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.

 E • F • G • H

• Dr. Robert Ellis (1921-2009)

  • Dr. Robert Ellis was the Director of Registration at the University of Mississippi while James Meredith had applied for admission. Meredith, while not the first African American to apply for admission to the University, joined with the NAACP to sue the university for admission upon his denial. As the case proceeded within the courts, Governor Ross Barnett inserted himself in the process, even going so far as calling Dr. Ellis before he gave his testimony before the court, and vowing to shut down the University should Meredith win his appeal. Before Meredith had been officially registered at the University, riots broke out on the Oxford campus, leading to the activation of the National Guard to restore order. The next morning, Dr. Ellis registered James Meredith, now the first African-American to enter the University, in his office. Blackside interviewed Dr. Ellis on his recollections of the entire event.

• Reverend Joseph Ellwanger (1934-)

  • Joseph Ellwanger, a Lutheran minister, became pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958. While in Birmingham, Ellwanger led the interracial Birmingham Council on Human Relations and the Concerned White Citizens of Alabama. He was the pastor of Cross Lutheran Church for 34 years before his retirement in 2001. Currently, Ellwanger works for WISDOM, a faith-based affiliation of groups working for social causes in southeast Wisconsin. 
     
    The Reverend Joseph Ellwanger was one of the few white Southern ministers involved in civil rights work. Ellwanger worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to plan the Birmingham demonstrations. On the Sunday when the 16th Street Church in Birmingham was bombed, Ellwanger was giving a service in his church a mile down the road. Denise McNair, one of the children who died in the bombing, was the daughter of one of his parishioners and Ellwanger spoke at the funeral. Ellwanger was the president of The Birmingham Council on Human Relations, which provided behind-the-scenes support for civil rights work. On Saturday, March 6, 1965, Ellwanger organized a march in Selma, Alabama to support voting rights. He and 72 white Alabamans who wanted to openly support voting rights marched to the courthouse steps in Selma, where they were confronted by hostile whites singing "Dixie." They came and left without any violence that day, and Ellwanger himself returned to march in Selma on "Turnaround Tuesday."

• Harold Engstrom (1918-2002)

  • Harold Engstrom grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas and attended public schools there. In 1939, he received a degree in civil engineering from the University of Arkansas. He worked at Arkansas Foundry Company (AFCO) and in 1965 was named vice president of the company. In 1971 he was inducted into the College of Engineering Hall of Fame. He remained the vice president at AFCO until he left the company in 1978. He died on February 11, 2002. 
     
    Harold Engstrom was not only a talented engineer; he was also an important leader in the Little Rock area at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. Besides serving as chairman of the Little Rock City Building Code Appeals board and as the national director of the Society of Professional Engineers in Arkansas, Mr. Engstrom was also the president of the Little Rock School Board in 1957 when Central High School was being desegregated. National and local leaders battled on the issue of desegregation at Central High, but in the end, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in 1,200 federal troops to force integration upon the people at Central High and upon the Governor Orval Faubus. Engstrom was there on the School Board when all of this happened, and when it was over he thanked President Eisenhower for his help.

• Don Evans

  • Don Evans was fifteen when Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led the Birmingham demonstrations in 1963. As a resident of Birmingham, Evans experienced the brutality of the city’s response and was attacked by dogs and firehoses when demonstrating.

• Darrell Evers (1953-2001)

  • Darrell Evers was born in Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1953. Nine years later, his father was murdered outside their house in Jackson, Mississippi. Byron De La Beckwith was arrested for the murder in 1964, but the case ended in a mistrial, with an all-white jury. After new evidence came to light in the 1990s, De La Beckwith was tried and convicted for the murder. Evers studied painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. He and his wife Lauren founded Intellikey Labs. He died of colon cancer in February 2001 at age 47. 
     
    In 1962, Evers was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenged segregation the Mississippi school system. Evers also played himself in the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi that documented the tragedy of his father's death and more generally, racism in the South. Evers continued his father's work by becoming the Chairman Emeritus of the NAACP National Board of Directors.

