Hunter Bear -- Maintaining 'Normally High' Optimism: Notes From a Street-Smart Activist

(Editor’s note: Hunter Gray (Hunter Bear, John R. Salter, Jr.) is a well-known and successful civil rights and labor advocate. He is a retired professor who enjoys sharing his stories with those who strive for equality. He recently sent out this note, and has given his permission to share it with others. Be sure to read his Organizer's Book, JACKSON MISSISSIPPI! Hunter has been an inspiration to me, and so many others, and I hope you enjoy the following. Susan Klopfer, author, Who Killed Emmett Till)

'Maintaining My Normally High Optimism'

This is a kind of selective mini-memoir, reaching back into the latter 1950s and the earlier part of the 1960s – embracing a number of diverse and good people of strong social justice feelings, much of this in the Red Scare epoch.  I could write much more on that and comparable periods but am keeping this within the limits stirred by a very recent letter from a long ago student of mine at a small college, Wisconsin State at Superior, in northern Wisconsin.

Hunter Bear (Hunter Gray, John Salter, Jr.), accomplished activist and professor

Many in Eastern Idaho, including our family, have been hit by the nationally notorious flu. We all weathered that, some with anti-biotics, but in my case a troubling cough persisted.  My domestic responsibilities considerably increased of late, and thus not inclined to take chances, I went to a medical outpost where I was given a chest X Ray. The doc told me I had pneumonia and, when I asked -- was there anything more serious, such as COPD which had taken one my best friends some years ago, I was looked at like I was a high school kid and told pneumonia was very serious.  In the end, with an array of medicines, I threw that off handily.  I may have had it for some time.

The letter came from Mark, now retired from a long and successful teaching career.  It said, in part, “You inspired me then and although I could never be as strong and as tough as you, I have done a few good things in a life filled with luck.  The memory of you inspires me still.”

Drinking black coffee and smoking my tobacco pipe for several hours very early this morning, I traveled back into time.  I wrote Mark later this morning, saying in part:

I very much appreciate your good words – and glad to know my role at Superior, as activist and teacher, was encouraging in those challenging days and circumstances.

It’s been a hell of a challenging period for literally everyone we know. One of my major struggles these days is to maintain my normally high optimism and faith in most of Humanity.  So far, I think I’ve been successful.

The fact is, in that ‘way back time that doesn’t seem that long ago, it was “you students” who certainly inspired me!  I have always remembered you all – with the greatest appreciation and Eldri feels exactly the same way.  We handled some very tough challenges effectively and well. You, yourself, were certainly a major figure in that struggle.

The age difference between myself and you all was obviously pretty minimal. (I note you are 78 and I am virtually 81.)  At Superior, as at my one year of high school teaching in the Nebraska Sandhills country a couple of years before I got to Wisconsin, I felt no social distance between myself as a teacher -- and my students – from whom I always learn much whatever the setting and times.

In fact, that’s been basically my ethos everywhere I have gone as a “professor.”  I’ve often told classes, “I’m not really a professor, just pretending to be one.”

+ + +

I wrote a long letter to the paper attacking HUAC, the film, and praising the student activists.

+ + +

I arrived at Superior State College as it was often known, as an instructor, in late summer, 1960, fresh from a few months on super isolated Bear Mountain Fire Lookout in extreme eastern Arizona and armed with a fresh M.A. from Arizona State, Tempe.  I had been hired at the last minute. I was already a reasonably experienced organizer, militant labor and student rights, and my own kind of radical, but its president, Jim Dan Hill knew nothing personal of my background, save that I was a good part Indian, a veteran and an Arizonian.

No sooner at that college, I learned it was the super authoritarian fiefdom of its president, General Jim Dan Hill, best described as a Texas Bircher. My  sociology teaching load was very heavy, fine with me. Hill and I clashed early on when, in his weekly newspaper column, “Let’s Look At The Record” he praised the witch hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, and the purely awful red-baiting film, “Operation Abolition, which attacked the student protestors and their militant organization – SLATE – who had challenged HUAC during its hearings in the Bay Area early in 1960 via very vigorous demonstrations.

