Unsung Heroes Oral History Collection
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Oral history interview with Rev. Steve Allen
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Steve Allen grew up in the Shiloh community of Greensboro, one of the oldest African-American neighborhoods in the city, dating back over 127 years. The center of the community was the Shiloh Baptist Church (where years later he would become their Pastor!) Educated in segregated Catholic schools, he then attended Dudley High School, where his teachers were inspirational and he was class Salutatorium (second best in class), despite the hand-me-down textbooks. Early on, as a high school and college student Mr. Allen became involved as a civil rights activist. He was deeply influenced by the ministers at Shiloh Baptist Church, most especially Reverend JT Harrison. Mr. Allen went to North Carolina A & T on a Chancellor's Scholarship, and following graduation was accepted at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's law school in 1976. There he experienced racist treatment at the hands of his white professors (who would recognize the white students and none of the five African-American students). He graduated from law school in 1978, and had the honor of being the Research Assistant for the first African-American judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. In 1979 he founded one of the first African-American law firms in Greensboro, taking on many civil rights cases as a trial lawyer. In 1988 he became a Superior Court Judge- one of a group of eight African-American judges who changed the state's history. During his eight years on the court he helped to create a first-time offenders diversionary program and was instrumental in changing the judicial culture towards more fairness for African-Americans. For the last eight years he has been the Pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church, capping off an amazing life of service and civic activism.
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Oral history interview with Willard Bass
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Reverend Willard Bass was born and raised in Fayetteville, NC, the son of a career soldier. Growing up in the Jim Crow South he was exposed from early on to the daily pain of racism, which ultimately led down the road to his decision to become a pastor. Bass received his B.S. in chemistry from Fayetteville State University, and had a strong career as a chemist, working for the State of North Carolina as well as the American Can Co. and RJ. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in Winston-Salem, NC. After a successful stint as a building contractor, Willard found himself increasingly drawn to the ministry and with the mentorship of Reverend Mendez (also interviewed for this Project) made the decision to apply to divinity schools. In 1999 Wake Forest University accepted Willard into its divinity program. He found his calling, but also was confronted with a racist culture within the department, which he challenged by creating in 2004 the Institute for Dismantling Racism. This organization has worked tirelessly to educate and to provide dialogue on the key issue of cultural and institutional racism. In 2013 Reverend Bass joined fellow ministers and lay people with his participation in the Moral Monday Movement led by Reverend Barber. This key movement has been and continues to be a critical force for social good not only in North Carolina but the nation. The following year saw Bass found the Truth and Reconciliation Project of Forsyth County. This project seeks to provide healing and reparation for the centuries of racism and trauma endured by African-American and other minorities in Forsyth County. Reverend Bass sees community-building as the center of his ministry. He helps build communities while engaging people in world-changing dialogue. For the last several years Bass has directed the Share Cooperative and Harvest Market. This project seeks to change the fact that Winston-Salem is the fifth-largest food desert in the U.S. In 2021 the Market opened, and the Co-operative now has over 500 members. Bass plans to make this a national project, with plans in the works for markets in Baltimore and Fayetteville which will provide not only good food but jobs with livable wages. Reverend Bass sees his life as a march of faith. Every day he seeks to make the world a better place. He is an inspiration to us all!
