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.

N • O • P •  R • S

• Diane Nash (1938-)

  • A young activist in the civil rights movement, Diane Nash was one of the founders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As a leader in SNCC, Nash helped lead the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, the 1961 Freedom Rides, and the 1965 Right-to-Vote Movement in Selma, Alabama. Nash became involved in the civil rights movement in 1959 while attending Fisk University. An advocate of nonviolent protest, Nash was active in the Nashville boycott and sit-ins of 1960. In February of 1960, hundreds of Nashville students participated in sit-ins throughout the city and the protests lasted for the next three months. During the sit-ins, African-American protesters sat at white-only lunch counters and asked to be served. When they were denied service, they refused to leave. In Nashville and other southern communities, African-Americans were required to stay out of white-owned hotels and restaurants and to use only designated drinking fountains, waiting rooms, and restrooms. The sit-ins were non-violent and the protesters established a system where those arrested were replaced by new activists. During the sit-ins, Nash publicly confronted Nashville Mayor Ben West about the issue of racial inequality. “Mayor West,” she asked, “do you think it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?” The Mayor agreed that it was wrong and, on May 10, 1960, Nashville started integrating public facilities. In 1961, after the Freedom Rides were stopped in Birmingham, Alabama, Nash and other Nashville activists continued the Ride from Birmingham to Jackson, Mississippi. Initially organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Freedom Rides aimed 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. The Nashville Riders were met with violence and most were arrested. In late May 1960, the Interstate Commerce Commission officially banned segregation in all facilities under its control. In 1963, Diane Nash was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to a committee that promoted the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Nash also helped coordinate the 1965 Right-to-Vote Movement in Selma, Alabama, which set the stage for the Voting Rights Act.

• Rachel West Nelson (1955-)

  • Rachel West Nelson was born Rachel West. She grew up in Selma, Alabama with parents who supported and participated in the voting rights campaign in Selma. Nelson is the co-author of Selma, Lord, Selma, recollections of the Selma Marches as told to Frank Sikora. The book was later made into a film that aired on “The Wonderful World of Disney” in 1999.  Rachel West Nelson was nine years old when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Selma in 1965. Her parents were ardent supporters of civil rights activists, housing many in their home during the Selma marches. Nelson and her friend Sheyann Webb greatly admired Dr. King, which led them to attend mass meetings and march in demonstrations. 

• Gussie Nesbitt

  • Gussie Nesbitt resided in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She participated in the boycott by not riding the bus and by attending the mass meetings of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

• E.D. Nixon (1899-1987)

  • E.D. Nixon, a resident of Montgomery, Alabama, led the local Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the local NAACP, the Montgomery Welfare League, and the Montgomery Voters League at various points in his life. He earned his livelihood as a sleeping car porter and worked as a recreation director for a housing project after he retired from railroad work. 
     
    In 1944 E.D. Nixon helped to file an appeal on behalf of Viola White, who had been convicted of violating segregation laws on a Montgomery city bus. The court never heard the case, but E.D. Nixon kept looking for ways to challenge segregation laws. He considered filing suits several times but waited until Rosa Parks was arrested. He posted bond for her and put into motion both the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the federal suit that eventually ended segregation on Montgomery buses. He was instrumental in forming the Montgomery Improvement Association and served as the treasurer from 1955 to 1958. 
     

• Peter Orris (1945-)

  • Dr. Orris was born in Los Angeles in 1945. He grew up in New York City in a socially conscious and active family. At the age of eleven, he participated in his first civil rights event, the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. As an adolescent, he was a member of numerous clubs and organizations that were concerned with social and political issues. Orris attended Harvard University where he joined several civil rights organizations, including the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC). With SNCC, Orris became a part of the battle for voting rights for blacks in Mississippi. He received his BA from Harvard in 1967 then an MPH from Yale University in 1970, and an MD from Chicago Medical School in 1975. In later life, he was an adjunct professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and practiced medicine at Cook County Hospital in the Chicago area. 
    Dottie Zellner recruited Orris to participate in the SNCC’s Summer Project in the spring of 1964 during his freshman year at Harvard. After the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, safety considerations led Orris to work in Holmes County, rather than in Amite County, as originally planned. There, he worked on getting people to register to vote. He helped coordinate and set up voter registration workers in the area, and his dedicated work for the civil rights cause ended up putting him in jail for ten days in LeFlore County, where he staged a hunger strike. At the Democratic Convention of 1964, Orris helped organize communications for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

• Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

  • American icon Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1912, in Tuskegee, Alabama. After attending vocational school, Parks married Raymond Parks in 1932. At this time, Parks worked variously as a domestic worker, clerk, and seamstress. In the early 40s, Parks became involved with the Montgomery, Alabama NAACP, eventually becoming local president E.D. Nixon’s secretary. Parks worked as a housekeeper for Clifford and Virginia Durr, both white civil rights activists who sponsored Parks’ attendance at the Highlander Folk School, a training center for activists in Tennessee. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus after the driver moved back the divider between the vehicle’s white and black sections. Local civil rights leaders, aware of the symbolic power of Parks’ defiance, used her arrest as a catalyst for the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted until December 20, 1956. In 1957, Parks, unable to find work in Montgomery, briefly moved to Virginia before settling in Detroit, Michigan, where she lived for the rest of her life. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965 when U.S. Representative John Conyers hired her as his secretary. Over the course of her post-civil rights era life, Parks dedicated much of the money she earned through speaking engagements to charity, including her Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. Parks retired in 1988 and published two books: 1992’s Rosa Parks: My Story and 1995’s Quiet Strength. Parks died on October 24, 2005, and was honored with a grand memorial service and procession. Parks earned a tremendous number of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, and has had many awards named in her honor. 
     
    During her time in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks worked for the NAACP and Voters’ League. This brought her in close association with E.D. Nixon, Clifford and Virginia Durr, and Jo Ann Robinson. Local civil rights leaders had already considered taking legal action against bus segregation but were looking for a suitable representative for their movement. Nixon, for example, chose not to make Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old girl who resisted bus segregation in early 1955, a symbol for bus segregation, because she was pregnant and unmarried at the time of her arrest. The bus boycott, prompted by Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955, lasted over a year, ending on December 20, 1956. Jo Ann Robinson famously stayed up all night on December 1, mimeographing thousands of flyers promoting the boycott. Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to help organize alternatives to busing; a young and relatively unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president of MIA, launching his career, as well as that of Ralph Abernathy. The success of the boycott resulted in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the most famous organizations in the civil rights movement. 
     

• Governor John Patterson (1921-)

  • John Patterson was born on September 27, 1921 in Goldville, Alabama. After serving in World War II, Patterson received a law degree from the University of Alabama. He later served in the Korean War, and in 1953 joined his father’s law practice in Phenix City, Alabama. In 1954, Patterson’s father was nominated for Attorney General and promised to rid the area of corruption and illegal gambling. However, he was murdered and the younger Patterson ran on his father’s platform and was elected. As Attorney General, Patterson worked to rid Alabama of organized crime. Patterson also was an opponent of the civil rights movement. He was elected Governor of Alabama in 1958 and served until 1963. When his term was over, Patterson returned to practicing law. He ran for governor again in 1966, but was defeated by Lurleen Wallace. In 1984, he was appointed to the State Court of Criminal appeals. He retired in 1997. In 2004, Patterson was unexpectedly involved in a controversy receiving national attention. He acted as the Special Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in a temporary session of retired judges set up to hear the appeal of Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore was removed from office for refusing to withdraw a monument of the Ten Commandments he had commissioned for the Alabama Judicial Building, even after being ordered to do so by a federal court. The Special Supreme Court, led by Patterson, unanimously upheld the decision to eject Moore. 
     
    In 1958, with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, he ran for governor and defeated George Wallace. The Civil Rights Movement was an important and controversial part of Patterson’s year term. Patterson banned the NAACP from Alabama and brought legal action against the individuals boycotting Tuskegee businesses and the buses in Montgomery. In 1958, with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, he ran for governor and defeated George Wallace. In the early 1960s, he claimed his state had a right to be segregated and was responsible for the expulsion of black students from Alabama State University because they staged a sit-in. He also had a series of political clashes with federal officials over voter registration. During the Freedom Rides Patterson refused to prevent violence against the riders. The federal government had to intervene in Alabama in order to protect the riders. Outside of the civil rights arena, Patterson was an effective governor and passed legislation that improved transportation and healthcare in Alabama.