• Myrlie Evers (1933-)

  • Myrlie Beasley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on March 17, 1933. She attended Alcorn A&M College, hoping to become a school teacher and follow in the footsteps of both the grandmother and aunt who had raised her. Her plans changed, however, when she met upperclassman Medgar Evers. The two were married a year later and Myrlie left school. Medgar had been passionately dedicated to and involved in the struggle for civil rights for some time and helped inspire a similar passion in his wife. Medgar Evers was assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith in 1963. Following that tragic event, Myrlie moved her family to Claremont, California, where she studied sociology at Pomona College and earned her degree in 1968. Evers stayed on in academia and became assistant director of planning and development for the Claremont College system. In 1975, Myrlie married her second husband, Walter Williams. She then moved to Los Angeles and worked as consumer affairs director for the Atlantic Richfield Company. In 1988, she was the first black woman to be appointed to the five-member Los Angeles Board of Public Works, which oversaw a budget of nearly $1 billion as well as five thousand employees. From 1995 to 1998, Myrlie Evers-Williams served as the first woman chairperson of the NAACP. She published her memoirs, entitled Watch me Fly: What I learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I was Meant to Be, in 1999. 
     
    When Medgar became the Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP, Myrlie worked as his secretary and together they organized boycotts, demonstrations, and voter registration drives, making them prime targets for reactionary segregationist violence. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech to the nation in which he announced his intention to submit new civil rights legislation for passage by Congress. This elevated the tension in the South to a breaking point. At 12:30 that night, Medgar returned home and was approaching his front porch when he was shot through the back by a military rifle that would later be found 150 feet from the scene. Medgar died fifty minutes later, after being taken to a hospital that initially refused to admit a black patient. The rifle belonged to Byron De La Beckwith, whose fingerprints were found on the weapon’s scope. Beckwith was a dedicated segregationist and member of the White Citizens’ Council. Although he publicly denied responsibility for the murder, bringing forth three policemen to testify that he had been playing cards with them at the time the crime was committed and claiming that the rifle had been stolen from him some time before, he felt no shame in saying he was glad Evers was dead. Beckwith’s trial led to two hung juries and he was allowed to go free. However, since he was not officially exonerated of the crime, double jeopardy did not apply and Myrlie lived for decades with the hope that the case would be reopened and Beckwith convicted. Finally, in 1989, her long-standing hopes came to fruition when she found several witnesses willing to testify that Byron De La Beckwith had in fact been in Jackson the night of Medgar’s murder, contradicting the testimony of police officers whose card game had allegedly taken place sixty miles away in Greenwood. This, among other new evidence, prompted Mississippi prosecutors to reopen the case. In 1994, Beckwith was finally convicted of Medgar’s murder. He died serving a life sentence in 2001. 
     

• James Farmer (1920-1999)

  • An early civil rights leader, James Farmer helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. Farmer was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and practiced his teachings of non-violent protest. A supporter of racial integration in civil rights organizations, Farmer recruited both whites and blacks as CORE volunteers. Farmer and other CORE leaders organized the 1961 Freedom Rides. 
     
    As the Director of CORE, Farmer and other CORE members organized the 1961 Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides called for an interracial group of protestors to take two interstate buses throughout the South. The Rides were conducted to test the federal government’s willingness to enforce the United States Supreme Court’s 1960 ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that racial segregation in public interstate travel facilities was unconstitutional. In Alabama, one of the buses was firebombed and many activists were beaten – acts that were nationally televised. Nashville activists went to Alabama in an effort to continue the Freedom Rides. These Riders rode from Birmingham, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. After Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked civil rights leaders to postpone the Rides so everybody could “cool off,” Farmer declined, responding: “We have been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off any more, we'd be in a deep freeze.” The new Riders were also met with violence and most were arrested. Though the Riders were prevented from reaching New Orleans by bus, a committee was formed to coordinate more rides. In late May 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission officially banned segregation in all facilities under its control. During the Rides, Farmer spent 40 days in Mississippi jails. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, three CORE members named James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner who worked with Farmer were killed by Ku Klux Klan members. Farmer left CORE in 1966 and, in 1998, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