(Decades later, I met the good Bill Mandel, then about 90, on our discussion lists He had played a very constructive and centrally activist ant-HUAC role in those very events.  We found we had crossed trails many times in our lives.  I was about the last person interviewed by Bill on his weekly radio program at Berkeley – KPFA – on Native concerns in late 2005.  Shortly after that, Bill was struck by a car, badly injured, and became inactive.  He remains much missed.)

I wrote a long letter to the paper attacking HUAC, the film, and praising the student activists. It was published.

And I found I was an instant celebrity in Superior where few, and certainly virtually no faculty, ever criticized General Hill openly.  I also learned there was a long extant movement against Hill out in the community – but it had lost a good deal of steam.

Early on, the college Ski Club, all male, saw me and recognized the kind of faculty sponsor they’d like – not a fussy professorial and intrusive type.  Though no ski buff – I am a snowshoes guy – I agreed to be their faculty cover.  Soon thereafter, the Ski Club had one of its big parties – no females and pretty tame by today’s standards.  But, perhaps because of my role as sponsor – I wasn’t at the affair – the Dean of Students, a classic Hill sycophant, officially abolished the Club.  We talked to Student Government which protested the Dean’s action.  The Dean and General Hill then abolished  Student Government in total.

I and a good number of students, some Ski and many others, then had a large mass protest meeting in the college auditorium.

And the War against Hill was on.  Mark, my good and very recent correspondent, was among the first to join the effort.  It was then that I learned that Mark’s uncle, a resident of Superior, was a national VP of the American Federation of Teachers – and an old friend of Bill Karnes, also a national VP of AFT, and president of Phoenix Local 1010 of AFT. Among my several active union affiliations was my at-large membership in 1010.

+ + +

We began systematically contacting potential allies – e.g., political, labor, and general community members.

+ + +

Bill was one of a great many AFL-CIO unionists in Arizona and elsewhere who politely and firmly ignored the flow of attempted mandates from the Federation’s top level – most generated by the predatory Steel Union – seeking to prevent contact with the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, widely seen by its critics as “Communist.”  My own relations with Mine Mill were very close indeed. Bill Karnes and other teacher unionists had always appreciated Mine Mill’s considerable assistance in organizing AFT locals in the mining towns.  AFL-CIO craft unions were much involved with Mine Mill in fighting the copper companies.  And, in any case, Mine Mill, with 10,000 plus members in Arizona – the largest union in the state which, in 1956 and 1957, had won bargaining rights at two major Magma Copper properties – could hardly be ignored.

One of Bill’s best high school students, Rodney, eventually went to UC at Berkeley where he immediately connected with under-grad and grad students who were forming the radical campus political party, SLATE. One of the latter was the older economics student Clinton Jencks, always a widespread and beneficial influence, and late of Mine Mill, Salt of the Earth, the Jencks Case.  They were all involved together in the anti-HUAC fight.

Back at Superior, our student movement, mostly Anglo but some Native, mushroomed fast.  We put out a regularly issued and fiery but rational  mimeographed protest journal, focused on many education issues and certainly student and faculty academic freedom – and, too, faculty and staff salary discrimination. We began systematically contacting potential allies – e.g., political, labor, and general community members. The somewhat dormant, broad and very diverse anti-Hill community movement began to stir – then came vigorously alive.

But the students, Mark and many others indeed, who often didn’t see themselves as activists, were the consistent spear-point.  General Hill attacked me as an atheist and an advocate of free love (the latter for my support, voiced in my Marriage and Family course, of the Swedish system of trial marriage.) Only a little more surreptitiously did he and his cohorts attack me consistently as a Communist.  FBI documents of concerning me, secured many years later via FOIA/PA, indicate Hill brought the willing FBI into it all as an ally very early on.

