NEWS
By Scott Calvert and Scott Calvert,SUN NATIONAL STAFF | January 20, 2003
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.
NEWS
By JAMIE STIEHM and JAMIE STIEHM,SUN REPORTER | January 4, 2006
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.
NEWS
By Timothy B. Wheeler and Timothy B. Wheeler,SUN STAFF | May 11, 1998
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.
NEWS
By Jacques Kelly | January 14, 2011
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.
NEWS
By Sheri L. Parks | April 26, 2010
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.
NEWS
By Erin Texeira and Erin Texeira,SUN STAFF | November 30, 1999
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.