Dr. Ellen Weiss’s new lushly-illustrated biography of African American architect Robert Taylor is helping bring this figure the recognition he deserves. The January 12 New York Times “Antiques” column called Taylor a “pioneering architect,” and the Mobile Times-Register called Weiss’s book on Taylor, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington, “long overdue.”

The Times-Register article “Southern Bound: Tuskegee architect finally gets his due,” by John Sledge, calls Weiss a “thorough researcher and a graceful writer who nicely balances Taylor’s personal and professional lives.” Indeed Weiss describes Taylor’s early life and includes both Taylor’s own letters, and writing about Taylor by his contemporaries, along with detailed accounts of the buildings that Taylor designed at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, later Tuskegee University. Many of those buildings are still in use.

“I feel I know him,” Weiss told New York Times reporter Eve Kahn for the “Antiques” column, given the volume of documents Weiss studied related to Taylor.

Weiss contextualizes Taylor’s accomplishments, examining them against the Jim Crow laws of the 1900s. As the Times-Register notes:

Weiss is also very good on the difficulties that black architects and tradesmen faced in a constricted society. Though extremely careful, Taylor did push for increased opportunities for minority professionals, and on at least one occasion he had to deal with a racist white tradesman. Like [Booker T.] Washington, Taylor remained relentlessly optimistic, though Weiss reveals that after 1919 when whites were viciously assaulting entire black neighborhoods, “he wrote privately that he could no longer assume that white people were fair minded.” It was a rare pessimistic comment from a man focused on work, family and surviving in a hostile world. But in finding that reference, Weiss has given us the whole man, in his glory and his despair.

Ellen Weiss’s Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite book retailer. At 300 pages and including over 100 photographs, including a full catalog of Taylor’s work at Tuskegee University, Weiss’s book will be of interest to social and architectural historians and the general reader alike.

Two NewSouth Books authors, Fred Gray and Constance Curry, will be added to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame during the 2012 Trumpet Awards on Friday, January 6, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.

Attorney Fred D. Gray served as the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s lawyer in 1950 at the age of only 24, defending such civil rights figures as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. He has worked on numerous civil rights cases since that time, including defending the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, and the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Gray chronicled his civil right career in his memoir Bus Ride for Justice and the book The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, published by NewSouth Books; an updated edition of Bus Ride will be published in spring 2012.

Constance Curry’s most recent publication from NewSouth Books was co-authoring Bob Zellner’s autobiography, the award-winning The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, currently in production as a movie with executive producer Spike Lee. During the Civil Rights Movement, Curry worked for a number of organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She is a documentary filmmaker and the author of a number of books; she has twice received the Lillian Smith Book Award, including for Wrong Side of Murder Creek.

2012 marks the ninth year for the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame, sponsored by the Trumpet Awards Foundation. The Foundation states that the purpose of the Walk is “to give recognition to the foot soldiers of justice who sacrificed and struggled to make equality a reality for all.” Learn more at the Foundation website, trumpetfoundation.org.

Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System by Fred Gray and The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement by Bob Zellner and Constance Curry are both available direct from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

That breeze you feel this morning must be one of two things: either it is caused by Bull Connor spinning in his grave over the international expressions of sympathy for the passing and admiration for the life of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, or it is caused by a lot of angel wings flapping as Shuttlesworth has arrived in heaven. Where he will begin organizing and demonstrating shortly.

Reverend Shuttlesworth died Wednesday in Birmingham, where he had returned to live for medical treatment after becoming frail over the past few years. He was 89. There are many good tributes to him being published and broadcast today; here’s one from the New York Times.

I met Shuttlesworth several times over the years, beginning in the 1970s in Birmingham, where he had stayed active even after taking a pulpit in Cinncinati, and continuing through the 1980s when he would appear occasionally at anti-Klan demonstrations and into the 1990s and 2000s when he was beginning to be honored and celebrated for his remarkable role in civil rights history.

