Civil Rights Movement

Taylor Branch's second narrative of the civil rights era, "Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965," has won the 1999 Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.The book, published last year, is the second in a planned trilogy by the Baltimore historian. Branch has said that he "hopes to sustain his thesis that [Martin Luther] King's life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed post-war years."The ABA award goes annually to writers who best illustrate the legal system.

WASHINGTON -- On Christmas night 1951, a terrorist bomb exploded under the floorboards in Harry T. Moore's home in Mims, Fla. Within hours, the soft-spoken NAACP state coordinator was dead, cutting short his 17-year battle for racial justice.The device had been placed below Moore's bedroom, where he and his wife, Harriette, had retired after celebrating the holiday and their 25th wedding anniversary.The blast left an 18-by-24-inch hole in the ground and turned much of the wood-frame house into kindling.

Starr Aaron, 19, was raised on stories of the civil rights movement. She visited the National Civil Rights Museum in her hometown of Memphis, Tenn., and studied freedom rides and the Fair Housing Law in high school history classes.Only when the Johns Hopkins University sophomore came to Baltimore did the tales come to life.In a class that encompasses history, social change and race, Aaron and about 50 other Hopkins students are delving into civil rights this semester, not only through books and documentaries, but through interviews with those involved.

Paul Robeson(1898-1976)Robeson, the youngest son of an escaped slave, graduated from Rutgers University, later Columbia Law School and went on to be primarily an actor and a singer.Robeson was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for the loyalty to Russia that he had developed. It was during this period that he wrote "Here I Stand."In it he discusses how his political views came about. He also used the book to encourage blacks in continuing the Civil Rights Movement independently while being mindful of their heritage.

I FLIP the book open to its very first page and gaze at the handwriting on it."To Gregory, my best -- James Farmer."The book is Farmer's "Lay Bare The Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement." It was published in 1985. Four or five years later, Farmer was in Baltimore to speak at the Gilman School. I weaseled out of work that day to listen the man who might have been the most underrated and unheralded of America's civil rights leaders and to get him to autograph my copy of his book.

NO ONE has done more to energize the civil rights movement and improve race relations in the United States than Thurgood Marshall. The Baltimore native was a juggernaut smashing through the obstacles of racial injustice.Long before Martin Luther King Jr. and others took to the streets to appeal to the American conscience, Marshall won the crucial battles that built, block by block, the legal pillars of monumental change. He will be remembered as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, but his most important contributions to society came decades before.

For his class assignment, Damian Pitts reluctantly attended a Jewish bar mitzvah in Park Heights. He was pleasantly surprised."They made me feel at ease, even though I was six-four and black and stood out like a sore thumb," the Goucher College junior from Laurel said last week.Having a black student visit a Jewish synagogue is par for the courses taught at Goucher this year by Taylor Branch. Author of two critically acclaimed books on the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Branch is trying to impart his passion for the subject to a new generation -- one for whom the era is ancient history.

Henry Hampton, 58, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker whose series "Eyes on the Prize" was hailed by many critics as the definitive look at the nation's early struggle over civil rights, died Sunday in Boston.Mr. Hampton had the bone marrow disease myelodysplasia, which arose from a treatment for lung cancer. He had surgery last week to repair a hematoma in his brain, said his nephew, Jacob ben-David Zimmerman.A lifelong chronicler of the poor and the disenfranchised, Mr. Hampton began his career in 1963 as a spokesman for the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston, a strong voice in the civil-rights movement.

MOST AMERICANS believe that our society is too uncivil, too impolite. Our politics become mean-spirited and cynical. People yelling at each other on television passes as entertainment. Daily interactions grow more suspicious and mistrustful. We size each other up as members of competing, even antithetical, identity groups.We desperately want to make things different, yet we don't have the slightest idea what ''civil'' and ''civility'' requires -- or means. Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday provides an opportunity to reflect on another important use of the word ''civil'' -- the civil-rights movement.