The fight went through the entire spring semester of 1961.

+ + +

Thus I met Eldri, and we were married a few months later at a very well attended wedding.

+ + +

Mark’s AFT uncle introduced me, at an AFT conference, to Governor Gaylord Nelson (later U.S. Senator).  We had a short but very productive discussion.  Soon after that, the Gov appointed a member of the Board of Regents as a kind of college overseer.  At the end of that spring term, Hill was given only three or so more years and his powers were sharply limited.  He was required to get Regents’ approval for any significant policy and fiscal appropriations decisions.

Eldri, then employed on campus by several Lutheran churches as their student counselor, had come to my attention when a member of the still functioning Ski Club (however unofficial its status) and an Irish Catholic, told me that “a Lutheran girl” had a phonograph record of SLATE’s anti-HUAC protests. Thus I met Eldri and we were married a few months later at a very well attended wedding.  We left Superior in the summer of 1961 for Mississippi teaching and organizing -- and my later organizing with the leftist Southern Conference Educational Fund in the Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt. We finally left the South in 1967 and went on to many other tough campaigns, and college/university teaching – often an activist endeavor in its own right.

Eldri

Over the years, Eldri and I kept in touch with as many of our old friends and fellow combatants as we could.  In the fall of 1965, I carefully wrote the basic draft of what became the first edition of my book on our massive Jackson Movement of 1961-63.  When that was finally published in 1979, it did OK sales-wise – but I also sent over 100 copies as gifts to as many of our old fighting friends I could locate.

During the civil rights period, I went on a few speaking junkets. Bill Karnes, in Arizona, played a key role, along with Harry Stamler, a veteran radical, in setting up speaking engagements for me in Phoenix metro.  Aware that my only life insurance was my GI/VA policy which I had continued, and that I couldn’t get one in Dixie, Local 1010 quickly provided a good one for me.

+ + +

In the old days – going back in time a good ways – it has always seemed to me that friends and foes alike were much more candidly open in their positions, often duking it out, mostly nonviolently but sometimes not.

+ + +

The Arizona Mine Mill Council was as pleased to have me as its major speaker on the civil rights movement as I was to appear before that very large gathering of its many Arizona local unions.

General Hill returned to Texas.  In 1981, a good friend, Duane Hale, Creek Indian and an academic historian, ran across Hill at the West Texas Historical Conference.  He reported that the Old Dragon was old and frail.

Many years after all of this, I learned from our good friend, Stephen Zunes, who we have known since he was a precocious seven year old, that Bill Karnes was his cousin on his mother’s side.  Not surprised at all.

In the old days – going back in time a good ways – it has always seemed to me that friends and foes alike were much more candidly open in their positions, often duking it out, mostly nonviolently but sometimes not.  Nowadays, all sorts of disingenuous stuff, often covert back-biting and back-knifing, seem much more common on the part of our adversaries, and occasionally even a few of our ostensible allies.

The people I have mentioned fondly and well were, and those who remain still, are very fine people.  I wouldn’t try ideological analysis on any of them and their productive contributions -- or their multitude of interesting inter-connections.  As my old cowboy/artist and radical mentor, Frank Dolphin, was sometimes prone to trenchantly note:

“Like pulls to like.”

Hunter Bear

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ and Ohkwari' . 

Check out our massive social justice website:

www.hunterbear.org 

Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
Core dimensions of my Community Organizing course:

http://www.labornet.org/news/0000/hbear.htm

My expanded/updated "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new 10,000 word introduction by me. Covers much of my confrontational social justice organizing life to date. Contains much how-to grassroots organizing methodology: http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

See this for mini-bio, efforts to prevent JM’s appearance in Mississippi, a wide range of its many reviews, and some photos: http://www.amazon.com/John-R.-Salter/e/B001KMEHWY/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Photos)

Hunterbear: Notes on Endangered Native Burials in the Florida Everglades; Way Back When -- Jackson, Mississippi and Civil Rights

Blog post by Hunter Bear
http://www.hunterbear.org

(Publisher's note: Hunterbear is a noted civil rights veteran, a university professor, and author.)