A lot of people — on both sides of the movement — were almost afraid of Shuttlesworth because of his manner, which was direct to the point of fierceness. That quality served him and the movement well when he confronted Bull Connor in Birmingham and other racists in other places. Yet Shuttlesworth always struck me as a compassionate, fundamentally decent man who just happened to be incapable of dodging an issue or saying less than what he believed to be the truth about whatever the situation was.

In his later years, he could be just as critical of what he saw as corrupt uselessness within the movement as he had been of Jim Crow segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, and the world. That prickly nature often caused him trouble, but it gained him respect and it made him effective. There can be no doubt that without Shuttlesworth, the police state repression in Birmingham would have continued for many more years, and Martin Luther King Jr. would never have been in a position to write a letter from the Birmingham jail nor probably to win a Nobel peace prize.

Shuttlesworth is the subject of an excellent biography by Andrew Manis, and he shows up prominently in many of the civil rights histories, biographies, and memoirs that I have edited and that Suzanne La Rosa and I have published over the years at NewSouth Books. Just about everybody who was active in the movement has Shuttlesworth stories to tell.

In Bus Ride to Justice, for instance, Fred Gray describes how Shuttlesworth was arrested in Montgomery for trying to eat at a white lunch counter. Bob Zellner describes in The Other Side of Murder Creek how Shuttlesworth waded fearlessly through the white mob outside the First Baptist Church on the night after the Freedom Riders were beaten in Montgomery, and then, with King and Ralph Abernathy, helped keep up the spirits of those trapped in the church during that long, frightening night while the mob raged outside. In The Judge, the biography of Frank M. Johnson Jr., Frank Sikora tells some of what Shuttlesworth faced as he confronted segregation in Birmingham’s schools in 1957:

“On September 11, 1957, Ruby Shuttlesworth, twelve, her sister, Patricia, fourteen, and two other black children went to all-white Phillips High School in Birmingham. They were driven by the girls’ father, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and his wife, Ruby, plus another minister, J.S. Phifer. As they pulled up in front they were met by a group of about thirty white men, some of them wearing brass knuckles, others carrying chains and clubs. They advanced, shouting threats and cursing. Then they broke out the car windshield.

“Shuttlesworth got out of the car, knowing what awaited him. He was set upon and knocked repeatedly to the ground. His wife and the girls attempted to get out and run to the school, but were forced back inside. Birmingham police, meanwhile–and there were only a few of them on hand–attempted to radio for reinforcements. The call was held up, they said, because the radio was airing a routine stolen car report. Later, the report was found to be false; the car reported ‘stolen’ actually was the property of Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor.

“Bleeding and bruised, Shuttlesworth managed to get back into his car and was driven by Phifer to University Hospital. While most of the news media centered its attention on Central High in Little Rock, the attempt by the audacious Shuttlesworth to implement the Brown order in Birmingham and Alabama ended in one day.

“Ruby and Patricia Shuttlesworth returned to the all-black schools they had been attending.

“Sizing up the racial situation of the day, President Eisdenhower uttered a statement that was less than profound when he said, ‘Patience is the key to integration.’

“To the average black person living in the South then — ninety-four years after Abraham Lincoln put his signature on the Emancipation Proclamation — it was hardly an encouraging word.

“The angry resistance Shuttlesworth encountered ended the integration drive in the education arena for six years.”

Significantly, Shuttlesworth didn’t quit. He may not have had the patience President Eisenhower spoke of, but he was incapable of quitting. He kept working and kept organizing and kept resisting. And then when the time was right, he helped move the movement into a higher gear.

Rest in peace, Fred. You’ve earned it.

Former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice and US Senator Howell Thomas Heflin will be inducted into the Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, and a plaque will be inscribed with his name in the Samford University library. Heflin died in 2005. In 2001, NewSouth Books published his authorized biography, A Judge in the Senate, by John Hayman with Clara Ruth Hayman. Senator Edward Kennedy called A Judge in the Senate “required reading for all citizens who believe that one person can make a difference.”

