Book Chapters: Living in the Shadows of a Legend
Al Sampson
Rev. Al Sampson, former member of the SCLC executive staff and currently the pastor of Fernwood United Methodist Church in Chicago, was the only minister within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) known to have been ordained by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Ann and Karl Braden
Anne and Carl Braden, who were charged with sedition in 1954 after buying a home in a segregated community for a black couple in Louisville, then reselling it to them, as well as their ongoing struggle to achieve equal rights and opportunities for African-Americans. Read more details about their trials and triumphs as they traveled the South chroniciling the civil rights struggle for the Southern Patriot.
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Alice Tregay (and MLK Jr.)
Alice Tregay served as a cornerstone for Operation Breadbasket in Chicago and was heavily involved in the quest for open housing. She is also credited with launching the political career of former SCLC staffer and currentRainbow/P.U.S.H. Chairman Rev. Jessie Jackson.
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Lula Jo Williams
Lula Jo Williams, one of the first female field staff members ever hired by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who is a native of Montgomery, helped integrate the city and led major marches while still a teenager.
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Rev. Hosea Williams
The legendary Rev. Hosea Williams, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s field general, who’s motto was "unbossed and unbought," was also known as "The Agitator" as he stirred the fires of freedom and equality in black people and communities throughout the South after turning his back on a successful career as the first black federal government chemist ever hired south of the Mason-Dixon line.
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John Thomas
Montgomerian John Thomas at 92 in 2000, an active participant in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, also met martyred civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo of Detroit the night she was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on her was back to Montgomery after dropping marchers off in Selma.
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J.T. Johnson
Former SCLC field organizer J.T. Johnson stands in front of the sign at Monson’s Riverfront in St. Augustine, FL, in 2001, 47 years after police jumped into the integrated pool to arrest him and two others that was memorialized in an Associated Press photo that appeared throughout the world.
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Albert Turner
Albert Turner, the leader of the Marion, Alabama movement. The murder by deputized officials of Jimmy Lee Jackson as he tried to protect his elderly grandfather precipitated Bloody Sunday the Selma to Montgomery March that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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Rev. Clay Evans
Former pastor and nationally acclaimed vocalist Rev. Clay Evans of Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, a native Tennessean, was one of the few Chicago ministers who stood with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when the young minster challenged the racism and the powers that be of the Windy City in 1966. Evans also offered his church as the founding place of the Chicago office of Operation Breadbasket, the economic empowerment arm of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
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Dr. Robert Hayling
Dr. Robert Hayling, as a young dentist, challenged the African-American community of St. Augustine to accept nothing less than being full-fledged citizens of the United States. Hayling, who first worked with the NAACP, then aligned himself with King and the SCLC, refused to back down from "Hoss" Manucy and the violent element of St. Augustine, despite being kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan and having his home shot into.
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Betty Magness
The career of Betty Magness in civil rights, like that of so many others before and afterher, began more by accident than design. Employed by an insurance company, Magness took two days off work to experience Chicago's first Black Expo. While working at Expo, she got sick, called into work ill, and was fired because her boss thought she was only calling in "sick" in order to work the Expo. She began volunteering at Operation Breadbasket in Sept. l968, five months after Dr. King's assassination. One year later, after serving as a volunteer usher, typistat night, producer of picket signs and anything else the staff needed her to do, Operation Breadbasket Personnel Director Jo Ella Stevens hired the Southside (Chicago) native to work as a secretary for the communications department.
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