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Oral history interview with Owen Brooks
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Owen Brooks, whose parents were Jamaican immigrants, was born in Boston in 1928. After graduating from high school at the age of 16, Brooks served in the Army during the Korean War and later attended Boston University and Northeastern University, where he studied electronics. Politically conscientious, Brooks was drawn to the Black freedom struggle, where as a youth he joined the NAACP and the Progressive Party, and during the early sixties, he helped organize a national network of friends and supporters for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In the immediate years following the SNCC-sponsored 1964 Freedom Summer, Brooks left Boston and moved to Mississippi to work for the Delta Ministry, a National Council of Churches- sponsored organization that organized poor Blacks to take advantage of their growing political power. As part of this work, Brooks was instrumental in helping Martin Luther King, Jr. organize the Poor People's Campaign. Unlike most activists who visited the South, Brooks chose to remain in Mississippi and continued his political activism and civil rights activity. A field representative for Congressman Mike Espy and Field Director for Congressman Bennie Thompson during the late eighties and early 1990s, Brooks co-founded the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement in 2004. Chairing the organization, and later serving on its board of directors, Brooks organized conferences and urged his fellow veterans to pass on what they had learned as activists to interested youth. In his final years, Brooks worked at the Smith Robertson Museum and at Jackson State University's Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center. In both instances, Brooks served as an oral historian, diligently collecting the stories of veteran civil rights activists scattered throughout the United States. After a long life of activism, Brooks died in Jackson in 2014.
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Oral history interview with Rev. Cardes Brown
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Reverend Cardes Brown was born in 1945 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. His father was a pastor for over 56 years, and his mother taught school for 40 years in the schools of Rocky Mount. At the age of 12 he was arrested for drinking water out of the whites only drinking fountain. Already at that age he was determined to fight racism and the daily intimidation of life under Jim Crow, despite the serious danger of doing so. He went to college at A & T University in 1963, then an epicenter of the civil rights movement. At age 19 Mr. Brown realized that he was destined to be a man of the cloth, and began his now 55-year vocation, most of those years spent in Greensboro, NC. He has been a true "voice for the voiceless", with his civil rights activism closely tied to his work as a Pastor. A lifelong member of the NAACP, he has been directly involved with a number of struggles, including the fight to create a police review board, the campaign to get fairness with hiring practices at the K-Mart distribution center in Greensboro in 1996, and a decade later the Moral Monday Movement led by Dr. William Barber. Reverend Brown is also involved with the "schools to prison pipeline" issue, along with ongoing campaigns to address police violence, wrongful incarceration, and the mistreatment of undocumented workers. In 2019 he was awarded the Benjamin Hooks Keeper of the Flame Award by the NAACP, one of their highest honors. He counts among his most meaningful accomplishments the mentoring of over 100 associates who are now Pastors. Arrested numerous times for civil disobedience he has withstood all manner of intimidation, and is at age 75 still soldiering on, fighting the good fight.
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Oral history interview with Jasper Brown
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Jasper Brown was born in Columbia, SC in 1946, and grew up under the full oppression of Jim Crow. He attended all-segregated schools and did well academically, while also excelling at football and baseball. During the early 60s Jasper participated in the Civil Rights Movement protests in the Columbia area. These experiences made Brown determined to work for change. In 1965 he was accepted at Hampton University, graduating in 1969 with a degree in Business Administration. In 1974 Jasper graduated from the Catholic University School of Law in Washington, DC. He began his career with the National Labor Relations Board that year, transferring to the Region 11 office in Winston-Salem, NC in 1977. In his 40-year career as a Field Attorney for the NLRB, Brown dealt with many different cases in his assigned area, virtually all of which involved race—both in terms of the makeup of the employees and in the nature of the management's use of racial divisions to attempt to destroy union movements. Standout cases include Holly Farms Corp. vs NLRB in 1996, which Brown successfully litigated all the way to the US Supreme Court. This judgement resulted in a $6 million settlement for the workers. In 2004 he won a $7.75 million settlement with Enersys Inc. over its anti-union campaign. As with other cases this case involved a group of African-American workers whose union activities were being viciously fought by the company. Perhaps Jasper Brown's biggest case involved Smithfield Packing Co. vs. NLRB. This landmark case was a key factor in the biggest victory for a union in the 21st century, affecting 5,000 slaughterhouse workers, the vast majority of whom are people of color. Brown's 40 years of service lies at the intersection of labor rights and civil rights. It sometimes involved dangerous activities lining up witnesses and litigants in isolated areas of North and South Carolina. Long a mentor to young NLRB attorneys, Brown retired in 2014, and is still an activist in both the Big Brother's program, his church and Hampton University, where his fish fries are legendary.
