About the Author
Deric Gilliard, who was born in Atlanta to the parents of a young military couple, remembers his first civil rights experience while driving across the country with his father, Spencer Lee Gilliard, who used to take him out of school three weeks early every spring so the two could travel together. Riding through parts of the deep South, including Alabama, Gilliard recalls he and his father - the only black member of the U.S. Army's pistol marksmanship team being repeatedly threatened and harassed by police and state troopers during the mid-sixties. Gilliard also recalls riding trains for long distances with his mother through the deep South in the early 1960s and being unable to occupy a seat because they were all reserved for white passengers.
Later, after graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in journalism, then attending graduate school at Wichita State University, Gilliard wrote for a year at a large daily paper in the Midwest. He returned to his hometown in 1979, when he covered social issues, city hall and the Atlanta missing and murdered cases for the Atlanta Daily World, the nation's oldest black daily newspaper.
He went onto write for Time Magazine and spent a decade as a correspondent for USA Today newspaper, before moving into public relations. After working for five years in public affairs for predominately black colleges in Georgia, Gilliard went to work as National Communications Director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization co-founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957.
While at the SCLC, at that time the nation's foremost grass-roots civil rights organization, Gilliard was afforded the opportunity to work with and get to know many of the legends in the civil rights community, including Rev. Andy Young, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Dick Gregory and many others. He also served as the principal non Muslim promoter of the historic October 16, 1995, Million Man March.
Working under the leadership of SCLC President Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, who carved out a reputation as the "Dean" of the civil rights movement, Gilliard was on the front lines of a myriad of issues such as the burning of the black churches, disparities in sentencing, voter registration, economic empowerment, the fight to eradicate gun violence, the HIV\AIDS crisis, hate crimes and many others.
It was ultimately, however, the realization that these heroes and sheroes, twenty of whom are profiled in this book, had dedicated their entire lives to earning rights that most black Americans take for granted - yet, very few people even knew their names - that motivated him to undertake this project. Therefore, this book is dedicated to these 20 men and women and the countless others who we will never read about. Yet without their blood, sweat and tears, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Public Accommodations Act and many other privileges would not have been possible.
Deric Gilliard is also a minister of the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. Deric is married to his wife Catherine of 23 years a father of three.
Thank God for Dr. King's unknown ground crew.
Read more of Living in the Shadows of a Legend...