Heflin was the son of a Methodist minister and was a highly decorated combat Marine in World War II, before serving as chief justice and later, as a US senator for eighteen years. Historian Wayne Flynt noted that Heflin’s “exaggerated drawl, his gargantuan size, his bombastic oratorical style easily misled those who were forever labeling Southerners as escapees from a Lil’ Abner cartoon. Informed Alabamians knew better as did his colleagues in the U.S. Senate. As Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, architect of the 1973 judicial reform article that modernized the state’s court system, and thoughtful champion of expanded rights for African Americans, Heflin was one of the most successful Democrats in post-George Wallace Southern politics.”

In an article in the Times Daily, Heflin’s former chief of staff Steve Raby described the hall of fame induction as a “great honor for the family.” He continued, “I’m glad they are going to see this recognition … They deserve this moment and the honor is very much deserved.”

The Hall of Fame will induct Heflin alongside post-Civil War era governor Thomas Goode Jones. The Hall of Fame notes that “this year’s honorees, attorneys in different centuries, both left legacies of judicial and ethics report.”

The full article on Heflin’s induction is available at the Times Daily website. Learn more about the Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame at the Samford University website.

A Judge in the Senate: Howell Heflin’s Career of Politics and Principle is available direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite book retailer.

In a glowing article, The Montgomery Advertiser’s Al Benn praises NewSouth Books’ new title The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 as “the best of the batch” of books on the Airmen “because it takes a different approach” to the story of this famed military unit. Benn enthusiastically describes the book as “an encyclopedia crammed with everything you ever wanted to know about the organization” and notes that “the best part is that it is home-grown,” being authored by three historian/archivists from Maxwell Air Force Base, whose access to hundreds of historical documents “helped them to produce a superb 230-page book.”

The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 had its launch party on May 5 at The NewSouth Bookstore on South Court Street in Montgomery. Authors Joseph Caver, Jerome Ennels, and Daniel Haulman were delighted to be joined by Airmen veteran Lt. Col. Herbert Carter, who had been a member of the 99th Fighter Squadron. Lt. Col. Carter is prominently featured in the book. In his Advertiser story, Al Benn identifies Carter’s photos as being among his personal favorites. The veteran pilot delighted guests by signing copies of the book along with the authors.

Authors Joseph Caver (left), Daniel Haulman (top middle) and Jerome Ennels (right) with former Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. (ret.) Herbert Carter (bottom middle).

The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 goes further than previous publications, using captioned photographs–many never published before–to trace the Airmen through their various stages of training, deployment, and combat. It also showcases the work of the Airmen’s diverse ground personnel. The book is the first to contain a detailed chronology of the Airmen’s wartime missions.

Interest in the Airmen continues to grow, with major motion picture due out next year from director George Lucas, and many books on the topic already in existence. The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 stands as the most comprehensive treatment of this distinguished group of pilots and the crews who supported them.

The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite retail or online book seller.

NewSouth Books would like to congratulate Jock Smith, author of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: A Trial Lawyer’s Journey on Behalf of “the Least of These” for being profiled by this year’s annual Ford Freedom Award Program.

The Ford Freedom Award Program is a collaboration between the Ford Motor Company Fund and Community Service, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History, and others to honor African Americans that have made lasting contributions to American life. This year’s award program, titled “Champions of Justice: African Americans in the Law,” focused on African American achievements in the American legal system.

Smith will be profiled along with other African American legal figures in a sixteen-page student supplement that will be disseminated to requesting schools. An excerpt from Smith’s profile reads:

Smith was born in New York City in 1948. At Tuskegee University, he was on the track and baseball teams and vice president of student government and graduated with high honors. On academic scholarship, he went to the University of Notre Dame Law School and founded the school’s chapter of the Black American Law Students’ Association.