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Oral history interview with Willena Cannon
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Willena Cannon grew up in Mullins, South Carolina, a farming town 35 miles inland from Myrtle Beach. Born in 1940, she experienced first hand the horrors of segregation and racist violence. When she was nine Willena witnessed the murder of an African-American man whose crime it was to be in love with a white woman. The man was burned alive in a barn. His screams filled the night, and she never forgot it. As she recounts in her interview, African-Americans who in any way offended racist sensibilities or who resisted Jim Crow often ended up dead in a swamp, and nobody dared to talk about it. In 1963 Cannon began attending North Carolina A & T State University, where she majored in Student Health and Physical Education and was the Captain of the Women's Basketball Team. At A & T Willena became involved with the burgeoning civil rights movement and the fight to integrate Greensboro's businesses. This fight (led by Jesse Jackson, the then-head of the A & T Student Body) ended with the arrests of virtually the entire student body of the university (4,951, to be exact.) The jails were so overflowing, Willena along with other student activists were held in the old polio home in Greensboro. Two weeks in, many businesses caved and it was a major breakthrough. From that point on, Cannon was a dedicated activist, later joining the Beloved Community of Greensboro and the Reverend Nelson Johnson in a number of both civil rights and union campaigns including the Cafeteria Workers Strike and the fight to unionize Cone Mills. Willena and fellow activists engaged in "civil rights unionism", a melding of labor activism with the civil rights movement. In 1979 Willena came close to being killed by Nazis and KKKers at the November 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre. Now in her 80s and still as active and feisty as ever, Willena's advice to young people is simple: Get involved!
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Oral history interview with David Dansby, Jr.
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David Dansby, Jr. grew up in Greensboro, NC. His activism started in high school, when along with other young people he tried to integrate the Greensboro Public Library. Though that effort was not successful, David was determined to fight racism wherever he could. He was one of the first African-Americans to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an undergraduate and later at the law school. During his undergraduate years Mr. Dansby was part of the efforts to desegregate not only the campus but the businesses located nearby. These efforts were inspired by the sit-ins in Greensboro at the Woolworth's counter. He was threatened repeatedly for his activism, but these efforts proved successful. Restaurants, theaters and other businesses began accepting African-American customers. In his senior year of law school he was arrested for civil disobedience. Mr. Dansby was also part of the efforts to create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. One of his proudest moments was being part of the campaign to get a library in a predominately African-American area of Greensboro. Mr. Dansby was one of the first African-Americans to receive his law degree from Chapel Hill, and practices law in Greensboro to this day.
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Oral history interview with Reverend Frank Dew
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Reverend Frank Dew was born in Raleigh, NC and grew up in Lumberton, in the southeastern part of the state. As a White person growing up during the Jim Crow era, he witnessed first-hand the cruelties meted out to people of color, and never forgot the fact that movie theatres in Lumberton had three entrances: one for Blacks, one for Whites and one for Lumbee Indians. Dew knew from early on that he was a committed Christian and was determined to devote his life for the betterment of his fellow man. After graduating from Wake Forest University in 1973 Dew attended Duke Divinity School, finishing his degree in 1976. From that point on Frank has been a Presbyterian minister serving various churches in the Greensboro area. Over the years Dew has been involved as a leader and member of numerous groups seeking to better the community. He has been an associate pastor and leader at the Urban Ministry, which helps poor and indigent people with food, shelter and medical care. In 1980 Dew became a member of the Human Relations Commission, partially as a response to the 1979 Greensboro Massacre. (Please see interviews with Signe Waller Foxworth, Willena Cannon and Lewis Pitts in regards to the Massacre.) In 1985 Reverend Dew founded the New Creation Community Church, a small but vibrant community harkening back to earlier times (including Sunday dinners with folks from the Urban Ministry) which continues to this day. In 1987 Reverend Dew was one of the founders of Habitat for Humanity in Greensboro, which since that time has built over 100 homes. Dew also was instrumental in the founding of Mary's House, an institution devoted to helping women who are dealing with drug abuse issues (one of the first of its kind in the country.) A member of the Family Life Council, Dew is also active in People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, and is grateful for the fact that no one has been executed in North Carolina for the last 15 years. Author of the book Improving Our Acoustics for Hearing the Bible, Reverend Dew looks to the intersections of needs: food, shelter, health care, education, a living wage, all part of the larger struggle for human and civil rights. He is both optimistic and a person of deep, unshakeable faith. He has devoted his life and amazing energies to the common good, and we are thankful for it.