• Orval Faubus (1910-1994)

  • Orval Eugene Faubus was born in the rural hills of Madison County, Arkansas, in 1910. His father, Sam Faubus, was a left-wing activist, having organized a local chapter of the Socialist Party of America and chosen Orval’s middle name in honor of Eugene V. Debs, one of Sam’s personal heroes. In 1918, Sam was arrested for “distributing seditious material” in opposition to American involvement in World War I. Orval shared his father’s passion for politics, though his views were more moderate. In 1936, he ran as a Democrat for the Arkansas General Assembly. While he lost this particular race, he was not discouraged and soon managed to secure two terms as circuit clerk and recorder. During World War II, Faubus served in Europe as an intelligence officer under General George S. Patton. Upon returning home to Arkansas, Faubus resumed his involvement in the Democratic Party, serving as chairman of the state’s highway commission under progressive governor Sid McMath. When he ran for Governor in 1954, it was at the tail end of the McCarthy era, and his opponents pointed to his leftist upbringing in an attempt to label him a “dangerous radical.” Although Faubus’ promises to increase spending on schools and roads proved a more effective campaign tactic, the attacks apparently struck a personal nerve. In the early years of his administration, Faubus integrated public transportation and investigated the possibility of integrated schools. When these moves prompted further bitter attacks from the right, Faubus apparently felt compelled to demonstrate a swing in the opposite direction as soon as the opportune moment presented itself. This moment came when Little Rock’s school board made plans to begin the process of gradual integration, which Faubus bitterly opposed. While Faubus realized that integration was inevitable and that the federal order would have to be enforced, his opposition to the integration of Little Rock Central High School won him record support in many parts of the state, enabling him to serve an unprecedented six terms as Arkansas’ governor. However, after the poll tax was eliminated in 1964, and especially following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the increasing influence of African-American voters brought more progressive voices to prominence. Faubus declined to run for a seventh term in 1966, but he ran ill-fated reelection campaigns in 1970, 1974, and 1980. In 1988, he endorsed Rev. Jesse Jackson for president. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Faubus had severe financial problems, and was forced to sell his home and work as a bank teller. Orval Faubus died of cancer in 1994. 
     
    Governor Orval Faubus opposed the integration of Little Rock Central High School. After unsuccessful litigation, Faubus deployed National Guard troops to keep out the nine black students who had been selected to attend Central High School. While he claimed that his actions were prompted by reliable intelligence leading him to believe that violence would erupt if the black students were allowed into Central High School, he initiated a dramatic, high-profile confrontation between the state and federal governments. At the height of the tension, Faubus’ picture could be seen on the cover of Time magazine. President Eisenhower tried for eighteen days to persuade Faubus to allow the integration of Central High. When negotiations failed, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, ordered them back to their barracks, and brought in the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the safe matriculation of the nine black students. Faubus publicly referred to these troops as an occupying power in order to stir up resentment against Eisenhower and support for himself. In a 1958 poll, Faubus was voted one of the ten most admired men in the world. 
     

• Mrs. Folgate

  • Mrs. Folgate was an otherwise unidentified participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interviewed briefly by Blackside on the streets of Birmingham about her experience.

• James Forman (1929-2005)

  • James Forman was raised in Chicago and Mississippi by his grandmother, mother and stepfather. He graduated from Englewood High School in 1947 and served in the U. S. Air Force during the Korean War. Forman attended the University of Southern California, but left after being accosted by police. He graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1956. Forman became involved in the Civil Rights Movement when he covered the Little Rock school desegregation crisis for the Chicago Defender and participated in a Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) project in Tennessee. He was the Executive Secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1961 to 1966. After he left SNCC in 1966, he espoused Black Nationalist causes. He earned an M.A. from Cornell University in 1980 and then a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities. Forman is the author of several books, including The Making of Black Revolutionaries. He died on January 10, 2005. 
     