Earlier today I posted on the endangered Native burials in the Florida Everglades.

Sam Friedman writes:

It is hard to find words for such behavior. Attack, oppress and steal from people when they are alive, then desecrate their remains.

Not surprising, but still disgusting.

And my response:

You're right, Sam. And this situation is found across much of the United States. It's particularly prevalent in the Southwest where, in addition to such matters as construction in roads, buildings, and gas lines which can pose problem for burials, there is also a good deal of digging and looting of ancient graves for pots and crafts and sometimes presumed [but non-existent] gold and silver. Relatively recent laws, Federal and some state, are difficult to enforce in rugged back country -- even when there's some official motivation to enforce.

Not far northeastward from Flagstaff and in the lower elevated cedar country and related stretches into the very vast Navajo country, one can find hundreds of ancient Anasazi ruins around 800 years old. Those "old ones", ancestors of the contemporary Hopi, buried their dead to the south and east of their rock building structures. The latter crumbled over the centuries but the ruins and the burials remained, of course, and have been systematically pillaged by Anglo grave robbers for many, many decades. It's not unusual to find scattered skeletal remains along with the broken pieces of clay pots and other artifacts. It's also almost impossible to find a "ruin" in that region that hasn't had its burial area torn up.

In my long several days trek down vast and deep Sycamore Canyon southwest of Flagstaff in 1955, [a repeat journey is not totally out of the question by any means], I found some quite intact Native cliff dwellings in side canyons not far "up" from Sycamore Creek. I'd never reveal the location of those to anyone, anymore than I'd reveal the location of what I'm certain are the last surviving Grizzlies in that super rugged setting and in Arizona itself -- or the location of fairly rich gold bearing quartz that I spotted when the Canyon dropped down into the heavily mineralized Great Verde Fault. All of that's pretty safe -- I know of no one else who has ever done that long trek and systematic exploration. (The minerals would now be safe in any case since the eventual Wilderness Act covers Sycamore and prohibits any mining.)

The Navajo avoid anything relating to the old ruins in their vast reservation -- bigger than the state of West Virginia -- north and northeastward of Flagstaff and into Utah and New Mexico and a bit of Colorado. I've posted this before long ago but it says that pretty well:


HUNTING DEER WITH NED HATATHLI IN THE CINDER HILLS OF NORTHERN ARIZONA -- AND OUR ANASAZI CONCERNS [HUNTER GRAY 1/27/03]

Note by Hunter Bear:

This is simply another of virtually countless indications that the Native
nations and cultures have their own unique, deeply rooted and primary
identities. Many Anglos understand and respect this -- but many still do
not.

Concern about DNA tests and related matters is broadly held in Indian
Country. This news story from the Salt Lake Trib quotes a Paiute's view:
"Among Brewster's own Northern Paiute tribe, he said, "We're not even
supposed to go near burials . . . the whole idea of disturbing a burial is
serious business."

This concern, for example, is extremely and very, very widely pronounced
among the Dine' [Navajo] where the Chindee [a powerful taboo] mandates
avoidance of the dead and all things directly related thereto. Violation of
Chindee requires extensive cleansing and harmony-restoring ceremonies by
Navajo medicine men -- who train rigorously for about 17 years before they
are considered full-fledged practitioners in the totally interrelated and
pervasively blended spheres of spirit, body, and Cosmos.

Our own family's ties with the Navajo are extremely close in the deepest and
most personal sense. When hunting -- say, at various points from
north/northeast and east of Flagstaff up and away into vast Navajoland -- no
Navajo I have ever been with or known would even go close to one of the many
hundreds of old [around 800 years old] Anasazi ruins whose burial grounds
are always just to the east and south of these ancient pre-Hopi villages.