• James Peck (1914-1993)

  • James Peck was born on December 19, 1914. He attended Harvard, but dropped out after a year and worked as a sailor. He helped to organize the National Maritime Union and was an effective leader and representative of the union. During World War II, Peck was a conscientious objector and an anti-war activist. Because of his anti-war activities, Peck was put in jail for two years. While in jail, he led a strike against racial segregation. During the war, he worked with the War Resisters League and wrote a column for The Conscientious Objector. After the war, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and began to work tirelessly for the civil rights movement. A life-long activist, Peck later protested against the Vietnam War as well as nuclear testing. He died in Minneapolis in 1993. 
     
    Peck participated in the first Freedom Ride with Bayard Rustin in 1947. The plan was to send eight white and eight black men into the South to make sure that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Morgan v. Virginia was being obeyed. The ruling outlawed segregation in interstate transportation, and the first Freedom Ride was designed to make sure that ruling was enforced in the South. It was called the Journey of Reconciliation, and while on it Peck was arrested in Durham, North Carolina. In 1961, he joined the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). While on the Freedom Ride, he was beaten by a mob in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a leader and organizer with CORE for seventeen years.

• Chief Laurie Pritchett (1926-2000)

  • Laurie Pritchett was born on December 9, 1926, In Griffin, Georgia. He attended Auburn University and South Georgia College before graduating from the Southern Police Institute at the University of Louisville as well as the FBI National Academy. He was the chief of police of Albany, Georgia from 1959 to 1966. Pritchett then moved on to become police chief in High Point, North Carolina. He held this post from 1966 to 1974. He died in North Carolina in 2000. 
     
    Pritchett was most widely known for his work as the police chief of Albany, Georgia at the time of the Albany Movement. This movement was started in 1961, and it sought to eliminate segregation in the city through organized nonviolent protests and demonstrations. This movement involved several civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later joined by Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Pritchett was well aware that a violent response by the police would result in bad publicity, as well as add fuel to the movement, and responded in such a way that violence was minimal. He used large-scale arrests to silence the movement, and his officers refrained from violence when arresting the protestors. He also made arrangements with neighboring counties to use their jail space, not only so he could handle the number of arrests, but also so that he could keep the protestors spread out in different jails and away from Albany. Pritchett’s advocating of nonviolence in his mass arrests resulted in very little media coverage of the protests, and the movement accomplished little change in Albany.

• Craig Rains

  • Craig Rains was a senior at Central High School and an officer of the Student Council at the time of the Little Rock Nine’s desegregation of the school. He is interviewed in Hampton’s book Voices of Freedom, where he explains that he was initially upset that Central High School was being forced to integrate because he did not want the federal government to tell his state’s government what to do. However, as the events in Little Rock unfolded, Rains explains that he felt sorry for how the Little Rock Nine were treated. His opinion changed to one of support for the black students and disgust for those protestors outside of the school who were harassing the Little Rock Nine. 

• Joseph Rauh (1911-1992)

  • After graduating from law school, Joseph Rauh served as a law clerk for two justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: Benjamin Cardozo and Felix Frankfurter. In 1947, he was one of the founders of the liberal activist group Americans for Democratic Action. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was active as a lawyer and lobbyist on civil rights and labor issues, including service as chief legal counsel to the United Auto Workers. Rauh was also a longtime member of the executive board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He died in 1992. 
     
    At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Joseph Rauh wrote the party’s first real platform plank on civil rights issues. The platform’s civil rights statement was one of the issues that prompted a walkout of segregationist southern delegates, who nominated J. Strom Thurmond to oppose President Harry S. Truman in the presidential election. Rauh worked closely with A. Philip Randolph on issues of African American and workers’ rights. He lobbied Congress on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, he served as legal adviser to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party during their unsuccessful attempt to be seated as delegates to the convention.

• Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942-)

  • Bernice Johnson Reagon was born on October 4, 1942, In Albany, Georgia. She became involved in civil rights causes at an early age. While attending Albany State College, Reagon became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1970, Reagon earned a degree in history at Spellman College, and in 1973 she founded an acapella group known as Sweet Honey in the Rock. This group continues to perform today, even though Bernice retired in 2002, and their performances of traditional African music combined with contemporary African-American music have earned them numerous awards in the music industry. While working with this group, Bernice was also able to earn a doctorate in U.S. African American History from Howard University in 1975. Reagon’s musical talent has given her tremendous opportunities in film, radio, and television. Her work in these various fields has received numerous awards and recognition, including an Emmy and a Peabody Award. 
     
