The following is an alphabetized list of persons interviewed for the first series of Eyes On The Prize. Under each name is small biographical summary. Click on a name to watch their interview.

A • B • C • D

• Ralph Abernathy (1922-1990)

  • Reverend Ralph Abernathy, born in Linden, AL, served as the pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL. He was one of the founding members of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He served the SCLC as treasurer-secretary during Dr. Martin Luther King’s leadership and as president after Dr. King’s death in 1968. Rev. Abernathy moved to Atlanta in 1961 and became the pastor of the Hunter Street Baptist Church, where he remained until his death. Rev. Abernathy also served as vice-president of the American Freedom Coalition. His autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, was published in 1989. 
     
    Rev. Ralph Abernathy accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King during all of the MIA and SCLC civil rights campaigns. He was a key leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped to lead the SCLC in Albany, GA, Birmingham, AL, Philadelphia, MS, Washington, DC, and Selma, AL, among other places. Abernathy was with Dr. King in Memphis the night that Dr. King was assassinated. He took over leadership of SCLC after Dr. King died and his first major action in that capacity was directing the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.

• Victoria Gray Adams (1926-2006)

  • Victoria Gray Adams was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; a voracious reader, she eventually attended Wilberforce University in Ohio until she ran into financial difficulties. Gray Adams later studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and at Jackson State College in Jackson where she qualified to become a teacher. Adams taught public school in rural Mississippi in the 1940s before marrying and living in Germany for several years. Later in life, she served as a campus minister at Virginia State University for some 30 years and taught and lectured at schools, colleges and universities across the nation. While she and her first husband were stationed at Fort Meade, she began selling cosmetics with the black-owned Beauty Queen Co. Soon after, she returned to Hattiesburg, Mississippi as an independent businesswoman, where she would become involved in the Civil Rights movement. 
     
    As the Freedom Movement, as Gray Adams called it, came to Mississippi, she began attending citizenship school, an alternative schooling system set up by volunteers who were working in Mississippi. Soon, she was teaching literacy and voter registration classes to sharecroppers and domestic workers, some of whom had never written their names. In 1962, Mrs. Gray Adams became field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and she helped lead a boycott against Hattiesburg businesses. During the Democratic primaries in 1964 she decided to take on Senator John Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for sixteen years, becoming the first women to run for the U.S. Senate from Mississippi. After losing that election, Mrs. Gray Adams, amongst other prominent Civil Rights leaders, led the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) on a historic challenge of the all-white official Mississippi state delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Additionally, with a reputation as a fearless strategist, she became an associate of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a national board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

• Dr. William G. Anderson (1927-)

  • William G. Anderson was born in Georgia on December 12, 1927. Obtaining an undergraduate degree from Alabama State College for Negroes in 1949, Anderson went on to the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa and received his certification in surgery. Anderson was the first African-American president for the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). Anderson was a clinical professor of osteopathic surgical specialties at Michigan State University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, an associate dean for the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, and a developer of osteopathic education curriculum for hospitals in the Detroit area. 
     
    In 1957, after completing his residency in Flint, Michigan, Anderson relocated to Albany, GA to start his practice. Anderson developed a thriving practice in Albany due to the great need for health care for African-Americans in a segregated society. Anderson joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and attempted to address this segregation with the white leaders of the town. In 1961, activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began demonstrating in Albany and Anderson and other black leaders formed an organization called the Albany Movement, a coalition whose goal was desegregation. Anderson asked Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., who he had met in Atlanta, to assist the Albany Movement. What was meant to be a short visit from Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) colleagues turned into a year-long campaign of protests and mass arrests with Anderson deeply involved in his role as president of the Albany Movement.

• James Armstrong (1923-2009)

  • In August of 1957, James Armstrong was among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit which led to the eventual desegregation of Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. His sons Dwight and Floyd became the first black children to attend the school. Their first day at the school was September 9, 1963. Six days later, an all-black Church in Birmingham was bombed and four young girls were killed. 
     
    A barber and veteran of World War II, Armstrong was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement from the very beginning. Armstrong was a flag bearer in the Army, so he acted as flag bearer in local civil rights marches, including the pivotal 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. He took part in other demonstrations including an attempt to integrate the Greyhound Bus Station’s waiting room and a demonstration to integrate the stores in downtown Birmingham, which led to his arrest in April of 1963. Armstrong worked closely with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and even helped him when his children were jailed in Gadsden, Alabama. In 2011, Armstrong was the subject of a documentary, The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement.