The late Ned A. Hatathli [Hatathali] [1923-1972], who came from a very
traditional Navajo sheep-herding family near Coalmine Mesa, was one of my
father's top art students ever at Arizona State College, Flagstaff -- having
come there on the GI Bill via World War II. Some many years later, at the
end of the '60s, Ned played the key role in founding and launching Navajo
Community College [now Dine' College] -- the very first of the now many
Indian-controlled tribal colleges. He was NCC's first president. Far more
than all of those major dimensions, however, Ned Hatathli was a very close
family friend throughout his life. And he was someone who would often take
me deer hunting when I was a kid still without a vehicle. He used a
conventional 30/30 Winchester Model 94 lever action -- and I had an ancient
Winchester 1892 44/40 lever action which had served a venerable Basque
sheep-herder very well for decades. The jutting edge of its steel
saddle-ring-holder was worn down from an already long, long life in a tough
leather saddle scabbard. And when I got that good old rifle -- my first ever
for big game -- I was even given some black powder cartridges, but I
generally used the smokeless powder ones.

I remember an interesting -- but for me quite unsurprising -- scene where,
in the eastern edge of the Cinder Hills [a major volcanic region mostly just
east and north of Flagstaff, going back to upheavals around 1065 A.D. which
also involved the super-high and very spectacular San Francisco Peaks
immediately north of town], Ned and I spotted a very large buck mule deer.
It was difficult to get a clear shot in the cedars that were around it. As
we moved stealthily and hopefully toward it, the deer's keen senses jerked
it to attention. Aware of something, but not sure where we were, it
retreated slowly into some heavier cedars. We followed, very slowly, very
carefully.

And then -- shrewdly, coincidentally, or psychically -- The Quarry was going
literally into the midst of a large and obvious Anasazi ruin: several large
piles of rocks partially covered with cinders and sand and sage. Even from
some distance, we could see some broken pieces of pottery sprinkled
about --shining in the bright sun.

As one, Ned and I stopped, turned -- and went on to other game trails. Big
Buck could not have been safer.

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

Our Lair of Hunterbear website is now almost 12 years old. It
contains a great deal of primary, first-hand material on Native
Americans, Civil Rights Movement, union labor, and organizing
techniques -- and much more. Check it out and its vast number
of component pieces. The front page itself -- the initial cover
page -- has about 36 representative links.
www.hunterbear.org

See - A Few Basic Pieces in our Jackson Movement
"Scrapbook". Three consecutive web pages beginning with
http://hunterbear.org/a_piece_of__the_scrapbook.htm

And see this on the new, expanded and updated edition of my book,
Jackson Mississippi -- the classic and fully detailed account of
the historic and bloody Jackson Movement of almost 50 years ago:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

New Mexico, Civil Rights Author Releases Internet 's "TOP 10" List of Emmett Till Books

Media Release
Contact Susan Klopfer
http://susanklopfer.com
sklopfer@gmail.com

At right, A Chicago newspaper reports on the murder of young Emmett Till (may be subject to copyright)
* * * * *

(Gallup) -- In observation of Black History Month and the upcoming 57th anniversary of Emmett Till's murder in Mississippi on Aug. 28, civil rights author Susan Klopfer, has released a top 10 list of Emmett Till books and ebooks appearing on the Internet.

"These are books and ebooks that consistently come up in the first ten positions when Emmett Till is googled.

"And yes, of course I am pleased that both of my Emmett Till books are up high on the search engines," Klopfer said, "as well as my eBook, Who Killed Emmett Till? But all of these books are well worth reading, for anyone who wants to learn more about the modern civil rights movement."

The 14-year-old Chicago schoolboy, Till, was the victim of a racist lynching Aug. 28, 1955, in the rural Mississippi Delta.