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking the color line in baseball, and The Sun will commemorate the event with a four-page section wrapping around the sports section that day. Coverage will include Robinson's impact on the civil rights movement and how today's players view Robinson's legacy.Pub Date: 4/14/97

Kathleen Klein Shemer, who worked as a buyer at several Baltimore department stores before she became active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, died of complications from an illness Thursday at St. Joseph Medical Center. The longtime Pikesville resident was 91. Born in Pittsburgh, she graduated from James Madison High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. She moved to Baltimore in the 1940s and was a volunteer nursing assistant during World War II. She worked as a buyer at Hecht's, Brager-Gutman's and other department stores in the city.

Every great social movement creates its own musical score. So it was with the American civil rights movement and Odetta, the honey-voiced songstress and musical conscience of that era who died this week at the age of 77. Odetta was a force of nature who drew from every strand of America's folk music tradition - prison ditties and work songs, Irish ballads and gospel tunes, spirituals and the blues. Her art and her voice embodied the rage, courage, defiance and hope of the terrific moral struggle that transformed America in the 1960s.

ATLANTA -- In the four decades since the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the nation has undergone a stunning social and political transformation that even Dr. King may not have anticipated. The average 25-year-old would have a hard time imagining what the country was like before. No Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey or Will Smith. No Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice or Barack Obama. No black presidents in disaster movies or black babies in diaper commercials. That was my childhood.

This march came at the emotional peak of the civil rights movement. It was from Selma, Ala., to what other city in 1965? Write to unisun@baltsun.com or UniSun Flashback, Features Department, 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore 21278.

Time has not dimmed the activism or straightforward opinions of "Glorious Gloria" Richardson, the charismatic heroine of the 1963 civil rights protest that she led as head of the Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee in the Eastern Shore city. Considered by some to be a second Harriet Tubman, it was Richardson who educated then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that the civil rights movement was not just about desegregation but also poverty and joblessness. Richardson, who will be 85 in May, lives in an East 14th Street apartment near New York City's Union Square.

There's embarrassment and shame in this admission, but you need to know: We forgot about Woody Sauldsberry. He was the NBA's Rookie of the Year in 1958, just the second black man to win the award. He played for four NBA teams and later the Harlem Globetrotters. Retirement wasn't always easy. Diabetes claimed one of his legs and had its sights set on the other. When Sauldsberry died last year in Baltimore, there was no obituary in the next day's newspaper and no old highlights aired on that night's SportsCenter.

You want to know who deserves credit for the victories of the civil rights movement? Mother Pollard. She's been largely forgotten over the last two weeks as the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination bickered over who did what in the 13-year epoch that crumbled the walls of American apartheid. Should the lion's share of the recognition go to the president who staked his legacy on enacting laws that made real the promises of democracy? Should it go to the civil rights leader whose courage and eloquence roused the sleeping conscience of the nation?

Prince George's County senator and civil rights activist Gwendolyn T. Britt died early yesterday, shortly after being taken to Doctor's Community Hospital in Lanham, according to a spokeswoman for Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller. She was 66. She had not been feeling well and was absent from the General Assembly's session Friday, the spokeswoman said. The cause of death was not available. The five-year Democratic state senator was expected to introduce legislation this year that would legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland - and by agreeing to do so, she had become a "hero" to that community, wrote Dan Furmansky, executive director of Equality Maryland.

Bruce S. Gordon's abrupt departure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after only 19 months as its president, marks the end of a marriage between old-time movement idealism and new-wave corporate problem-solving. The marriage now appears to have been doomed from the start. The former Verizon executive came into office amid grand hopes that he would modernize the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. The 98-year-old group's civil rights mission has been diminished by the hard-won success of the civil rights movement.

SELMA, Ala. -- Two of the Democratic Party's leading presidential candidates came to an emotionally evocative touchstone of the civil rights movement yesterday seeking to strengthen their bonds with black voters and tie their campaigns to the cause's unfinished work. It was the first side-by-side appearance of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton in their 2008 presidential campaign, and the political theater of the two campaigns overlapped repeatedly, but with a polite tone that contrasted with their political skirmishing of recent weeks.