    James Forman worked for CORE in Fayette County, Tennessee helping sharecroppers who had been evicted for attempting to register to vote. He joined SNCC in 1961 and was soon jailed for his participation in the Freedom Rides. He became the Executive Secretary of SNCC soon after and his leadership abilities earned him the respect of fellow SNCC members. Highlights of his tenure as Executive Secretary of SNCC include the Selma voting rights campaign, demonstrations in Montgomery, and training SNCC volunteers during Freedom Summer. He also participated in the planning of the March on Washington and helped John Lewis, the chairperson of SNCC at the time, write and rewrite his speech for this event.

• A.G. Gaston (1892-1996)

  • A.G. Gaston, a black millionaire, represented the conservative interests of Birmingham’s black community during the protests and demonstrations of 1963. Born in 1892 in a rural Alabama town to impoverished parents, Gaston became one of the richest black men in the United States. His enterprises ranged from banking and insurance to real estate and business colleges. By the end of his life, beneficiaries of his charitable activities included the YMCA, the A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club, the Tuskegee University and other educational institutions. 
     
    A member of the Chamber of Commerce with political connections of his own, Gaston initially resented Martin Luther King’s intrusion into local affairs during the 1963 Birmingham protests. Earlier that year, the city had adopted a different form of municipal government, and the notorious Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor lost his election bid. Consequently, Gaston and other businessmen wanted to give the new mayor an opportunity to address black grievances. Despite his unhappiness with elements of King’s involvement, Gaston continued to provide financial support to Birmingham’s black leaders. His ambivalence would change, however, after the violence of May 1963. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had designated May 2 as “D-Day,” organizing hundreds of black schoolchildren who marched from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to protest segregation in downtown Birmingham. Retaining his power as Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Connor arrested over six hundred children, but another thousand marched on May 3. The SCLC recruited youth marchers because their arrests would not destroy family incomes, but on May 3, the march erupted into violence. Connor ordered police dogs to attack the children, and fire hoses blasted marchers with enough pressure to strip the bark from trees. After this violent attack on children, Gaston and other undecided members of the black community fully backed the SCLC’s demand for racial justice and equality in Birmingham. Gaston remained active in the black community long after the successful conclusion of the protests, as his numerous charitable commitments demonstrated. He died in 1996 at the age of 103. 
     

• Georgia Gilmore (1920-1990)

  • Interview 1979 | Interview 1986
  • Georgia Gilmore lived in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Gilmore walked to and from work each day and raised money to support the boycott. She formed the “club from nowhere,” which collected money for the boycott from people who supported it but did not attend the mass meetings of the Montgomery Improvement Association. As the sole officer, Gilmore was responsible for collecting all of the money raised by the club members. She said that she would usually take in about $125-200 each week, which she would deposit in the collection plate at the mass meetings. Gilmore was also known for baking food to sell to raise money for the boycott.

• Reverend Dana Greeley (1908-1986)

  • Born in Lexington, Massachusetts to a family with a long affiliation with the Unitarian church, Greeley became a Unitarian minister himself, and president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He attended the Harvard Divinity School and served as minister to the Arlington Street Church of Boston from 1937 to 1958, where Martin Luther King would occasionally attend while a student at Boston University School of Theology. After 1969, Greeley became a visiting professor at the Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago and President of the International Association for Religious Freedom. In 1970 Greeley returned to local church work at the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, and would continue his participation in national and international peace and humanitarian summits.
    
    After the death of Jim Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, Greeley accepted the call made by King for men of faith to come down to Selma Alabama, and assist in the campaign for civil rights there. While in Selma alongside Martin Luther King, the Reverend Greeley gave sermons and helped to organize marches. He would continue to work with Dr. King throughout the movement. 

• Ernest Green (1941-)

  • Ernest Green was born in 1941 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. He was the first black student to graduate from Central High. Green went on to attend Michigan State University, earning a B.A. in 1962 and an M.A. in 1964. After graduating, he was an apprentice at the Adolph Institute helping minority women in the South obtain professional careers and training. He served as the Director of the A. Philip Randolph Education Fund from 1968 to 1976. During Jimmy Carter’s administration, he was the Assistant Secretary of Labor (1977-1981). After this, he joined the private sector and began working for Lehman Brothers in 1985. He is married to Phyllis Green and is the father of three. Green has received several awards including the NAACP Spingarn Medal and the Rockefeller Public Service Award. He has served on several boards, including the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and the African Development Foundation. Green and the other members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. 
     