• Joseph Azbell (1927-1995)

  • Joseph Azbell began his newspaper career in the United States Air Force, where he founded the Air University Dispatch. In 1948, Azbell was hired by the Montgomery Advertiser and worked there through the early 1960s. His book, The Riotmakers, was published in 1968, and he wrote a weekly column for the Montgomery Independent from 1968 until his death in 1995. Azbell also worked on the presidential campaigns of George Wallace in 1968 and 1972 as Director of Communications.
    
    During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Joseph Azbell was the city editor for the Montgomery Advertiser. When E.D. Nixon told him of the upcoming boycott, he put it on the front page of the newspaper. As a reporter, Azbell attended the first mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church and sat in on meetings between the Montgomery Improvement Association, the bus company, and the three city commissioners. He was also present after the bombings of Martin Luther King’s and E.D. Nixon’s homes. When Dr. King was on trial in Montgomery, Azbell testified to the fact that King advocated non-violence.

• Sheriff Melvin "Mel" Bailey (1925-1997)

  • Melvin “Mel” Bailey served on the Birmingham police force before becoming sheriff of Jefferson County, Alabama. His career as sheriff began in 1963 and ended with his resignation in 1996, after a period of illness. Although less famous than Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, Bailey helped shape the police’s relationship with the civil rights activists of the early 1960s. 
     
    As sheriff of Jefferson County, Bailey’s jurisdiction included the city of Birmingham, and his position gave him authority over police officials in the city. During the 1963 marches and protests, Bailey tried to minimize conflict between black protestors and white Klansmen. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Bailey met with black ministers and leaders, and refused official sanction for Ku Klux Klan activities. He also tried to constrain the racism of the police force, and admitted that Connor and many Birmingham police officers had ties to the Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils. 
     
    Bailey’s tactics were not always effective. On May 10, 1963, news conferences announced a compromise between black leaders and white Birmingham businessmen. Connor and other former city councilmen were enraged, and Klan leaders called for retribution. On the night of May 11, bombs exploded at the house of King’s brother and at the A.G. Gaston motel, where King and other Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leaders had been staying. Over Bailey’s objections, Connor’s policemen came to restrain the black demonstrators who arrived at the scenes of the bombings, and state troopers sent by Governor George Wallace began beating black demonstrators with clubs and handguns. King, other black leaders and some white officials attempted to restore calm, but the night erupted into violence once again. Thirty-five blacks and five whites were injured, seven stores were burnt, and local authorities restored order only after President Kennedy sent federal troops to a nearby military base. In his later years, Bailey helped desegregate the police force, and remained popular with black and white voters until his retirement in 1996.

• Marion Barry (1936-2014)

  • Marion Barry was born on March 6, 1936 in Itta Bena, Mississippi before moving at a young age to Memphis, Tennessee. After completing an undergraduate degree at LeMoyne College, Barry attended Fisk University in Nashville, where he met participants in the Nashville civil rights movement, such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member James Lawson as well as activists Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard Lafayette. Soon after, he became the first chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and moved to Washington, D.C. He left the organization in 1967 and remained a local activist. First elected to the Washington, D.C. school board in 1971, then to the City Council in 1975, Barry received the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Washington, D.C. in 1978 and was elected mayor later that year. Barry served three terms as mayor from 1979 to 1991, working against increasing unemployment, poverty, drug use, and violence in the city. On January 18, 1990, the FBI and D.C. police arrested Barry for cocaine possession and use, infamously capturing him on video in a local hotel. Despite his sentencing, Barry remained a popular figure in D.C.’s 8th Ward, and shortly after his release in 1992 Barry won a seat on the City Council. In 1994, Barry ran for a fourth term as Mayor, winning 56% to 42% against Republican Carol Schwartz. Barry later served on the City Council, again representing the 8th Ward. 
     
    Through a large group of activists from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, and other schools, Barry became involved with the Nashville sit-ins and SNCC. Encouraged by a sit-in in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, student activists began sitting in at various segregated businesses in downtown Nashville. After weeks of protests, many business owners relented and began the slow process of desegregating the town. Barry was elected the first chairman of SNCC at its convention at Shaw University in 1960. He served for one year. Moving to Washington, D.C. i n 1965, he helped provide food for impoverished blacks after the city’s 1968 race riots, some of many across America during that year.