"People there were angry after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, Brown v the Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, a year before Till's trip to the Delta in 1954.

Then the second Supreme Court decision, Brown II came, "and they were furious, because the second decision said they must integrate schools with 'all deliberate speed.'"

"It was already a horrible time for racism, particularly in Mississippi and the South, and people were in no mood for black children who stood out and didn't mind their manners," Klopfer said.

Till was forcibly taken from his relatives' home in the small cotton town of Money, after angering a local white store owner. Her husband and a relative beat and killed Till, after taking him to a barn at the edge of another town a county away. "His body was taken to still another location, tied to a cotton gin fan, thrown into the Tallahatchie River and was only found after it rose to the surface," Klopfer said.

The Emmett Till incident is seen as the spark that ignited the modern civil rights movement, according to major U.S. historians.

"Emmett's mother, with the help of powerful Chicago unions, got his body shipped back to Chicago. without the help of the unions, this could not have been done.She made sure that photos were taken and that the casket was open, so that people around the world could see what happened to her son."

A month later, the two men identified as Till's killer were acquitted by an all-whte jury. They later confessed in detail to a magazine reporter. But once they were found innocent, Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Ala. decide the time was right for her to take her civil rights stand -- to sit at the front of a city bus -- bringing the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

"Parks later told Emmett's mother that she was thinking of Emmett when she decided to make her move."

Klopfer said it is important to place the Emmett Till story in proper context, and she recently posted an article, Eight Reasons Why the Death of Emmett Till is Important Today, on her Emmett Till blog at http://emmett-till.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-is-death-of-emmett-till-important.html where she frequently posts on Till and related civil rights issues.

That Till's death sparked the modern civil rights movement is listed as the first reason on Klofper's list.

Here is the googled list of Emmett Till books -- the top ten list as of today:

1. The Emmett Till Book
2. A Wreath for Emmett Till
3. The Lynching of Emmett Till: a documentary narrative
4. Who Killed Emmett Till? (eBook)
5. (a link to) Death of Innocence by Mrs. Till-Mobley
6. Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case
7. 'Emmett Till': A Poem of Sorrow, and Hope
8. Eyewitness Account: Emmett Till's cousin Simeon Wright
9. Teacher's Guide for A Wreath for Emmett Till
10.Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination.

Klopfer said her favorite Emmett Till book, "the book that motivated me the most to keep learning about this murder, was Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America by Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till.

"Till's murder was so atrocious. It really galvanized the civil rights movement, leaving an indelible mark on American racial consciousness. Whenever I have interviewed a black civil rights activist who is older, they have told me how Till's death was a defining moment.

"Mamie Carthan was an ordinary African-American woman growing up in 1930s Chicago, a young woman who was heavily influenced by her mother. She married Louis Till, and while the marriage didn't last, due to the husband's domestic brutality, they did have Emmett."

Till's mother went through "an incredible change," as she began her career of activism when she insisted on the open-casket viewing of her son's gruesomely disfigured body," Klopfer said. "It was a terribly brave thing for her to do."

It has been reported that over a hundred thousand people attended the Chicago service. "Perhaps even more people walked by that casket."

The trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, was considered the first full-scale media event of the civil rights movement. "European reporters, for the first time, covered a major U.S. civil rights-related trial. They went into the most dangerous part of Mississippi, at the time, to do their job."

Mamie Till-Mobley, "pulled herself back from the brink of suicide to become a teacher and inspire black children throughout the country. She died as she completed this memoir."

One of Klopfer's professional colleagues, Keith Beauchamp, the producer of the first extensive documentary on Emmett Till, "told me that he promised Mrs. Till-Mobley that he would keep this story alive.

"He did, and Beauchamp is the reason why our nation knows this story, better and better, as the years go by."