After he earned his law degree, he became a legal advisor to the NAACP’s Civil Rights Project in Broome County, New York, where he worked with low-income clients.

With the late Johnnie Cochran, he cofounded one of the nation’s most prominent legal firms.

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: A Trial Lawyer’s Journey on Behalf of “the Least of These,” by Jock Smith, is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

Civil rights activist Bob Zellner continues to advocate for equality and understanding even while balancing some newfound attention. Zellner has been interviewed for an Oprah show segment on the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides set to air May 4, and and pre-production activities continue on a feature film to be executive produced by Spike Lee based on Zellner’s award-winning memoir, published by NewSouth Books, called The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.

Zellner also appeared on an episode of the Investigation Discovery channel’s Injustice Files, which focused on the unsolved murder of Congress of Racial Equality member William Lewis Moore. Moore, a white postal worker, conducted solo protest marches for civil rights in the 1960s; he was shot and killed in Alabama during one of those marches.

For perspective on the danger Moore faced as a white civil rights activist in the South, Injustice Files host Keith Beauchamp asked Zellner to describe his own experiences. At Zellner’s first protest, he told Beauchamp, pro-segregation activists beat him “very severely,” gouging his eye and threatening him with a hangman’s rope.

“What they didn’t understand,” Zellner said, “is we weren’t just fighting on the side of black people; we were fighting to liberate ourselves” from the racist ideology.

Zellner also recently spoke at the first of California State University’s 2011 Diversity Day programs, relating his first forays into civil rights activism. Zellner’s father and grandfather were both members of the Ku Klux Klan, and it was not until a college assignment that Zellner attended a civil rights rally that included Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. As reported in the Monterey County Weekly, Zellner credits Parks’s advice — “If you see something wrong in the world, you have to do something about it. You can’t just keep studying it.” — with inspiring him to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and to continue to advocate for civil rights.

Recently, the Southampton Press reported, producers from the Oprah show taped Zellner as he travelled Montgomery speaking with Klansmen and police officers who fought with activists during the Civil Rights Movement. Zellner told the Press, “It was exhilarating being back. One of the Klansmen we talked to said, ‘I’ve come to see that Bob was right and I was wrong.’”

Zellner also described trying to protect the Freedom Riders in Montgomery: “The Klan stopped the bus, blew out the tires and burned the bus up with the Freedom Riders on board. Everybody escaped, but some were really injured for life. It was such a murderous mob that they were really attempting to kill the Freedom Riders, attacking them with bricks, leaving some for dead in the streets.” Zellner recounts in greater details these and other events in The Wrong Side of Murder Creek.

Watch a segment from Injustice Files at the show’s website. You can also read about Bob Zellner from the Southampton Press and Monterey County Weekly, or visit Zellner’s own Zellner Blog.

The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, by Bob Zellner with Constance Curry, is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

Chuck Morgan, 78, one of the most colorful and powerful legal advocates for civil rights in the 1960s, died January 8, 2009, of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He “died peacefully at his Destin, Fla., home,” the local newspaper reported. I hope that was so, and if it was, then it was one of the few things Chuck ever did “peacefully.” He was a larger-than-life personality who not only recognized the injustices in society but did something about them. There’s a good story by Roy Reed in the New York Times about Chuck’s passing.

NewSouth’s author Bob Zellner also wrote movingly about Chuck in The Wrong Side of Murder Creek. Here’s a passage from the book:

The everyday slog and the relentless work load could get us down, so spirits always soared when outside help arrived to reinforce what we already knew—that what we were doing was important and that the word was getting out up North. The joy was even greater when the help came from a progressive Southern lawyer, who by definition had to be both courageous and slightly crazy to get involved in civil rights cases. One such lawyer was the outspoken Charles Morgan Jr. from rough-tough Birmingham. Victor was already comfortable with our legal standing, assuring us that the Bill of Rights applied even in the primitive backwoods courts of darkest Alabama. What Big Chuck brought was joie de vivre and utter fearlessness. Chuck was not bashful about letting the courthouse thugs and hangers-on know that he was onto their game. He’d been to enough rural courtrooms in Alabama to know that the “Courthouse Gang” was there to prop up the powers that be by hanging around to whittle sticks, spit tobacco, and glare menacingly—we called it “the hate stare”—at outsiders or anybody else the sheriff and the judge didn’t like.