• James Bash (1924-2014)

  • Dr. Bash was a professor emeritus in the Curry School of Education and co-founder the Desegregation Center at the University of Virginia. During the Civil Rights era, Bash was the principal of the Farmville, Virginia high school located in Prince Edward County. The county had been included as a defendant in the Brown case, stemming from student-led protests against conditions at the all-black R.R. Moton High School. Following the order to desegregate by the second Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court, citizens of Farmville opted to open an all-white private school, while the county Board of Supervisors denied any funding for integrated public schools. Bash was against closing the public school and opening a separate privately-funded school and because of this position he lost his job as principal. The school board continued with their plan, and as a result public schools in Prince Edward County would remain closed for five years. Bash went on to teach at the Curry School of Education and helped create the Desegregation Center at the University of Virginia.

• Melba Pattillo Beals (1941-)

  • Melba Patillo Beals was born in 1941. Beals was one of the nine African-American students who desegregated Little Rock, Arkansas’ Central High School in the fall of 1957. Beals and the other eight African-American students became known as the “Little Rock Nine” and, amidst an atmosphere of potential violence, were admitted to the high school under armed federal escort. In May 1955, the Little Rock School Board decided to integrate Central High School by September 1957, agreeing to comply with the 1954 United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education which ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. Of the 517 African-American students who were eligible to attend Central High School, 17 were admitted by the school board. Of the 17, Beals and eight others decided to matriculate. Beals recalled: “I wanted to go to Central High School because they had more privileges. They had more equipment. They had five floors of opportunities. I understood education before I understood anything else.” There was a significant amount of white resistance to the integration of Central High School. White Citizens Councils protested the desegregation plan and Alabama Governor Orval Faubus authorized the state National Guard to prevent Beals and the other students from entering the school. On September 23, 1957 Governor Faubus removed the National Guard and a crowd of 1,000 people surrounded the school, creating the potential for violence. The next day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,200 federal troops to Little Rock to force the integration of Central High School. During the crisis, Beals was assaulted and threatened. “[People yelled] ‘get her,’ ‘kill her,’ ‘hang her,’ ‘we got us a nigger’...Parents were hitting, parents were throwing things. You would get tripped. People would just walk up and hit you in the face.” On one occasion, Beals had acid sprayed in her eyes by an angry white student. After President Eisenhower sent in troops to force integration, Beals remembered her emotions: “There was a feeling of pride and hope that yes, this is the United States, yes, there is a reason I salute the flag.” Melba was an active writer during her trying days at Central High School, and has continued to use that skill. She has written articles for publications including People, Essence and the San Francisco Examineras well as several books, including Warriors Don’t Cry and White is a State of Mind. In 1998 she received a Congressional Gold Medal, the legislative branch’s highest honor.

• Frances Belser (1916-1986)

  • Frances Belser was born on August 12, 1916. She lived in Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott of 1955 and 1956. She was a participant in the boycott. Belser died in September 1986.

• Reverend James Bevel (1936-2008)

  • Born in 1936 in Itta Bena, Mississippi, James Bevel spent two years in the United States Naval Reserve before attending the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee where he studied under James Lawson and joined the Nashville chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1959 and became very active in the civil rights movement. Bevel was married to Diane Nash for a short time during this period. Bevel worked on the Chicago open-house movement in 1966, the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1967, and the Memphis sanitation workers strike and Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. Bevel left SCLC in 1969 to form the Making of a Man clinic in 1970. He later founded Students for Education and Economic Development (SEED). He ran for vice-president in 1992 on Lyndon Larouche’s ticket. He also helped organize Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March and wrote articles for the Nation of Islam newspaper. In 2006, Rev. Bevel was accused of incest by one of his daughters and was convicted and sentenced to jail for 15 years. He served seven months of his sentence and then died in 2008 of pancreatic cancer while awaiting an appeal on his case. 
     
    Bevel, along with John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash, helped to organize student sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. As chairman of the Nashville student movement, Bevel participated in the Freedom Rides and in 1962 set up the SCLC Mississippi Project for voting rights. In 1963, Bevel joined the fight against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama alongside Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth. Bevel led the effort to organize and bring young people into the movement drawing criticism from those who felt it was too dangerous to march children against Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses. This tactic proved critical, however, in the success of the media battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. Bevel also helped brainstorm the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery.

• Unita Blackwell (1933-2019)

  • Unita Blackwell was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta. She completed the eighth grade and then began work as a sharecropper. In 1964, Blackwell was married, had a child, and taught Sunday school when Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members came to town. Blackwell became a prominent participant in Freedom Summer. Blackwell later received a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and served as a community development specialist for the National Council of Negro Women. In 1979, Blackwell became Mississippi's first black, female mayor when she was elected to serve in Mayersville, MS, her hometown. In 1992, she was named as a recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation's “genius” awards, largely because of her work as mayor. Her autobiography, "Barefootin': Life Lessons from the Road to Freedom" was published in 2006. 
     