Martin Luther King Demanded Strong Stand for Gay and Lesbian Rights

On this date, speaking four days before the 30th anniversary of her husband’s assassination, Coretta Scott King said that the civil rights leader’s memory demanded a strong stand for gay and lesbian rights. “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice,” she said. “But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’”

“I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people,” she said. “Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery (and) Selma (Alabama), in Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida, and many other campaigns of the civil rights movement,” Mrs. King said. She said she saluted the contributions “of these courageous men and women” who fought “for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own.”

(Coretta Scott King speaking at a 25th anniversary celebration for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a group that has pursued gay rights issues in the courts and won several key victories.)

Continued: Prof. Olsen @ large

A Trailblazer of Civil Rights Dies Forgotten

Juanita W. Goggins in 1974, when she became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina legislature. (Associated Press)

By ROBBIE BROWN
Published: March 11, 2010
The New York Times

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Neighbors were chagrined last week when the police here found the body of a 75-year-old woman who had frozen to death, alone in her house, during unexpectedly frigid weather.

Juanita W. Goggins in 1974 became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina legislature. Horace W. Goggins Jr., 42, said his mother had refused help in recent years.

Ms. Goggins, 75, was found dead last week in her home in Columbia, S.C.

Anne McQuary for The New York Times reports --
* * *

An Iranian Civil Rights Movement? Writer Questions Current Political Movement

An Iranian Civil Rights Movement?
by IAN MORRISON

For most observers of the Green Movement, the most salient question is how the current political movement in Iran mirrors the Islamic Revolution. But another parallel comes as a close second: Is the Green Movement pushing forward a civil rights agenda, comparable to the American Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s? Such is the comparison drawn by prominent Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi, as well as many others.

Morrison's analysis continues ...

Navy to honor civil rights martyr Medgar Evers

In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by a white supremacist on June 12, 1963. His murderer was not convicted until 1994.





From Breaking News 24/7


WASHINGTON — Slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers will be honored Friday with a Navy supply ship named for him.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, planned to announce the honor during a speech at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss. The nearly 700-foot-long vessel named for Evers will deliver food, ammunition and parts to other ships at sea.

During the civil rights movement Evers organized nonviolent protests, voter registration drives and boycotts in Mississippi, rising to the post of national field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In 1963 Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his home in Jackson after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. His death prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill.

Evers was born in Decatur, Miss., in 1925 and served in the Army during World War II. He returned to Mississippi, earned a degree from Alcorn College in 1952 and became active in the NAACP and its civil rights work in his home state.

Thirty-seven when he was shot to death by a white supremacist, Evers was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was not convicted until 1994.
-----

While writing Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, I had the honor and privilege of reading, researching and learning more about Medgar Evers. In the Delta and throughout Mississippi and the world, this early modern civil rights leader is remembered and loved. From talking to others, I learned that ..

MEDGAR EVERS was sixteen and a sophomore when World War I broke out. Within a year, he quit school and joined his brother Charles Evers in the U.S. Army. Medgar Evers was attached to a segregated battalion that served in England and after the Normandy invasion, in France.

The experience of travel opened up the world to him; the opportunity to leave the South provided an adventure he could not forget. In France, he found “a whole people – all of them white – who apparently saw no difference in a man simply because of his skin color, and this was perhaps the greatest revelation of all,” he once told his wife, Myrlie, recalled in her autobiography.

While Evers grew up in Decatur Mississippi, outside of the Delta, he would spend his first several years out of college in Mound Bayou of Bolivar County, working with Amzie Moore and Dr. T.R.M.Howard organizing NAACP chapters and investigating murders, and working also selling insurance.

Evers quickly came to know Aaron Henry and the three men began lifelong journeys to change Mississippi. All returning black veterans – Moore, Henry and Evers – faced the Delta’s familiar extremes, both old and new.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, his wife, wrote a beautiful book about Medgar and the times in which they lived, For Us, The Living. You can also read more about Evers at this Clarion-Ledger link.(sk)