racism throughout his life. Fellow SNCC veteran, Tim Jenkins, offers this remembrance of Charles Jones:

 

“I will remember him for his eloquence without the necessity of lengthy preparation. I will remember him for his courage to say ‘no’ to the best of his friends when he considered them in error. And I will remember him for admitting his own errors without hesitation whenever warranted.

 

All this made him an exceptional human being in my sight, if not yet in the sight of man! His tears were always for others, but never for himself. Greatness comes in small packages without a label calling for ‘fragile’ or ‘special handling’. From all the SNCC veterans who worked with Joseph Charles Jones, we say: ‘ It’s an honor to have served with you in the struggle for human and civil rights.’”

 

He will be sorely missed

 

^Video: https://www.wbtv.com/video/2019/12/27/civil-rights-leader-charles-jones-passes-away/

SNCC Digital: https://snccdigital.org/people/charles-jones/

New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/j-charles-jones-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

 

Julian Bond, Vice-Chair of the SNCC Legacy Project, died on August 15, 2015 at his vacation home in Florida.  He was 75.  He was a long-time resident of Washington, DC. Read More

Julius Lester, SNCC photographer 1966-1968, died January 18, 2018 surrounded by his family in Belchertown, Massachusetts.  He was 78 years old.  A renowned author, musician, activist and photographer who taught for three decades at the University of Massachusetts, 

Lester was born in St. Louis on Jan. 27, 1939. He grew up in Kansas City, Kan., the son of a minister, and later Nashville, Tenn., where in 1960 he received an English degree from the historically black Fisk University.

Lester was a true polymath. He wrote dozens of critically acclaimed books, for children — including a retelling of the Br’er Rabbit tales and an exploration of slavery, “To Be a Slave” — as well as nonfiction and novels for adults. He was also a musician, and his very first book was a guide to the 12-string guitar, co-written with legendary folk singer Pete Seeger.

 

Click here to hear Julius Lester talk and sing:

http://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-julius-lester-folk-singer/

In 1961, Lester moved to New York City, where he taught banjo and guitar, performed as a folk singer, hosted a talk radio show on WBAI and hosted a television show on WNET.

It was while he was a folk singer in New York City that Lester, in 1964, decided to travel to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer.

“Going to Mississippi in ’64, you knew you could be arrested, you knew you could be killed, you knew you could be injured. And so it’s not something you did lightly, not something you did because it was going to be fun,” Lester told PBS in a 2014 interview. “But there was this feeling inside of me that it was just something I had to do.”

In addition to using his musical gifts at mass meetings and rallies, Lester also chronicled the civil rights movement as a photographer working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Those photographs were later part of a civil rights exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, and his larger body of work has also been featured in solo shows at many galleries. 

 

Click here to learn more about Julius Lester's work with SNCC:

https://snccdigital.org/people/julius-lester/

 

In 1971, Lester became a professor of Afro-American studies at UMass Amherst, where he remained until his retirement in 2003. During his time at UMass, he won the Distinguished Teacher’s Award, the Faculty Fellowship Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship and the Chancellor’s Medal. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education named Lester the state’s Professor of the Year in 1988.

 

Journey to Judaism

When he was a child, Lester learned that his great-grandfather Adolph Altschul was Jewish, and this knowledge was one of the factors in his conversion to Judaism in the early 1980s. In 1988, he became a professor of Judaic studies at UMass, and he served as a lay religious leader of Beth El Synagogue in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, for around a decade. Lester chronicled his journey to Judaism in his book “Lovesong: Becoming a Jew.”

In his retirement, Lester lived in Belchertown with his wife, Milan Sabatini.

 Lester was active on Facebook, where his page has nearly 3,000 followers. It was on Facebook that his daughter Lian Amaris kept the world updated about his condition in his last days, and where she announced that he had died.

Facebook also provided a platform for Lester, a man of many words, to write a public statement to the world on Jan. 3 in what would be his final post.

In it, Lester reflects on his health, as well as his gratitude for the space that his Facebook page provided for him to continue to teach.

“Again, I am so grateful to all of you who shared so much wonderful energy with me, indeed who lavished wonderful energy on me,” were the last words he published, before signing off with a take care of yourselves and much love.

 

Julius is survived by his wife, five children, and eight grandchildren.

 

Read More

January 6, 1938-March 29, 2020

 

 

SNCC Freedom Singer Marshall Jones passed away in New York at age 82.   A native of Tennessee and a music major at the University of Tennessee, Marshall joined SNCC in 1963 and traveled with the Freedom Singers to raise money for SNCC. His mellow tenor will be sorely missed. Our condolences to his wife Alice and his children.