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Oral history interview with James E. Fergson II
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James E. Ferguson II was born on October 10, 1942 in Asheville, North Carolina as the youngest of seven children. As the student body president of Stevens Lee High School in his senior year, Ferguson organized a protest against the funding and maintenance inequalities for the segregated schools in Asheville, ultimately convincing the school board to construct a new all-black school. From here, Ferguson and other politically-involved students joined with adults in the community to form the Asheville Student Committee on Racial Equality, which organized nonviolent protests to address racial inequality within Asheville. ASCORE met little resistance within Asheville compared to other cities in the South and it was this coupled with the support of local black lawyers that made Ferguson decide he wanted to study law. After graduating from undergrad school, Ferguson began to study law at Columbia. Initially planning to return to Asheville, Ferguson was introduced by Jack Greenberg, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to Julius Chambers and was convinced to join his law practice in Charlotte. Working with Chambers and Adam Stein, Ferguson took part in the first integrated law office in North Carolina, where he still works today. When he started working at the law firm as a civil rights lawyer, Ferguson faced several challenges early on. The first time that Ferguson argued before the Supreme Court of North Carolina, the Chief Justice stood up and walked out of the chamber. The building that the law office occupied was also firebombed late one night in 1971, resulting in many of the office's books being destroyed and the ATF becoming involved, though no culprit was ever found. One of Ferguson's most notable cases was Swann v. Mecklenburg in 1968, which sought to bring further desegregation of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System and was initially successful. Aside from Jack Greenberg, Julius Chambers, and Adam Stein, other notable lawyers that Ferguson came to know or know of include Thurgood Marshall, Derrick Bale, Conrad Pearson, Henry Frye, Ken Brown, and others in England and Africa. Ferguson has also done teaching with lawyer training organizations such as the National Institute for Child Advocacy, and helped found the first child advocacy program in South Africa. Ferguson wants young people to know that bringing about change can be long and difficult, but perseverance does pay off."
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Oral history interview with Afrique Kilimanjaro
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This interview features Afrique Kilimanjaro, the current managing editor of the Carolina Peacemaker (One of Greensboro's oldest black newspapers) and daughter of its founders, sitting down with Anna Freeman, a UNCG Public History master's student. They discuss Afrique's background growing up around Greensboro and the Peacemaker, as well as how she found herself a part of it's management. Kilimanjaro discusses the nature and importance of community journalism as well as her parent's and the Peacemaker's role in the community while she was growing up. During this interview, Afrique also discusses the impact of the Greensboro Massacre on her family and the community, as well as the future of the newspaper. Overall, this interview contributes to the Civil Rights narrative of Greensboro as well as the history of the Carolina Peacemaker and its continued impact. This oral interview was conducted as part of the Unsung Heroes project through UNCG, by both Anna Freeman and Anna-Dixon Harkey.
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Oral history interview with Vickie Kilimanjaro
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Vickie Kilimanjaro grew up in Jackson, North Carolina, a small town in the eastern part of the state. She went to school, did farm work and remembers enjoying the closeness of the African-American community in the area. After college she married John Kilimanjaro (ne Stevenson). After John Kilimanjaro received his Doctorate in Education the couple moved to Greensboro where he became a professor at North Carolina A & T University. In 1963 Vickie and John were participants in the March on Washington. They became intensely involved in the ongoing civil rights struggles at the time, helping to integrate downtown Greensboro along with A & T students and faculty. In 1967 the Kilimanjaros founded The Carolina Peacemaker, a newspaper for the African-American community. This pioneering newspaper covered many events over its 53 years of existence, providing a different and critically important lens for the turbulent events of the period. At that point, the mainstream paper was far more interested in negative articles about the Black community, often who was going to jail or accused of a crime. The Peacemaker told the stories people wanted to hear, and built over its many years a strong base of support, winning many journalism awards in the process. Vickie continues the work of the newspaper along with her daughter Afrique.