Morgan went about his work in Talladega with such gusto that we felt less stressed. After court we gathered around him in his tiny motel room as he spun hilarious yarns of past exploits. “The other day,” Chuck said, “I had to go down to Greene County—that’s in the Black Belt—where I’m defending a poor black man. I told Camille, my wife, I might not make it back if the rednecks down there know about me ranting up here in Birmingham against Bull Connor. When she asked if I really had to go, I told her yes, if this man is to escape spending the rest of his natural life in jail for just trying to register. ‘What’d they charge him with?’ my wife asked. I told her it was carnal knowledge of a chicken, a tough charge to defend against.”

From the center of his sagging bed Morgan would lean over and put down his sweating glass of iced bourbon and branch water. He’d grab the phone and call the respected journalist Claude Sitton at the New York Times. “Claude, I got a report from the front.” Pause. “What do you mean what front? It’s the only front that matters right now—Morgan defending Zellner, the Bradens, and now Rabinowitz and Madame Grant—nothing but me standing betwixt them and the benighted lawlessness of the Great State of Alabama! My favorite kind of story, Mr. Sitton.” Another pause. “Sir, it certainly is news that’s fit to print. You ought to be down here to see it for yourself, but since you ain’t, let me tell you about it in living color.” Sitton was an Atlantan and the NYT’s chief Southern correspondent. He reported widely on civil rights from 1958–64. Morgan’s bantering with him was partly for our entertainment and also to make sure that our activities would stay in the national focus, thus bringing additional support and some measure of protection.

Rabinowitz and Grant had been added to the injunction when they showed up for my hearing. By the second or third day of the hearing, Morgan and Rabinowitz, with help from another volunteer attorney, Arthur Kinoy (later a co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights), had prepared a countersuit against the state of Alabama, Talladega County, et al. That morning our group, led by Morgan, had woven our way through the usual crowd of whittlers and spitters outside the courthouse. Inside, Chuck motioned for me to follow him down the stairs. We marched into the basement where many county employees worked, and he announced loudly with a big smile, “Mr. Zellner and I have just accused all of y’all of being white.”

Most of the time things in SNCC were so hectic and our lawyers were so busy trying to keep us out of jail or getting us out of jail that there was no time for preparing proactive suits. In Talladega, however, we were lucky to have these feisty attorneys working for us. So when Morgan impishly accused all the county employees of being white, he was deadly serious. Our counter-injunction asked the federal government to ban segregated courtrooms, all-white juries, and all-white judges and sheriffs. Morgan and Rabinowitz asked that all proceedings against civil rights workers and black voter registration aspirants be removed to federal courts.

The very next morning our entry into the courthouse changed dramatically. As Chuck and I approached the front steps and the waiting courthouse gang, he simply pushed his seersucker jacket aside just enough to reveal a huge gun snugly nestled in a beautiful brown leather shoulder holster. The gang parted like the Red Sea for Moses, and we sailed peacefully into the courthouse. As it turned out, Chuck was friends with the sheriff and had cleared this ploy in advance, but at the time his only comment was, “Zellner, maybe you know how to be nonviolent and survive. My mama told me, ‘Son, walk loudly and carry a big piece.’”

We were sworn to nonviolence in all our public affairs, but . . . we were kicking ass in the courtroom and it seemed that Charles Morgan Jr., Esquire, of Birmingham, was prepared to kick it on the courthouse lawn if push came to shove.