    Blackwell joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1964 Freedom Summer and began recruiting people to register to vote. She was a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation that went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ in 1964. This delegation attempted to become the official Mississippi delegate in place of the segregationist delegates from Mississippi’s official Democratic Party. 

• Harry Briggs (1913-1986) & Eliza Briggs (-1998)

  • Harry and Eliza Briggs were instrumental in the destruction of segregation in American public schools. The couple, along with eighteen others, were the plaintiffs in the case Briggs v. Elliott, a class action lawsuit organized by Reverend Joseph DeLaine and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which argued that the segregated schools of Clarendon County, South Carolina were unconstitutional. The case was eventually joined with four other suits to form the case Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Brown case that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, effectively overruling the “separate but equal” legal principle set down by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. After they filed the complaint, Harry Briggs, a Navy veteran, lost his job as a gas station attendant and Eliza Briggs was fired as a domestic worker in a local motel. Mr. Briggs had to move to Florida to find work to support his wife and five children still living in South Carolina. Similarly, DeLaine’s home and church were attacked. He eventually left South Carolina and was prohibited from returning.

• Harry Briggs Jr. (1955-2005)

  • Harry Briggs, Jr.'s parents, Harry and Eliza Briggs were instrumental in the destruction of segregation in American public schools. The couple, along with eighteen others, were the plaintiffs in the case Briggs v. Elliott, a class action lawsuit organized by Reverend Joseph DeLaine and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that argued that the segregated schools of Clarendon County, South Carolina were unconstitutional. The case was eventually joined with four other suits to form the case Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Brown case that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, effectively overruling the “separate but equal” legal principle set down by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. As a young man, Harry Briggs, Jr. attended one of the crowded, small, poorly funded and equipped black schools in Clarendon County. The children would often have to chop wood to heat the school in the winter and they had no transportation and had to walk as much as five or six miles to and from school. Once his parents signed the petition against school segregation and joined the lawsuit that would become Brown v. Board of Education, the entire family suffered retaliation from the local white community. Although the Brown v. Board of Education case was a success, both Briggs' parents lost their jobs and Briggs, Sr. had to leave the state to find work, and Harry Briggs, Jr. had difficulty finding and keeping work years after leaving school due to his recognizable name and connection with the lawsuit. 

• Herbert Brownell Jr. (1904-1996)

  • Born in 1904, Herbert Brownell attended the University of Nebraska and Yale Law School. He passed the bar in 1927 and immediately began practicing law in New York City. He quickly became very involved in the Republican Party, and was elected to the New York State Legislature in 1933. He managed the successful gubernatorial campaign of Thomas E. Dewey in 1942, as well as Dewey’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1944 and 1948. Between 1944 and 1946, he also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Brownell was able to convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to retire from the military and run for President in 1952. Once elected, Eisenhower appointed Brownell Attorney General. In this office Brownell played a major role in the nomination and appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where Warren would oversee and insure unanimity on the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. After the controversy surrounding the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in the fall of 1957, Brownell came under pressure from southerners in Congress angered by his consistent support of civil rights. He stepped down from his position on November 8, but in later years would again serve his country as U.S. Representative to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in addition to numerous other civic offices. He died of cancer in 1996. 
     
    Brownell was responsible for developing and presenting the Eisenhower administration’s position on Brown v. Board of Education to the Court. President Eisenhower was not prepared to state officially that the federal government believed segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, but Brownell was permitted to state his own opinion as Attorney General. When the question was put to him, Brownell stated that he believed such segregation to be, in fact, unconstitutional. In 1956, Brownell authored a civil rights bill to be presented to Congress. This bill would (1) create a bipartisan Civil Rights Commission, (2) expand the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department into a Civil Rights Division, (3) allow the Attorney General to secure court injunctions in civil rights cases and move such cases from state to federal courts, and (4) grant the Justice Department greater power to enforce voting rights. “Part III” became the most controversial, and it was equated by Georgia Senator Richard Russell with “another Reconstruction at bayonet point of a peaceful and patriotic South.” Part III was stricken from what became the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first federal civil rights legislation, to be passed, indeed, since Reconstruction. 

• Reverend Will Campbell (1924-2013)

  • Born in Mississippi in 1924, Campbell suffered a near-fatal case of childhood pneumonia. After recovering, Campbell decided to become a minister, and he was ordained at age seventeen before attending Louisiana College and serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Campbell went on to study at Wake Forest, Tulane and Yale, after which he briefly pastored a Baptist church in Taylor, Louisiana. 
     