    In 1993 Reagon began work as curator emeritus at the Smithsonian. In this same year, she also began her teaching career at the American University, where she was a professor of history. She retired from teaching in 2002 but continued to lecture on college campuses across the country. 
    While studying at Albany State College in the early 1960s, Bernice Reagon became an active member of SNCC. She attended sit-ins, marched, helped organize demonstrations, and was even arrested for her actions. Reagon’s special talent for singing was a crucial part of her effectiveness as a protestor and leader of the movement. She confronted cruel police officers and endured prison time, all the while singing her songs of freedom and making sure that her voice would be heard. Eventually, she created a group within the SNCC known as the Freedom Singers. This group was made up of herself, another woman, and two other men. They sang songs in support of the movement and in opposition to racism and helped to raise morale within the movement, and produce revenue with their music to help SNCC which was always in need of funds.

• Reverend Frederick Reese (1929-2018)

  • In 1964, Reverend Frederick Reese was the president of the Dallas County Voter League, a group of registered voters who worked on the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. They were assisted by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been working in Selma since 1963. When SNCC began running out of resources for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Reese sent a letter to Dr. King requesting the help of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Reese was the main contact in Selma for Dr. King and served as something of a mediator between SNCC and SCLC. Reverend Reese was also president of the Selma City Teachers Association and was instrumental in getting teachers in Selma to demonstrate the right to vote in January of 1965. The teachers’ demonstration is often credited with giving the voter registration campaign in Selma more momentum by being the catalyst for black middle-class involvement.

• Jan Robertson

  • In 1962, Jan Robertson was a student at the University of Mississippi and the managing editor of the student newspaper, The Mississippian. She witnessed the riots that accompanied federal efforts to enroll James Meredith at the university. During the integration crisis, The Mississippian published an editorial stating that the rioters were “bringing dishonor and shame to the University and the State.”

• Amelia Boynton Robinson (1911-2015)

  • Amelia Boynton Robinson (née Platts) was born in 1911 and became one of the key leaders in the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama. As an educator and voting rights activist, she and her first husband, Samuel Boynton, actively encouraged and facilitated African Americans to vote at a time when there was massive disenfranchisement among that population. After the 1960s, Robinson continued to be active in the civil rights movement, giving speeches and writing a memoir of the Selma campaign, Bridge across Jordan. She was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr., Freedom Medal in 1990. In 2015, Robinson participated in the 50th anniversary march in Selma with President Obama, and her role in the original march was brought to life for a new generation in Ava DuVernay's film "Selma" released in 2014. She died in 2015 at age 104. 
     
    As one of the few African Americans registered to vote in Selma, Boynton helped other black residents try to register to vote. The vast majority of applications were rejected and, as late as 1965, only about 1% of Selma’s voting-age black residents were registered. The Boyntons were active in the Dallas County Voters’ League, a group founded in the late 1950s, pushing for the registration of black voters. In 1963, the Voters’ League joined forces with members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1964, Boynton and a fellow League member, the Reverend Frederick Reese, invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join the voting rights campaign in Selma. On January 19, 1965, Amelia Boynton was leading a protest at the courthouse when Sheriff Jim Clark arrested her and violently shoved her. This assault made national news and convinced SCLC leaders to stay in Selma. On March 7, demonstrators tried to march to Montgomery. When they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers and Clark’s sheriff’s posse brutally attacked the protesters with tear gas, y clubs, and whips. Photos show Robinson lying on the ground after being savagely beaten and tear gassed. That day came to be known as “Bloody Sunday” and news footage of the police riot on the bridge intensified support for the voting rights campaign. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in August 1965.

• Jo Ann Robinson (1912-1992)

  • Jo Ann Robinson grew up in Georgia. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Fort Valley State College and an M.A. in English from Atlanta University. Robinson moved to Montgomery in 1949 to teach at Alabama State College. In Montgomery, she joined and became president of the Women’s Political Council, which was instrumental in starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Robinson left Montgomery in 1960. She taught for a year at Grambling College and then taught public school in Los Angeles until she retired. Robinson’s memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, was published in 1987. Robinson died in 1992. Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had been planning a bus boycott in Montgomery for years but waited for a sympathetic person to be arrested for violating segregation laws. Robinson and E.D. Nixon saw Rosa Parks as someone whom the black community could rally around for an effective boycott. When Parks was arrested, Robinson quickly put the plan into action. She notified community leaders and stayed up all night printing leaflets which she distributed to the black community. She kept a low profile as a leader of the boycott, but her home and car were vandalized by Montgomery police nevertheless.

