Civil Rights Movement

EIGHT MEN sat on the stage at the Polytechnic Institute on Thursday. One was Robert Lumsden, the school's former football coach, who taught at Poly for 38 years. Another was John Clark, who graduated from Poly in the 1960s. The other six were the ones I had come to see and hear. Believe me, I had heard of these guys. They were about one-half of a group of boys who, if there were any justice in the world, would be as famous as the black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957.

Local authors share the titles they're enjoying right now. Madison Smartt Bell, whose most recent novel is "The Color of Night": "Noble Savages," by Napoleon Chagnon, back to back with "Triste Tropiques" by Claude Levi-Strauss. Sort of a bookend pair of anthropology texts, both fascinating. "Les Cloches de la Bresilienne," a magical mystery by Haitian author Gary Victor. I have a project with some other people to publish this book in the U.S. Jessica Anya Blau, author of the forthcoming "The Wonder Bread Summer": I'm reading "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter.

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?

A few words on the death of Elwin Wilson. He passed last week in a South Carolina hospital at age 76. Wilson had endured heart and lung problems and had suffered a recent bout with the flu. There is little reason you would know his name, but as a young man, Wilson made a virtual career out of hatefulness. He was a Klan supporter who burned crosses, hanged a black doll in a noose, once flung a jack handle at an African-American boy. In 1961, he was among a group of men who attacked a busload of Freedom Riders at a station in Rock Hill, S.C. In none of those things was he unique, so no, his name should ring no bells.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Fairview Plaza is a dingy strip mall near Interstate 65 at the city's edge. But one day, state officials predict, throngs will come to revisit a key point in the civil rights movement. Alabama plans to buy the mall for $2 million to make way for a federally run visitors center. The state also has set aside $1 million to preserve the real draw - the nearby field where participants in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march camped the night before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led them to the state Capitol.

The Rev. Benjamin L. Hooks, former executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, will be the keynote speaker for the 18th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Dinner on Jan. 13, organizers announced this week. The event, which is open to the public, will be held at 6 p.m. at La Fontaine Bleu restaurant, 7514 Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie. On Jan. 16, a sold-out breakfast in King's honor will also be held, with Frank M. Reid III of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore as the featured speaker, at 8 a.m. at Anne Arundel Community College.

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.

There is a new argument as to why the old flagship Read's drugstore in downtown Baltimore must be preserved. I've long argued that the No. 1 of the chain, at Howard and Lexington streets, is an overlooked 1934 architectural gem. Now historians of the civil rights movement in Baltimore have shown the role this building played in the desegregation of 1950s Baltimore. In 1955, after listening to the members of the Baltimore Committee on Racial Equality, the owners of the Read Drug and Chemical Co. gave the word that as of mid-January, all persons, regardless of race, could be seated and served at its soda fountains and lunch counters.

Dorothy Height, the grande dame of the civil rights movement, died recently in Washington after a long illness. She was 98. Mrs. Height, as everyone called her, was a force in the black civil rights movement for 60 years, 40 of them as the president of National Council of Negro Women. In life and in death, she has been called the matriarch and the queen of the movement. President Barack Obama called her its "godmother." The titles are reverential. She was a tall, stately woman, always perfectly dressed, her voice moderated and mannered.

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.

Rush Limbaugh thinks John Lewis should have been armed. "If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma?" he said recently on his radio show, referencing the 1965 voting rights campaign in which Mr. Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, had his skull fractured by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. "If John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?"

The math is daunting: More than 2,300 pages of prose winnowed down to 190, including photographs and the occasional blank sheet that signals chapter breaks. Yet, that's exactly the challenge that author and historian Taylor Branch tackled when he condensed his three-part history of the U.S. civil rights movement into one slender volume that could be taught in the nation's classrooms. Never mind that Branch, now 66, devoted more than 25 years of his life to crafting his acclaimed trilogy.

The Sun in its recent editorial ("Time for Phase II," Dec. 14), tells us that Occupy Baltimore protesters need to become "mainstream," that camping out in downtown Baltimore accomplished nothing and city residents were "perplexed" by the actions of the protesters. Some of the tactics the protesters used may have seemed over-the-top, but they created an awareness of issues that likely would not have been noticed using conventional, mainstream methods of protest. The civil rights movement and the peace movement of the 1960s and '70s relied on nonviolent, civil disobedience to accomplish their goals of equality for African Americans and an end to the war in Vietnam.

Julia Davidson-Randall knew she was likely to be arrested. But as the Morgan State junior's second day in a Baltimore jail bled into a third, she began to wonder what she had gotten herself into. "I honestly didn't know what was going to happen," she said 48 years later, reflecting on her incarceration for protesting segregation at the Northwood movie theater near Morgan's campus. The Baltimore native was back at Morgan on Thursday to celebrate the unveiling of a permanent exhibit depicting the role she and hundreds of fellow students played in fueling the civil rights movement.

Nonviolence, a potent force in the 1960s fight for civil rights, has become an "embarrassment, an instrument of the weak," lamented Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch. Seated in a wing chair Sunday afternoon in the chancel of First and Franklin Presbyterian Church in Mount Vernon, the author described how the strategy has fallen from favor. The Atlanta-born Branch, the son of a dry cleaner, wrote three books on the life of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was later invited by President Bill Clinton for a series of lengthy interviews at the White House for a work on Clinton's presidency.

These opportunities come once in a generation, social movements whose cause is so manifestly just, and whose potential is so transformative, that they rise above the clutter of ordinary politics. The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and others inspired a generation as it overcame Klansmen, brutal sheriffs and growers' thugs. Two decades later, we watched in awe as the brave people of Eastern Europe brought down one repressive communist dictatorship after another.

The math is daunting: More than 2,300 pages of prose winnowed down to 190, including photographs and the occasional blank sheet that signals chapter breaks. Yet, that's exactly the challenge that author and historian Taylor Branch tackled when he condensed his three-part history of the U.S. civil rights movement into one slender volume that could be taught in the nation's classrooms. Never mind that Branch, now 66, devoted more than 25 years of his life to crafting his acclaimed trilogy.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - This is a city of broad, white beaches on the Atlantic Ocean, home of America's most famous stock car race and a popular destination for college kids on spring break. But Daytona Beach also stands as a significant site in African-American history, linked to three important figures in the civil rights movement - Jackie Robinson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Howard Thurman. Daytona Beach, settled by Mathias Day in the mid-1800s, was as segregated a town as any other Southern city, with plantations growing rice, indigo and sugar cane.

There is a new argument as to why the old flagship Read's drugstore in downtown Baltimore must be preserved. I've long argued that the No. 1 of the chain, at Howard and Lexington streets, is an overlooked 1934 architectural gem. Now historians of the civil rights movement in Baltimore have shown the role this building played in the desegregation of 1950s Baltimore. In 1955, after listening to the members of the Baltimore Committee on Racial Equality, the owners of the Read Drug and Chemical Co. gave the word that as of mid-January, all persons, regardless of race, could be seated and served at its soda fountains and lunch counters.

"You get up. You are black," the woman screamed as she pointed to a student in the front row to leave. "Segregation now. Segregation forever. " The words were so astounding to this group of eighth-graders that they sat silent and stunned. The woman was Janice Washington, a teacher and civil rights activist who wanted eighth-graders at Sudbrook Middle Magnet School in Baltimore County to feel the same sense of outrage that she had felt as an African-American growing up in Texas, even if just for a second.