    He was director of religious life at the University of Mississippi from 1954 to 1956 and then Executive Director of the National Council of Churches’ Summer Project in Nashville, Tennessee. There, Campbell participated in a variety of civil rights conferences and direct actions. When nine black students planned to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, Campbell was among four adults who accompanied them on their first attempt, upon which they were turned away. In 1962, Campbell left the National Council of Churches to join the Committee for Southern Churchmen. Campbell preferred spreading a gospel of reconciliation to aggressive public activism. He and his wife Brenda lived on a farm in rural Tennessee where they raised three children, and he was the author of seventeen books including his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, a 1978 finalist for the National Book Award. Campbell died in 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee.

• Gordon Carey (1932-2021)

  • Gordon Carey was born in 1932 in Michigan. His father, a Methodist minister, founded a CORE chapter in Michigan in 1943 and Carey joined CORE himself in 1954. During the sit-ins of 1955-56, he was particularly vital to the civil rights movement, supporting the Greensboro Four and others. As a leader within CORE, he encouraged questioning the law and judiciary. Carey was particularly fundamental to the Freedom Ride effort, having trained several hundred participants in nonviolence. Carey moved to Pasadena, California, where he served as chair of his local CORE chapter. In 1954, he was elected vice chairman of CORE, and in 1958, he was hired as a field secretary for the organization. He was promoted to field director in 1960, and in this capacity oversaw CORE programs, training, and field secretaries. Following the February 1, 1960 sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, Carey was sent to Greensboro, stopping in Durham to assist in planning demonstrations there. In 1961, he helped to organize the Freedom Rides, and he also participated in planning the Freedom Highways Project, the March on Washington, and 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. He left CORE in 1968 and joined Floyd McKissick's efforts to found a utopian community for African Americans in North Carolina, called Soul City.

• Hodding Carter III (1935-)

  • Hodding Carter was born 1935 in New Orleans, Louisiana into a family rooted in journalism. His father, Hodding Carter Sr., was a Pulitzer Prize winner and chief editor and publisher of the Greenville, MS based newspaper, Delta Democrat-Times. In 1959, a few years after Carter graduated from Princeton and completed his service to the U.S. Marine Corps, he returned to Greenville to work for his family’s journal. During his eighteen-year stint at the paper, Carter was involved in the highly successful presidential campaigns of Lyndon Baynes Johnson and Jimmy Carter. He has served as an anchor and correspondent for numerous political programs for ABC, BBC, CBS, and CNN. Carter was the president, CEO and Trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 
     
    Carter and his family were attacked by the white segregationist community during the civil rights era. Their strong stance against Jim Crow Laws resulted in death threats and boycotts for their paper. Carter’s family values made a lasting impression on him. Carter employed his journalistic voice to combat the injustices of segregation and advocate civil rights. He later extended his fervor into politics, by helping organize a white and black delegation that traveled to the 1968 Democratic National Conventions and removed the all-white segregationist Mississippi delegation.

• Judge Robert Carter (1917-2012)

  • The Hon. Robert C. Carter was born in Careyville, Florida in February 1917, but spent his formative years in New Jersey. He received his LL.B from Howard University in 1940, and his LL.M from Columbia University in 1941. Spending the intervening years in the U.S. Air Force, Carter began working as legal counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1944. With a career that spanned over twenty years, Carter remains most famous for his litigation of Brown v. Board of Education and NAACP v. Alabama. In 1972, President Nixon appointed Carter as a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, a position that Carter still holds today. In addition, Carter remained active on the boards of numerous social service organizations and continued to publicize the discrimination inherent in America’s political and educational institutions. 
     
    Carter began his work with the NAACP as an assistant to Thurgood Marshall, often venturing into Southern courtrooms hostile to the presence of black attorneys. In the 1950s, the NAACP’s tactics for fighting segregation and discrimination changed, and Carter emerged as one of the leaders behind the new strategy. For the first time, NAACP lawyers confronted the legality of the separate-but-equal doctrine itself, claiming that it was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, they continued to argue that the creation of separate facilities created inequality; only integration could remedy the situation. Carter used this reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the first of the five cases known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education.

• Judge Charles Clark (1925-2011)

  • Charles Clark was born in Memphis, TN. He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve in World War II and the Korean War. Between the wars and after the Korean War, Clark practiced law in Jackson, MS. In 1969, President Nixon appointed him a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit as part of his “southern strategy” of aligning with opponents of civil rights. Clark became the Chief Judge of this court in 1981 and retired in 1992. 
     