• Bayard Rustin (1912-1987)

  • A mass organizer during the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin was a lifelong leader in the struggle for racial equality. Raised as a Quaker, Rustin was a staunch supporter of non-violent protest as a means of ending racial discrimination. In 1941, Rustin worked with civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph on a proposed March on Washington. As a leader in the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he also helped organize the first Freedom Ride in 1947. Rustin advised Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1955/56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and organized the August 28, 1963, March on Washington. In 1964, Rustin attempted to broker a compromise between the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the National Democratic Party. The MFDP sought to replace the all-white Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arguing that these delegates represented only the state’s white establishment. In 1965, Rustin became the executive director of the newly formed A. Philip Randolph Institute, a civil rights & labor organization. He worked for the APRI until his death in 1987.

• Bernie Schweid (1916-1990)

  • Bernard (Bernie) Schweid was a white bookstore owner in Nashville at the time of the sit-ins of 1960. Schweid moved to Nashville in 1945 and was an active part of the city's literary culture. He was posthumously granted an Intellectual Freedom Award by the Tennessee Library Association in 1990. 
     
    As co-owner of R.M. Mills Book Stores, Schweid spoke out publicly against segregation and in support of the students participating in the sit-ins. He was interviewed for Eyes on the Prize and expressed his sympathy for the sit-in movement. He explained that a big turning point for the movement was when Nashville’s mayor openly questioned the fairness of segregation. When this happened, store owners began to integrate their stores and lunch counters.

• John Seigenthaler (1927-2014)

  • John Seigenthaler was a reporter for The Tennessean for 43 years, except for a brief hiatus taken to serve as Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant. By the time he retired in 1991, he was the paper’s editor, publisher, and CEO. While at The Tennessean, Seiganthaler also served as an editorial director of USA Today from 1982 to 1991. In 1991, Seigenthaler founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of a biography on James Polk and is a senior advisory trustee of the Freedom Forum. 
     
    As Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant, John Seigenthaler was responsible for arranging protection for Freedom Riders in Alabama. He attempted to work out this protection through Governor Patterson. Protection was guaranteed only from the Birmingham city limit to the Montgomery city limit. When the Freedom Riders were attacked by a mob in Montgomery, Seigenthaler himself was injured.

• Normareen Shaw (1936-2010)

  • Audio only.
  • Normareen Shaw was the manager of Mack’s Café in Marion Alabama, near Selma, Marion was also the scene of civil rights demonstrations. On February 18, 1965, one of the leaders of the Marion Movement, James Orange of SCLC, was being held in the local jail. There was a rumor that Klansmen were planning to lynch Orange that night, so activists planned a demonstration in front of the jail. When they marched to the jail, they were attacked by Alabama state troopers, local police, and white residents of the town. Numerous demonstrators and newsmen were severely beaten. 
     
    During that police riot, the state troopers came into Mack’s Café and attacked an elderly black man named Cager Lee. Lee’s grandson, Jimmy Lee Jackson tried to defend Lee and was beaten and shot twice by a state trooper named James B. Fowler. Jackson later died in the hospital. Shaw was a witness to the incident and at one point tried unsuccessfully to stop the troopers from beating the people in the café.

• Charles Sherrod (1937-)

  • Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Charles Sherrod attended Virginia Union University where he received a degree in divinity. In the 1960s, he became one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Albany, Georgia. He was a key player in the campaign that attempted to desegregate Albany starting in 1961. From 1969 to 1985, Sherrod directed a cooperative farming initiative in Southwest Georgia. He was also a member of Albany’s city commission from 1976 to 1990. 
     
    In 1961, Sherrod was involved in sit-in campaigns in Virginia and South Carolina. In Albany, he and SNCC participated in the Albany Movement, along with local activists and Dr. William G. Anderson, who was elected president of the movement. The Albany campaign aimed to desegregate the city through nonviolent direct action. Protesters violated the segregation laws and, when arrested, refused bail in an effort to fill the jails (a tactic known as “jail, no bail”). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also joined the campaign, bringing its leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, among others. The campaign was unsuccessful in the short term: SCLC left Albany in 1962 without any significant progress on desegregation. However, Sherrod and other local activists continued their efforts. New lawsuits by civil rights groups led to additional court desegregation orders, and the city gradually integrated.