    In September of 1957, Green with eight others arrived at Central High School. The school system in Little Rock remained segregated despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Nine black students had enrolled despite the protestations of local citizen groups who wanted the school to remain segregated. On September 4, Governor Orval Faubus summoned National Guard soldiers to prevent the black students from entering the school, in defiance of federal law. Green and the other students were met with a mob on the first day of school and were not able to enter. A standoff occurred between the state and the federal government. A court order was issued ordering the National Guard to stand down. Faubus complied but replaced the Guard with the local police force. Hundreds of protestors and police were outside the school on September 23 when the black students were escorted into the school via a side door. Once the protestors in the crowd realized the students were inside a riot threatened to break out and the students were escorted from the school. After these clashes, President Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students to and from school. The Little Rock Nine were able to attend Central High but were subjected to verbal and physical harassment from many of the students. Green and the other black students remained under federal protection for the remainder of the school year. 
     

• Lawrence Guyot (1939-2012)

  • Lawrence Guyot was born in 1939 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. As a student at Tougaloo University, he encountered his first serious incidents of racism. Guyot earned a law degree from Rutgers University and entered public service with the District of Columbia’s Department of Health and Human Services. Guyot has often conducted leadership training conferences at organizations and institutions including AmeriCorps, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and Georgetown University. 
     
    Guyot joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1962 and was an active member, particularly in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He helped organize and develop voter registration drives throughout Mississippi. He was arrested twice during his time with SNCC, both times after he asked local police to intervene on behalf of African-Americans who were being discriminated against. He was a chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and a delegate to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He could not attend, however, because he had been arrested during a protest in Hattiesburg. Throughout his life, Guyot remained a strong advocate of the protest techniques employed by SNCC. 
     

• Patricia Harris

  • Patricia Harris was only nine or ten years old when she took part in the Birmingham youth marches in May 1963. Harris's mother had been active in the movement for some time, and Harris, having noticed discrimination around her, decided to take part. While not physically assaulted during the demonstrations, young Harris was subjected to much verbal abuse. Despite this, she would continue to live in Birmingham, becoming a nurse. She recounted her memory of these events for Blackside. 

• Wendell Harris (1934-2012)

  • Wendell Harris worked for Birmingham, Alabama’s WAPI radio and television stations during the 1950s and 60s. Harris attended the University of Alabama and began working for WAPI-AM in 1954, then WAPI-TV in 1960. After working for WAPI, he moved to Texas, first as the general manager of Austin’s KTBC-TV and then as the vice president of Dallas’s KDFW-TV. Harris died on June 5, 2012, at age 78.

• Casey Hayden (1937-)

  • Casey Hayden, born Sandra Cason, was a leading activist for Civil Rights during the 1960s. Born in a segregated part of Eastern Texas, Hayden attended the University of Texas at Austin and graduated in 1960. Hayden was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). She went on to work as a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Hayden, who married Tom Hayden in the 1960s, was a major SNCC contributor, first in Atlanta and then in Mississippi. Casey Hayden worked in Mississippi as a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during Freedom Summer in 1963. She worked closely with Bob Moses and Jim Forman in coordinating the influx of volunteers into Mississippi to help get African Americans registered to vote. Hayden was in Jackson when three volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared. Hayden is also remembered for her popular memo, “Sex and Caste,” which she co-wrote with Mary King in 1965. The memo was distributed within SDS and SNCC and challenged activists to be aware of gender inequality in the Movement and the country. She is also a co-author of Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Joan C. Browning, another author of this book, commented that "Casey was articulate, poised…I saw in her depth of commitment and generous affection, the embodiment of the beloved community."