Click here to see/hear Marshall sing his mournful song, "In the Mississippi River".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_HIof3irK0

 

3 August 1931-August 7, 2020

Matthew J. Herron died when his glider plane crashed near San Rafael, California.  He was 89 years old.

Born in Rochester, NY, Matt  studied photography in Rochester as a private student of Minor White, and then worked as a writer and photographer for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. A conscientious objector during the Korean War, Herron was organizing peace demonstrations and beginning to shoot assignments for Life and Look at the time the first sit-ins were occurring in Tennessee and North Carolina. He was arrested for attempting to integrate an amusement park in Maryland in the summer of 1963 and shortly afterward he and his wife, Jeannine, moved to Jackson, Mississippi with their two small children. 

For the next two years Herron pursued three styles of photography: classical photojournalism for the major picture and newsmagazines, documentary photography as practiced by his mentor, Dorothea Lange, and photography as propaganda in the service of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organizations. Often he was able to use news assignments as cover for a more documentary style of work. Many of the iconic photos used to document SNCC's story were taken by Matt. 

In the summer of 1964, Herron organized a team of five photographers, The Southern Documentary Project, in an attempt to record the rapid social change taking place in Mississippi and other parts of the South as civil rights organizations brought northern college students to work in voter registration and education. George Ballis and Danny Lyon were among the Southern Documentary photographers and Dorothea Lange served as informal adviser to the project.

In 2012 he curated a 158-print photography exhibition, This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement, featuring nine photographers who joined the civil rights movement and shot it from the inside. This Light opened in Salt Lake City and is now touring the US. The University Press of Mississippi has published a companion volume to the show. In 2014 Herron published Mississippi Eyes, the story of the Southern Documentary Project.  The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service has recently agreed to host a US tour of his 50 print exhibition on the Selma March and Voting Rights.

Herron's photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Memphis National Civil Rights Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the High Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the George Eastman House. He is the subject of several profiles, including Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, and a cover story in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 2014.

 

Read more about Matt Herron:

http://mattherronwriter.com/pages/matt-herron-bio.php

New York Times obituary:

https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=Matt+Herron

Other news:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/san-rafael-man-dies-in-lakeport-glider-crash/ar-BB17J9dN?ocid=hplocalnews

https://www.crmvet.org/images/pherron.htm

February 24, 1940 - October 25, 2018

Mattie Bivins Dennis at the 50th Anniversary of Freedom Summer 1964.

On a CBS national broadcast, Mattie Bivins Dennis told the country what registering to vote in her hometown, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was really like. “I was thinking as I walked along the dirt road in front of my house about the dust which would be on my shoes and the scars from the rocks. And that if we had enough registered voters–Negro registered voters, that is–this wouldn’t be a problem at all. Because the streets would be paved.” It was September 26, 1962, and only 12 of the 7,500 voting-aged Blacks in Forrest County, Mississippi were actually registered to vote.   For Bivins, civil rights work was a family affair. She and her relatives formed a web of local activists in the local Freedom Struggle. As a child, Bivins watched her father D.K. Bivins fight for the vote alongside farmer and NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer. Her cousins Dorie and Joyce Ladner were integral to SNCC’s organizing in Palmer’s Crossing, a proud and resilient Black community just south of the Hattiesburg line. This local network and support system inspired Bivins and others to keep on despite fierce white resistance to their efforts.   In 1962, when Hollis Watkins introduced Mattie to Bob Moses, she was ready to jump on board with SNCC. She went with fellow Tougaloo College students Colia Liddell and Dorie Ladner to Sunflower County to register people to vote. For a time she managed the SNCC/COFO office in Greenville, Mississippi.

Dave Dennis, the only CORE organizer in Mississippi at the time, came to Hattiesburg, and met this community of local people changing the world around them. There he met Mattie, and soon he and Bivins married, forming an important partnership rooted in organizing for the Movement as well as love.   In 1963, Bivins went back to Tougaloo and kept fighting against segregation and police brutality. And, despite the financial stress that Bivins, Dennis, and all movement workers dealt with everyday, they shared what they had to keep the Movement family alive.   Mattie Bivins Dennis is survived by her daughter, Erika Young and son-in-law, Brian Young. Her grandchildren Jalen Young and Julian Young, and former husband David Dennis.

Mildred Forman Page passed away in Chicago on March 19, 2018.  She came to the Atlanta SNCC office with her husband James Forman, and worked as a SNCC Field Secretary.  One of her duties was managing the SNCC Freedom Singers.  Later she returned to Chicago, remarried and raised her three children.  She was active with the Chicago Friends of SNCC and the Chicago SNCC History Project of which she was a founding member.