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Oral history interview with Richard McGough
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Throughout his life, Richard McGough has been a tireless proponent of civil rights who uses his remarkable skills to free the wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1954, and first became involved in progressive activism as a high school student in the early 1970s. This was a period of massive change in North Carolina, especially around the integration of public schools. Richard was one of the few white students who actively supported the “Wilmington 10,” a group of nine men and one woman who were wrongfully convicted of arson and conspiracy for their efforts to desegregate Wilmington’s schools and to fight the endemic racism that afflicted the region. Around the same time McGough expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War by moving to Canada rather than be drafted. Following the decision to end the draft, Richard moved back to the United States and became a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Richard entered a Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology while at Chapel Hill that led him to do fieldwork in Ecuador, interviewing cultural groups and indigenous peoples who were fighting political corruption in the region. During this time, he was trained in two valuable skills—fluency in Spanish and the art of listening—both of which would prove useful in his later career as a private investigator and certified expert in capital case litigation. Witnessing the deep poverty of Central America and the effects of the war in El Salvador led McGough to become a dedicated leftist. He ultimately discontinued his graduate work in cultural anthropology and became an organizer for the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina, and became involved with the Christic Institute, a left-wing legal group that worked on the Karen Silkwood case, the Iran Contra Affair, and the Greensboro Massacre. During that period Richard worked closely with Lewis Pitts, a lawyer with the Christic Institute who is also featured in this archive.
In the late 1980s, after receiving his North Carolina private investigator’s license, McGough took on the biggest cases of his career. Darryl Hunt, an African-American man, was wrongfully convicted of a gruesome rape-murder by a prosecutor who willfully ignored evidence that would have led to the actual killer. Working closely with Mark Rabil, Hunt’s defense attorney, over a 19-year period, and with Phoebe Zerwick, the journalist who helped break open the case, Richard was able to obtain DNA samples that ultimately led to Darryl Hunt’s exoneration. (Both Zerwick and Rabil are featured in this archive.) In the last decade or so, Richard has become a national expert on mitigation for capital murder cases; most of his cases involved African-American individuals who have suffered under a racist justice system bent on punishment and blinded by deeply held hatred. Now retired, McGough continues his justice work with Wake Forest University’s Innocence and Justice Project, which is led by Mark Rabil. With Rabil, McGough is working to address secondary trauma as an outgrowth of incarceration.