And another passage from the same book:

Wallace and his prosecutors were delighted with the prospect of trying me on something other than the political charge of conspiracy. Conspiring to do what? They had no evidence of plans to demonstrate at Wallace’s inaugural. So their Plan B was to convict Zellner on a bad check charge and send him to the penitentiary for ten years. Maybe he wouldn’t survive the Alabama prison system!

Chuck Morgan assisted Clifford Durr at my trial. Clifford in frail health and was exhausted, and Morgan was always spoiling for a civil rights legal fight. I remember at one point coming out of the courtroom and I had a cigarette in my hand and my hands were cuffed in front of me, and the photographer was there, and I didn’t expect the photographer, so I smiled and he took the picture. Chuck told me later, “No matter if you are acquitted or convicted or there’s a hung jury, never smile when you come out of the courtroom, because you weren’t supposed to be arrested to begin with.”

When they took me to the jail, I guess it was the same jail Rosa Parks had been in, and Martin Luther King, and even Hank Williams a time or two. One of my classmates from Huntingdon was the brand new jailer. The newsmen interviewed him, and they asked how it felt to lock up his old classmate, Bob Zellner. I wasn’t treated badly at all.

Cliff and Chuck had a good defense for the all-white, mostly male Montgomery jury. The prosecution said that I had purchased a camera for $85 from the pawn shop on Friday afternoon. Because I traveled so much, my SNCC paycheck was automatically deposited in Atlanta each week. The police wouldn’t let Mr. Erlich, the shop owner, deposit my check. Instead, the cops called the bank in Atlanta to see what my checking account balance was and were told that at the moment there was less than $85. But they were also told that the bank knew the account and knew that a deposit was made each Friday. The bank said the check would be honored. Nevertheless, that was the state’s case against me.

“The check,” Mr. Durr argued, “could not be evidence of false pretenses since it was never presented for payment, nor was it ever returned for insufficient funds.” The prosecutors could not have it both ways. In closing arguments, Morgan marched his ample frame up and down in front of the hometown jury, waxing homespun as he asked each juror, “How many times have you, or your spouse, bought groceries on Friday based on the family paycheck that was to be deposited that afternoon?”

Then in summation, Clifford Durr, as courtly a Southern gentleman as anyone ever saw, rail thin in his crisp seersucker suit and bending slightly forward because of his bad back, delivered the final blow. He asked the jurors, “How would you feel if the Governor or the police were mad at you and took the check out of your grocer’s hand, called your bank and then tried to put you in jail for ten years because someone at the bank said you didn’t have enough money?”

However, long before Cliff drove these last nails into the coffin of Wallace’s case against me, Chuck had done something in open court that determined the outcome of the trial. It is rare that the opening shot is the one that decides the battle, but that is what happened. We had spent weeks asking the progressive ministers of the conference and their wives to attend my trial in support of a fellow Methodist in trouble because of an issue of conscience. We had asked them to be prepared to be called as character witnesses.
Mrs. Francis McLeod, the grande dame of Alabama Methodists and the mother of a brood of charismatic and successful preachers in our conference, agreed to lead the charge against the state for trying to imprison me for ten years. This famous Methodist momma was the mother of Dad’s best friend, Reverend Fletcher McLeod. Another son, Powers McLeod, was everybody’s pick to be bishop someday.

Chuck’s simple but brilliant maneuver, as the judge gaveled the crowded court session to order, caught everybody off guard. He stood and addressed the judge, “Your Honor, there are several preachers here with their wives who are character witnesses for my client, Mr. Bob Zellner. Mr. Durr and I have not had the opportunity to interview all of them. In the interest of saving the time of the court, if it please your honor, would you ask for them to stand so we may identify Mr. Zellner’s character witnesses? I don’t know how many of them are here.”

