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I was about 17 in a small, rural town in Connecticut watching CBS Eyewitness News when the camera showed many people praying with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for first class citizen rights for all Americans regardless of color, creed or national origins. They were on the steps of the Albany, GA courthouse. The steps were covered with kneeling people. The police scooped them up and put them in jail. Another wave of praying Americans from many different backgrounds replaced them. They were scooped up for jail. Wave after wave went to jail just to give all Americans equal rights. Including Rev. King.
A few months later, an elderly white Quaker, Virgie Hortenstine and a tall black preacher, Rev. June Dowdy (a man from Somerville, Fayette County TN) came to my college to tell us about people trying to register to vote – not even able to vote, just registering – despite knowing they would be evicted from their homes if they rented or sharecropped and put on a list that would bar them from entering stores, getting medical services from local doctors (they had to go to Memphis), and from buying gas for their cars. Rev. Dowdy asked us to “put your body where your mouth is” – spring break 1963 was coming up and I joined 5 other volunteer work campers, 4 white and 1 black high school student who later was killed in Vietnam. We piled into a van to drive day and night to Fayette County from Philadelphia and New York, via Cincinnati where we picked up Virgie Hortenstine – and we were greeted with an abundant meal of black eyed peas and ham hocks at the home of Rev. Dowdy with his wife and little children.
I and the other work campers helped lay bricks for a community center sponsored by the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League. Carpenter John Harris taught us the skills. Each of us stayed in a home with people whose families had kept ownership of their homes since Reconstruction so they could not be evicted. I stayed with Mr. Harris and his wife Fanny.
We were watched by the White Citizens Council from a little shack – the sunlight sparkled on the butt of a gun aimed at us. But no trouble. As we worked on the community center, after a few days, an old white farmer who had been watching us from his porch came over to us and asked if we were communists. We spoke gently with him about our commitment to the ideas and values of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the meaning of “all men (defined as human beings) are created equal” and “of-by-for the people” and in Matthew 25.
The voting rights struggle in Fayette and Haywood counties started in the 50s by African American WWII veterans like John McFerren and others, long before the civil rights movement was in the news and before the presence of news media gave some protection from the violence of my insecure white brethren. At Memphis University’s Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change, you can see photos, hear audio interviews, read documents and see videos of the courageous people who stood up for first class citizenship for all Americans, some of them the poorest of the poor who risked everything for equal rights, justice and plain old simple fairness.
Thanks to Rev. King and others praying for equal rights for all Americans and to the two people going to colleges to recruit volunteers to help build a community center, my life was totally changed. I went back to my home in the North, saw housing discrimination, unequal resources for schools in poor and wealthy communities, hidden job discrimination, and after M. Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow.” In addition to taking regular jobs to support myself and my family, I tried to do what I could – from testing housing discrimination by going to look at apartments right after a black family went to see if they were told the apartment had been rented and I was welcomed, volunteer work at after school centers, and serving as election inspector during Obama’s two elections. Minor actions compared with Rev. King’s total commitment knowing he might be killed for his faith in God and in American values…
…but more than nothing if all of us do at least something.
– Tita Beal Anntares
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