• Arthur Shores (1904-1996)

  • Arthur D. Shores was one of the first African-American lawyers in Alabama. He worked with the NAACP on a number of desegregation cases, including the lawsuit that forced the University of Alabama to admit Autherine Lucy in 1956. After riots by Klansmen and their supporters, the university expelled Lucy on the grounds that they could not protect her. Shores and other civil rights lawyers brought another desegregation lawsuit against the university, leading to the successful enrollment of James Hood and Vivian Malone in 1963. The Ku Klux Klan bombed his Birmingham home twice in 1963 and made two more unsuccessful bombing attempts thereafter. In 1969, Shores became the first black citizen to be elected to the Birmingham City Council. He served on the council until 1978.

• Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (1922-2011)

  • Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth earned degrees from Selma University and Alabama State University and then became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953. Shuttlesworth was the Membership Chair of the Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) until the organization was outlawed by the state in 1956. He remained a civil rights activist and was one of the founding members of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and then of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Although he moved to Cincinnati in 1961, he remained active in the Birmingham civil rights struggles. He was the pastor of the Revelation Baptist Church in Cincinnati and of then the Greater Light Baptist Church in Avondale. In 1988, Shuttlesworth founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation. He served as the SCLC president for a short time in 2004. 
     
    Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in 1956, after the NAACP was banned in Alabama. When the Supreme Court declared bus segregation in Montgomery to be unconstitutional, the ACMHR tested desegregation on Birmingham buses immediately. In 1957, Shuttlesworth founded the SCLC with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other southern ministers. He served as the secretary of this organization from 1958 to 1970. With SCLC, Shuttlesworth waged a campaign to desegregate Birmingham in 1963 called “Project C,” during which some of the most violent clashes between demonstrators and city police took place. Throughout his civil rights work, Shuttlesworth survived many attacks on his life, including bombings and beatings. 
     

• William Simmons (1916-2007)

  • William J. Simmons was born in 1916 in Utica, Mississippi. After graduating from Mississippi College in 1937, Simmons studied at the Institute de Touraine in Tours, France, During World War II, Simmons worked for the Royal Engineers of the British Army as well as with the United States Department of State. Simmons returned to Jackson, Mississippi in 1954 and became an active member of the Jackson Citizens’ Council. He served as the editor and publisher of The Citizen, administrator of the Citizens’ Councils of America, and president of the Citizens’ Council Forum. Simmons argued in support of the discriminatory tests which African-Amerians had to pass before they could register to vote. He retired from the Citizens’ Council in 1990, but remained active in the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Jackson Civil War Round Table.

• B.J. Simms

  • Reverend B.J. Simms was an Alabama State College professor and Baptist minister. Simms received his master’s degree in theology from Oakland College in 1942. He served as the director of transportation for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) carpool and as the MIA promotional director. He was arrested for participating in the Montgomery Bus Boycott on February 21, 1956.

• Linda Brown Smith (1942-2018)

  • Linda Brown Smith was in third grade when her father Oliver Brown brought forth his landmark class-action suit in 1951. The suit is now famously known as the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Oliver Brown was suing partly because eight-year-old Linda had to cross railroad tracks to take a bus twenty-one blocks to an all-black school instead of attending a white school that was five blocks from her home. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in this case declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

• Mayor Joseph Smitherman (1929-2005)

  • Joseph Smitherman grew up in poverty in Selma, Alabama. He sold appliances, first for Sears Roebuck and then for his own business. In 1960, at the age of 30, he was elected to the city council of Selma and four years later he was elected mayor. Smitherman served nine terms in office. Initially, Smitherman was a segregationist, but as the number of black voters in Selma increased, he appointed a considerable number of black officials and managed to garner enough of the black vote to be reelected many times. In 2000, when he was 70 years old, he was defeated by a black candidate, James Perkins. 
     
    Joseph Smitherman was the new mayor of Selma when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to Selma to join a voting rights campaign begun by the Dallas County Voters’ League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Smitherman, who once referred to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as “Martin Luther Coon,” tried unsuccessfully to convince local black leaders to stop the marchers. Throughout the demonstrations, he and his appointed police commissioner, Wilson Baker, failed to restrain Jim Clark, the hot-tempered sheriff of Dallas County. Attacks on peaceful demonstrators by Clark and by Governor George Wallace’s Alabama state troopers increased national support for the voting rights effort. Smitherman watched as marchers were beaten and tear gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 (“Bloody Sunday”), but his Selma city police did not take part.

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