Read more here: http://cafsncc.org/Chicago_SNCC_History_Project/Mildred_Forman_Page,_Secretary.html

Read more here: http://www.crmvet.org/mem/formanm.htm

 

SNCC Project Director in Alabama, passed on July 17, 2015 at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, age 74.   While a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Silas first came to Selma in June of 1964 as a member of the Selma Literacy Project and facilitated Malcolm X’s visit to Selma in early 1965.  Read More

 

SNCC Photographer Tamio Wakayama passed away on March 23, 2018 in Vancouver, B.C. Canada, at age 77.  As a child he and his parents spent time in a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Canadians.  He joined SNCC in 1963 and soon was working as an official SNCC staff photographer.  After Freedom Summer, Tamio returned to Canada where he organized a Friends of SNCC Chapter.  He was the author of six books, including Dream of Riches: The Japanese Canadians 1877-1977, a photographic reconstruction of the memory of the Nikkei community,

See Tamio speak about photographing during the civil rights movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4POLTG4_U00

Read  more about Tamio at https://snccdigital.org/people/tamio-wakayama/

 

 

Unita Blackwell’s leadership was historic: in 1976 she became the first Black woman to be elected Mayor in the state of Mississippi.  Across the South and especially in Mississippi the leadership of women was the critical ingredient of the 1960’s civil rights Movement. Women were the backbone of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) whose 1964 challenges to the National Democratic Party resulted in new policies banned the seating of future delegations that had been chosen through racial discrimination. Those new rules eventually changed the face of United States politics.

 

In 1963 Unita encountered SNCC when she gave sanctuary to SNCC workers Charlie Cobb and Ivanhoe Donaldson who had been run out of nearby Sharkey County at gunpoint while canvassing for voter registration. They made it to Mayersville in neighboring Issaquena County where the two saw her standing in front of her small store and asked if she had a telephone.  Subsequent conversations about their work in SNCC and the building of the Mississippi movement caused Unita to join and in less than a year she became a SNCC field secretary. She was just 31 years old, and believe it or not, except for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, she was SNCC’s oldest field secretary in the state.  Unita became a project director for SNCC and helped organize voter registration drives for Afro Americans across Mississippi

 

In April 1965 she and her husband Jeremiah sued Issaquena County’s Board of Education after the school principal suspended over 300 black children—including their son Jerry—for wearing SNCC pins depicting a black hand and a white hand clasped with the word "SNCC" below the image. The case resulted in a school desegregation plan for the county.

 

We tell this story not simply to underline Unita’s great strength and commitment but to make the larger point that building relationships in the grassroots--step by step—brick by brick if you will—was the source of the unique leadership which arose in  the Mississippi Movement  and across the black belt south.   As we like to say, leaders don’t make the Movement; the Movement makes leaders.

 

One last point in this very brief expression of our love and respect for Unita: She was able to finish the eighth grade and with a high school equivalency certificate in 1982 was accepted at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) where she received a master’s degree in Community and Regional Planning.  In 1992 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” for her work in rural housing and water systems. Her life is a beacon for us today, illuminating the resistance and leadership present in marginalized people and places.  All around this nation, let Unita Blackwell’s light shine.  

 

Ms. Blackwell was the author of a memoir, “Barefootin’: Life Lessons From the Road to Freedom” (2006), written with JoAnne Prichard Morris.  Survivors include her son and four grandchildren.

See more about Unita Blackwell at https://snccdigital.org/people/unita-blackwell/

Ms. Blackwell's obit in the The Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/unita-blackwell-mississippi-mayor-w

Ms. Blackwell's obit in The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/obituaries/unita-blackwell-dead.html

Ms. Blackwell's obit in The Root:

https://www.theroot.com/unita-blackwell-civil-rights-activist-and-the-1st-blac-18348016

William “Winky” Hall grew up in Harlem and attended Howard University, where he first met fellow Civil Rights activists Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) and Cleve Sellars, among others.  His early Civil Rights experience took place along Route 40 in Maryland, demonstrating at restaurants in Baltimore and walking along picket lines in Washington DC with Julius Hobson and fellow classmates from the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG).  In April 1964, he went to the eastern shore of Maryland to work with Gloria Richardson-Dandridge.  Much later, he went to Atlanta to become a campus traveler for SNCC in Alabama, recruiting other college kids to SNCC projects in Alabama.  He was based in Selma and worked with Dr. King, James Bevil, Andy Young and others in SCLC.