Before the prosecutor could object and before the judge realized he was being poleaxed in his own courtroom, the judge asked the character witnesses to stand. Almost the entire audience stood up. Case closed.

As reported Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2007 in the New York Times, James F. Seale has been arrested in Roxie, Mississippi, in connection with the murders of two African-American men, Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore, in 1964. Seale is alleged to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI believes Seale and others suspected the two men of planning an “armed uprising,” while in fact they may just have been hitchhiking in the area.

NewSouth author Rev. J. Phillips Noble grew up in Learned, Mississippi. He served as the first chairman of the Human Relations Council during desegreation in Anniston, Alabama. Regarding the arrest in Mississippi, Noble wrote:

The history of the world is littered with examples of “man’s inhumanity to man.” High up on the list is the ignorant, prejucice, and hate driven horrific crimes committed on African Americans during the 1960′s. Many were people who were not involved in Civil Rights activity, but innocent bystanders who became the objects for violent treatment just because they were black.

Time brings some healing of hurt to families of these victims, but it does not entirely remove it. However, time does not negate the need for justice for those who perpertrated cruel violence to innocent victims. I am immensely proud of my fellow Mississippian, former Gov. William Winter, who was a voice for tolerance and moderation in an atmosphere of bigotry and hatred during the 1960s, and others like him, and I continue to be appalled at the depths of hatred to which some of my fellow Mississippians could sink as they carried out their evil deeds. I am grateful that the wheels of justice continue to grind in my native state.

Rev. J. Phillips Noble wrote about his experiences struggling for civil rights in Anniston in his book Beyond the Burning Bus, available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

The following comes from This Day in Civil Rights History, written by Ben Beard and NewSouth editor Randall Williams:

On this day in civil rights history, Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis killed five people in North Carolina, in what would become known as ���the Greensboro Massacre.���

Weeks earlier, the Workers��� Viewpoint Organization had planned an anti-Klan rally to be held in Morningside Homes, a black housing project in Greensboro. In the late 1970s, the WVO, a biracial organization, helped textile unions in North Carolina negotiate better working conditions. The WVO grew out of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the late 1960s as activists sought to continue their work in the post-civil rights era.

Under WVO auspices, poor black and white textile workers built a coalition to improve their situation. On occasion, the KKK threatened the union leaders and, as an act of defiance, the WVO planned a rally against the Klan. The activists were also planning to announce the new name of their organization: the Communist Workers��� Party.

The so-called ���Death to the Klan��� rally was to be a combination social protest, political gathering, and economic declaration. Learning of the event, members of the KKK and the American Nazi Party, both then active in middle North Carolina, planned a competing anticommunism event.

The anti-Klan rally began around 11 a.m. Soon afterwards, carloads of Klansmen and Nazis disrupted the rally. Television news cameras were present, and their film of the incident showed the armed Klansmen and Nazis getting out of their cars and, with guns drawn, approaching the anti-Klan parade, targeting members of the Communist Workers Party and firing point-blank at them. The entire incident lasted only a few minutes. At the end, five leaders of the rally lay dead���Caesar Cauce, Mike Nathan, Sandi Smith, Bill Sampson, and James Waller���with ten injured.
Survivors of the attack alleged a conspiracy, and with good reason. The local police, who were warned of the potential for trouble, were suspiciously absent at the time of the attack. Informants in the Klan had relayed information about the potential attack, but no one had done anything about it. In the subsequent state and then federal trials, however, the murderers were found not guilty on all charges. In a civil trial, the City of Greensboro paid some of the survivors a settlement without admitting any wrongdoing.

The Greensboro Massacre caused a national outrage and led to the formation of the National Anti-Klan Network (later the Center for Democratic Renewal). Some 100 civil rights, church, labor, and community organizations joined in the network. In the summer of 2004, Greensboro launched the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the incident.

This Day in Civil Rights History is available from your favorite local or online book retailer, directly from NewSouth Books, or from Amazon.com.