    Charles Clark represented the Board of Trustees of the University of Mississippi in the lawsuit over James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi. Clark argued that there was no policy of racial discrimination at the university and that James Meredith had been denied admission because he was not qualified.

• Sheriff James Clark (1920-2007)

  • Jim Clark was first elected to the office of Sheriff in Selma, Alabama in 1958. He was at the center of the violent clashes that occurred in Selma in 1965. After his violent response to blacks attempting to register to vote was broadcast around the nation, Clark lost his re-election bid in 1966. After that he worked selling mobile homes in and around Selma, and eventually spent time in prison for selling marijuana. Clark died in June 2007. 
    
    In 1965, Jim Clark was the ardently segregationist Sheriff of Selma, Alabama in Dallas County. During that year's SCLC/SNCC protests against voter discrimination in Selma, Mayor Joe Smitherman and Public Safety Commissioner Wilson Baker hoped to blunt the force of the campaign by showing some restraint in dealing with demonstrators. However, the protests centered on the voter registration offices at the county courthouse, which fell under Clark's jurisdiction. Known for his violent temper and his use of Ku Klux Klan members as irregular deputies, Clark lived up to his reputation, beating and manhandling activists like Amelia Boynton, Rev. F.D. Reese and Rev. C.T. Vivian in front of news cameras. During the Bloody Sunday attack on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Clark's mounted officers rode into the crowd, wielding bullwhips. Clark lost his re-election bid to Wilson Baker in the 1966 Democratic primary, largely due to gains in black voter registration under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  

• Dr. Kenneth Clark (1914-2005) 

  • An African-American psychologist, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark was an early civil rights leader who used social science to combat racial segregation. Dr. Clark received national recognition after his research was used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Chief Justice Earl Warren in the Brown v. Board of Education case to argue that racial segregation in public schools was harmful to African-American children. Dr. Clark’s research used white and black dolls to study how young African-American children perceived their race. Dr. Clark’s work concluded that a majority of African-American children felt racially inferior. The data from the tests showed that a majority of the black children tested favored white dolls. Dr. Clark and his wife saw the data as “indicative of the dehumanizing effects of racism.” Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, accepted Dr. Clark’s contention, writing in the Court’s opinion that racial separation was “implying inferiority in civil society.” For black children, Chief Justice Warren continued, this “feeling of inferiority...may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Warren directly cited Dr. Clark’s work in his opinion. Clark was the author of numerous books, including Dark Ghetto (1965); A Relevant War Against Poverty (1969); A Possible Reality (1972); and Pathos of Power (1974). Dr. Clark died in 2005.

• William Coleman (1920-2017)

  • Born in 1920 in Philadelphia, William T. Coleman served as the 4th U.S. Transportation Secretary, becoming the second African American to serve on the cabinet, and played a significant role in major civil rights court cases. Coleman graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Law School and became a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the first African American to serve in that capacity for the nation's highest court. Following his clerkship, Coleman was a partner at prominent New York and Philadelphia law firms, developing expertise in transportation law and becoming involved with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. After serving on the board of directors of multiple large corporations and Presidential commissions under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Coleman left private practice to serve as Transportation Secretary under President Carter. Coleman returned to the private sector, served on numerous corporate boards of directors, and remained active in civil rights. In 1971 Coleman became President of the NAACP-LDF and later served as its Chair and then Senior Director. In 1997, he received the Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1995 was the recipient of the President’s Medal of Freedom in recognition of his many years of public service. 
     
    As a lawyer working with the NAACP, Coleman was involved with several cases which eventually led up to Brown v. Board of Education, and was coauthor of the brief in that case. He defended the rights of freedom riders and civil rights workers throughout the South, and served as co-counsel on McLaughlin v. Florida, establishing the constitutionality of interracial marriage. In 1959 President Eisenhower appointed Coleman to serve on the President’s Commission on Employment Policy, which dealt with increasing minority hires in government.

• Courtland Cox (1941-)

  • Courtland Cox was an active member of SNCC in the 1960s and participated in organizing in Mississippi. He and Joyce Ladner served as the SNCC representatives on the planning staff for the March on Washington in 1963. He helped make last-minute changes to John Lewis’ speech for the March. Cox was also a part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the Atlantic City, NJ Democratic National Convention. 
     
    After Courtland Cox’s involvement in SNCC, he worked in Washington, D.C. for the United States government and as a private consultant. In Washington, D.C., Cox served as Director of the Minority Business Opportunity Commission, Director of the Office of International Business, and Special Assistant to the Mayor for Economic Development. He also worked for the Department of Commerce as Director of the Minority Business Development Agency and the Director of the Office of Civil Rights. Cox later worked as the Director of Local, Small and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Development for the Washington, D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission.