• Tom Hayden (1939-2016)

  • Born in Detroit in 1939, Tom Hayden attended the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the school’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. Hayden was active in the civil rights movement from the 1950s to the 1970s. He turned to politics in the 1970s, running an unsuccessful challenge campaign against Democratic U.S. Senator John V. Tunney in 1976. Hayden was successfully elected to the California State Assembly in 1982, where he remained a member until he was elected to the State Senate in 1992. He retired from official politics in 1999, but remained a vocal spokesman for the American left, writing books and serving as co-director for the No More Sweatshops! Coalition. 
     
    In 1959, Hayden helped to found the left-wing activist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as draft the group’s manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement. SDS’s first protest was in support of the 1960 Greensboro sit-in. Hayden himself took part in the Freedom Rides. In 1961, he married Casey Hayden, a civil rights activist from Texas who was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1964, Hayden moved to Newark, New Jersey, where he worked with local residents on the Newark Community Union Project. The race riots he witnessed during his stay in Newark formed the focus of Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. In 1968, Hayden took part in the massive protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Following the violence that ensued, Hayden was among the “Chicago 8” who were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot. In 1971, Hayden permanently relocated to Los Angeles, California. A prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, Hayden made several visits to North Vietnam, including an especially controversial visit in 1972 with Jane Fonda, whom he would later marry.

• James L. Hicks (1915-1986)

  • James L. Hicks was born in Akron, Ohio on May 9, 1915. He attended the University of Akron and Howard University. In 1935 he got his first job in journalism as a reporter in Cleveland for a publication called Call and Post. In the U.S. Army, he earned three battle stars and was promoted to captain. Hicks became the Washington Bureau Chief for the National Negro Press Association. From 1955 to 1966 and then again from 1972-1977 he was the editor of the Amsterdam News. In between, Hicks was a public relations officer for the National Urban League. In 1977, Hicks was named editor of the New York Voice. He died in Manhattan on January 19, 1986. 
     
    While working at the Amsterdam News, Hicks covered the Emmett Till case. He also reported on the desegregation efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Oxford, Mississippi. While working on all of these stories, Hicks constantly faced threats of violence. Wherever he went, he and other black reporters were confronted by angry white mobs, and at times they were physically harmed. While covering the Emmett ill case, Hicks found an overwhelming amount of evidence that should have convicted the men that were on trial, but it was never brought forward in the trial. Through his writing, however, Hicks was able to expose this evidence as well as the corruption of the law and judicial system in Sumner, Mississippi.

• James Hoffman

• • Audio only. 
  • James Hoffman was an otherwise unidentified participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interviewed briefly by Blackside on the streets of Birmingham about his experience.

• William Bradford Huie (1910-1986)

  • Journalist and novelist William Bradford Huie was born in Hartselle, Alabama on November 13, 1910. He was valedictorian of his senior class and went on to become a journalist in Birmingham, Alabama. He served in the Navy during World War II, and these experiences became the basis for one of his fictional works, The Americanization of Emily. Huie is primarily known for his non-fiction and journalism work. His book, The Outsider, about one of the flag-raisers at Iwo Jima, Ira Hayes, was made into a film starring Tony Curtis. His writing also extended to working for periodicals including the conservative journal, The American Mercury. He was very active as a journalist during the Civil Rights Movement and continued to work up till his death on November 20, 1986. Huie began documenting the civil rights movement, beginning with the shocking murder of Emmett Till. After the trial was over and the defendants had been acquitted, Huie interviewed the defendants Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and they confessed to the crime since they could not be tried again. The subsequent article was printed in Look Magazine. Huie was criticized for paying Bryant and Milam for their interviews at the time, but the interview is considered an important source of information on the case which was later reopened. Huie continued his work documenting the civil rights movement by covering the killings of the Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. He went on to write He Slew the Dreamer, an investigation of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Huie then collaborated with Zora Neale Hurston on Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail, which dealt with the murder trial of McCollum, a black woman who was on trial for murdering her white lover. This controversial book was banned in Florida and Huie was jailed for contempt. He also was a target of the Ku Klux Klan who burned a cross on his lawn in 1967.

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