 

He was on the second and third marches across the Edmond Petits Bridge.  As it turned out, the first march was lead by John Lewis, the second by Ralph Abernathy and the third by Dr. King.  It was the third march that was permitted to continue onto Montgomery; the others were turned backed.  Throughout the march, he traveled to college campuses recruiting kids to join.  Bill Hall was one of the SNCC leaders that remained after the march that demonstrated in front of the capitol with Jim Forman and college kids from Montgomery State and Tuskegee Institute.  He was beaten and arrested in Montgomery with Jim Forman and several others.

 

In the fall of 1965, he returned to New York City.  He wanted to take his grass roots organizing experience home.  Once there, he became involved in housing and school issues.  In New York, he began to focus on Africa – demonstrating in front of the South Africa Consulate Office in New York protesting the treatment of black people and the Sharpesville massacre.  He was arrested several times in New York protesting at the South Africa Consulate Office.  On one occasion, he was jailed protesting apartheid along with Julian and James Bond, Jim Forman, John Lewis, Cleve Sellers and Willie Ricks.  He recalled being greatful that Harry Belafonte and Sidney Portier bailed them out.

 

In December 1967, he joined Stokely Carmichael in Washington DC.  At the same time, he applied for admission to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. – sensing contradictions in New York City’s school system.  In the 1960s, in New York City, only four African Americans had supervisory licenses in education.  This license qualified one to serve as a school principal in New York City.  It was hard to imagine that a school system with 1,000 school buildings had only four black people with the qualifications to serve as school principals.  As he recalled, there was only one who actually served in such a capacity.  To his knowledge, no Hispanics had any such licenses.

 

On a brighter note, he was Stokely Carmichael’s best man when he married Miriam Makeba, and they all lived together briefly in Washington DC – until September 1968, when he left to go to Harvard.  “I initially went to get a Masters in Education,” he wrote. “But I later decided to enter the doctoral program and much later decided to complement the credentials with a Masters in Business.  During my time at Harvard, I managed to talk Cleve into coming to the Ed School.  By the time I left Harvard, I had four graduate degrees, a wife, a new son, a daughter from a previous marriage and a corporate job on Park Avenue.”  In a sort of homecoming, Bill Hall later went on to become superintendent of schools in Harlem.  He also served as school superintendent in Hartford, CT and New Brunswick, NJ.

 

Over the years, he also worked for investment banks Lehman Brothers, Chemical Bank, Manufacturers Hanover, etc.  Additionally, he served as CFO for the District of Columbia, before finally reigniting his passion for education—teaching finance on the university level at Philadelphia area colleges and universities.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Submitted by Diallo Hall.

 

 

 William Porter, 76, son of the late John and Lizzie Mae Porter of Albany, GA, went to be with the Lord on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. Known to family as “Bill” and to friends as “Porter,” he was born on Nov. 3, 1941, the second oldest of eight children. He attended local schools and spent two years at Albany State College, when the civil rights struggle drew him into voter registration efforts.

A participant in the 1961 Albany Movement to desegregate public facilities, he left school in 1962 to devote his energies to become a soldier in the cause of freedom. He became Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) coordinator of Citizenship Schools in the area to teach people how to pass the literacy tests on their knowledge of the U.S. Constitution in order to vote. He joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (known familiarly as “Snick”), 1962-1967, serving under Chairmen Charles McDew and John Lewis as chief file clerk; project director in Gadsden and Birmingham, AL; southern fundraiser; campus coordinator; scholarship coordinator; conference coordinator; assistant director of the research library; and Atlanta Office manager.

Some of the documents he created and accumulated are known as the “William Porter Papers,” part of the SNCC Archives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change in Atlanta, GA.

Later, while obtaining his B.S. degree in Business from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Bill met the love of his life, Violet Brodie, and married her, stating in the wedding ceremony that he was also, in effect, marrying her two children, Eileen and Anthony, to show his unconditional fatherly love for them. Bill yearned to be a minister and gave his first sermon at Bethel AME Church in Iowa City. The family moved to Washington, DC, where Bill and Violet were blessed with a son, William Robin Porter. Bill was a correctional officer in the juvenile detention system, and lived in Maryland before moving to Henry County, GA in 2008. Possessing a gentle demeanor with a steadfast determination to do whatever he set out to do, Bill was known for his love of “throwing down” in the kitchen with his down-home culinary skills.

 He leaves to cherish his memory his wife, Violet Porter of McDonough, GA; a daughter, Eileen Leona Brodie, of the Atlanta, GA area; two sons, Anthony Mason of McDonough, and William Robin Porter of Maryland; and eight grandchildren.

 

 

                           1937-2016