• Carl Daniels

  • Carl Daniels was a Birmingham, Alabama native who became a well-known local radio and television journalist. He worked as a reporter for the African-American radio station WJLD before becoming the first black newscaster in Birmingham to work for a white-owned station, WSGN. He also worked for television station WVTM (Channel 13) and radio station WERC.

• John Daniels

• • Audio only.
  • John H. Daniels was a participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interviewed by Blackside about his experience.

• Dave Dennis (1940-)

  • Dave Dennis worked closely with Bob Moses in Mississippi civil rights activism. He later worked for the Algebra Project, an organization founded by Moses to improve minority children’s mathematics education. 
     
    Dave Dennis was a Freedom Rider and Co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in Mississippi. Dennis was the Mississippi director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), but he worked with SNCC members and other civil rights activists in Mississippi under the COFO umbrella to avoid intra-organizational conflicts. COFO organized activists for a Mississippi voter registration drive during the Freedom Summer. Dennis spoke at the funeral of James Chaney, and he worked closely with both Bob Moses and Medgar Evers.

• Annie Devine (1912-2000)

• • Audio only.
  • Annie Devine was born in Canton, Mississippi. She graduated from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Devine was an insurance executive who became increasingly interested in, and committed to, the struggle for civil rights. Her determination and desire to initiate resistance to the status quo marked her as a unique and fighting spirit. Devine also worked as a volunteer with the Head Start program in Mississippi.
    
    Annie Devine co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) with Fannie Lou Hammer and Victoria Gray Adams. This party, unlike the Democratic Party in Mississippi, included blacks and invited their participation in the political process. The MFDP sought to gain seats as part of the Mississippi delegation for the 1964 National Democratic Convention. They hoped to replace Mississippi politicians who had gained access to the delegation through corrupt voting procedures. Devine, Hamer, and Adams were the first black women to sit on the floor of the House of Representatives when they made their accusations to the House about Mississippi’s discriminatory voting practices. Though the party were not seated at the Convention, they did successfully pressure the national government. President Johnson responded to their claims and actions, as well as those of other civil rights leaders and participants by pushing for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

• Charles Diggs (1922-1998)

  • Charles Diggs, Jr. was born on December 2, 1922 in Detroit Michigan, the only son of Charles Diggs, Sr., a prominent African American business man and the first African American elected to the state senate. Charles Diggs Jr. served in a segregated unit in the Air Force, where he gained the commission of second lieutenant. He took up his career in public service after the Michigan senate refused to seat his father, who had been convicted on charges of bribery. Diggs entered the special election for his father’s seat, won, and served for three years in the state senate before entering and winning the race for the U.S. House in 1954, becoming the first African American Representative from Michigan. Allegations of corruption forced his resignation in 1980. His political career was distinguished by a sustained commitment to civil rights, the promotion of home rule of the District of Columbia, the promotion of increased aid to Africa, and the exposure of abuses perpetuated by the Apartheid regime of South Africa.  
    
    Shortly after taking up his seat in the U.S. House, Diggs traveled to Mississippi to attend the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Till, where even as a Congressman, he was forced to seat in a segregated section with black reporters. Much of Diggs’ congressional career was focused on the issue of civil rights. He urged President Eisenhower to convene a special session of Congress to address civil rights, and was an outspoken advocate for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In April 1955, he gave a well-received speech to a crowd of about 10,000 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi at the annual conference of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and used his position to expose race discrimination in federally funded programs throughout the south. He proposed withholding funding for schools which refused to abide by the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

• Dr. William Dinkins

  • Dr. William Dinkins was one of two African-American doctors at Selma, Alabama’s Good Samaritan Hospital. On February 18, 1965 in nearby Marion, Alabama, a large number of African-Americans held a nighttime demonstration outside of the city jail that ended with a confrontation with state troopers. One of these state troopers, later revealed to be James Bonard Fowler, shot 26 year old Jimmie Lee Jackson at the nearby Mack’s Café. Jackson was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where Dr. Dinkins treated him. 
     
    Jackson died on February 26. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at Jackson’s funeral, and Jackson’s death gave impetus for the multiple marches in Selma that took place in early March 1965. The police-led violence at these marches (notably the “Bloody Sunday” march on March 7) led directly to President Lyndon Johnson’s submission of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Congress. In 2004, James Bonard Fowler admitted to John Fleming, a reporter for the Anniston, Alabama Star, that he had shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, allegedly in self-defense. Two grand juries in the 1960s had chosen not to indict Fowler, identified then only by his last name. After an indictment in 2007, Fowler eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2010.

• John Doar (1921-2014)

  • John Doar attended St. Paul’s Academy in Minneapolis, MN and received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He earned a law degree at Boalt Hall in Berkeley, and he served in the Air Force during World War II. Doar served as Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division from 1960-1967. Doar later served as Special Counsel to the House of Representatives and went on to be the senior partner in a private law firm in New York. 
     
    John Doar spent most of this time in the Justice Department investigating civil rights abuses in the South and bringing suit against violations of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He began by filing suits over voter intimidation in Tennessee. In early 1961, he and fellow Department of Justice attorney Bob Owen began investigating voter discrimination in southwest Mississippi with Bob Moses’ help. He also accompanied James Meredith as he enrolled in Ole’ Miss in September of 1962, staying with Meredith in his dorm room for several weeks and accompanying him to his classes with federal marshals. In 1964, Doar was involved in the investigation of the murder of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman during Freedom Summer. He authorized the F.B.I. to investigate the case, and he was the lead attorney in the federal trial that led to the conviction of several people for violating the civil rights of the three civil rights workers. Doar also investigated and successfully prosecuted the murder of Viola Luizzo, who was killed while bringing marchers back to Selma from Montgomery. Doar had been present during the entirety of that march. One of Doar’s most famous actions occurred after the death of Medgar Evers. Mourners wanted to march up the main street in Jackson, MS, but they were stopped by police. When marchers began throwing bottles and bricks and county police were brought in with shot-guns, Doar stepped between the two groups and convinced the marchers to disperse peacefully.

• Ivanhoe Donaldson (1942-2016)

  • Ivanhoe Donaldson was a very active member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1968, Donaldson helped found Afro-American Resources, Inc. which ran the Drum and Spear Bookstore, Drum and Spear Press, and the Center for Black Education in Washington, DC. He was also a visiting lecturer for Afro-American courses at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. Donaldson advised and worked for Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry for many years, but in 1985 he pleaded guilty to embezzling funds from the Washington, DC government. Donaldson later worked as a vice-president for PWRT Services. He continued to support SNCC related activities and served on the advisory committee for an October 2005 conference called, "Tell the Story: The Chicago SNCC History Project, 1960 -1965."
    
    Ivanhoe Donaldson worked for SNCC as an organizer and held leadership positions within the organization. In 1960-62, as a SNCC field secretary, Donaldson collected food in Michigan and Kentucky and brought it to Mississippi to help sharecroppers and tenant farmers who had been kicked off their land for attempting to register to vote. In 1963 he was active in demonstrations in Danville, VA. Donaldson was also active during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, though he felt ambivalent about the participation of northern white students. After the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began planning a march from Selma, AL to Montgomery, AL in 1965, Donaldson became one of the SNCC organizers in Selma.

• Virginia Durr (1903-1999)

  • 1979 Interview | 1986 Interview
  • Virginia Foster Durr was born in Alabama in 1903. She is remembered for having overcome her own personal racism and striving to make others aware of their prejudices. Durr attended Wellesley College where she was hesitant to sit near, and eat with, African-American students. Being in a different environment from the segregated South changed Durr’s perspective, and she began to see how the society she’d been raised in was constructed to keep groups of people separate. She eventually returned to Montgomery and married attorney Clifford Durr. The couple moved to Washington D.C. where in 1938, Durr was a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and worked with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to combat racism. In the 1940’s the Durrs came under suspicion and were under FBI surveillance due to their political beliefs and because Clifford took on clients who were members of the Communist Party. They moved to Colorado briefly and then back to Montgomery, where they became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Durr continued to work for social justice throughout her life and wrote an autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr which was published in 1985. A book of her correspondence Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, was published in 2003. In her later years, she protested against nuclear weapons. She and Clifford raised four daughters and she died in February, 1999. 
     
    After moving back to Montgomery, Alabama, Clifford opened a law practice where Virginia worked as a secretary. Virginia became friends with Rosa Parks and arranged for Parks to study at Highlander School in Tennessee. The Highlander School was an organization where union members and civil rights leaders held meetings and conducted educational training. Shortly after that, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on Montgomery bus for a white man. The Durrs and E.D. Nixon bailed Parks out of jail. The Durrs supported the boycott which resulted from Parks’ actions. She and her husband eventually became outcasts in the white Birmingham community because of their political beliefs and actions. Virginia later supported Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers by housing many volunteers who came to Montgomery to work on voter registration issues.

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