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Oral history interview with Reverend John Mendez
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John Mendez was born in New York City on January 7, 1948. He was educated in the NYC public schools. Like many other African-American youth he was placed in a lower academic track, and from that time on never forgot the sting of being treated differently because of his color. Mendez got involved with gangs in his teenage years, but was drawn out of it after hearing Fred Shuttlesworth (a veteran civil rights activist and founding member of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights) speak. Mendez got further inspired by hearing Dr. Martin Luther King preach, and he became an activist and committed Christian from that point on. At the age of 16 Mendez spoke at a worldwide gathering of Baptist youth in Bern, Switzerland. A number of colleges accepted him, but he chose to attend Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. This was a propitious decision, as Shaw University was the birthplace of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.) At Shaw Mendez was a student leader and read deeply about philosophy, Black Nationalism, Marxism and imperialism. Mendez did his religious studies at a number of institutions including the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, Wake Forest University and Shaw University. Reverend Mendez began his lifelong career as a minister in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was the Senior Pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church for 36 years, and became a prophetic minister preaching to the whole person, spiritually, mentally and physically. Mendez's many contributions to social justice include over 30 years with the Apache Stronghold group, the NAACP, and the Moral Monday demonstrations led by Reverend Barber. (Please see the interview with Reverend Willard Bass concerning the Moral Monday Movement.) The Moral Monday demonstrations resulted in the arrests of Mendez (and almost a 1,000 others) for civil disobedience, and became the basis for the Poor Peoples' Campaign that is a national movement. Mendez has been a leader in the fight to stop voter suppression in North Carolina, an on-going struggle with a number of court victories on the side of justice. He is a part of the Racial Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches. In 2003 Reverend Mendez became a leader in the 19-year fight for the exoneration of Darryl Hunt, an African-American man wrongfully convicted for a rape-murder in Winston-Salem. Reverend Mendez speaks in his interview of his realization that there's only one spirit and that one spirit unites all religions together. Mendez is also a licensed psychotherapist who seeks to decolonize the minds of people of color from the brainwashing of white supremacist culture. He was a founding member of the Howard Thurman Counseling Program. Retiring as a minister in 2019, Reverend Mendez shows no sign of stopping; he is a lifelong activist whose work and ministry truly speak to a total commitment for human justice. We are inspired by his courage and deep faith.
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Oral history interview with Virginia Newell
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Virginia Newell was born on October 17, 1917 in Davie County, North Carolina in a family of nine. Her father was a successful builder, and one of the few Blacks (because an ancestor was white) in the county allowed to vote. Ms. Newell's parents believed strongly in education and in working hard. Early on in her life, Virginia proved adept at math, helping her father do measurements for the homes he built. In the fifth grade Ms. Newell won the math prize, leading to a lifelong career in math, where she ultimately became a teacher. Virginia's family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina where she graduated from high school. Ms. Newell earned her Bachelor's, Master's and PhD degrees and went on to have a teaching career that spanned more than 50 years. She taught at the high school and college levels. While teaching at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in the early 60s, Ms. Newell gave a speech that led to a student-led fight to integrate restaurants and other businesses in the city. This successful fight led Ms. Newell to a lifetime of civil rights activism. Married in 1943, she and her family moved back to Winston-Salem in 1977. That year she became the first African-American Alderman, serving in that position for 16 years, and helping to change the city. She led the successful effort to create the first African-American shopping center in the city, and was a founder of the YMCA's Best Choice Center. She was also instrumental in bringing the first African-American bank to Winston-Salem. Ms. Newell continued her teaching career at Winston-Salem State University, helping to create the Department of Math and Computer Science. She brought the first computers to WSSU. She is now 101 and a half years old and continues a lifetime of activism and achievement.
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Oral history interview with Charles Person
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Charles Person was born in Atlanta, GA in 1942, and grew up in a section of the city called "Buttermilk Bottom." It was an insular community, with marginalized people (Jews, Greeks, Chinese) constituting a vital part of it. Mr. Person was an excellent student, despite the hand-me-down books from the white schools. While still in high school Charles became a member of the NAACP Youth Council, and continued his activism when accepted at Morehouse College in Atlanta. The Morehouse students (no doubt inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins) mobilized to integrate stores and restaurants. Mr. Person, along with hundreds of others, was arrested and spent five days in solitary confinement for singing civil rights songs too loudly. The student campaign was ultimately successful and demonstrated that non-violent agitation could not be stopped. Hearing of CORE's drive to integrate the interstate bus system, Person went to Washington, D.C. for training in non-violence. The freedom riders encountered their first serious violence in Rock Hill, SC, then in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, where people were beaten almost to death by law enforcement officers and members of the KKK. The noble stand they took required enormous amounts of courage and a deep sense of faith. One of the four freedom riders still alive today, Mr. Person maintains a powerful and dedicated belief in non-violence. He has been an activist his whole life, educating generations about what he and others did and how they succeeded.
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Oral history interview with Lewis Pitts
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Lewis Pitts was born in 1947 in Clinton, SC. Both of Lewis's parents were college educated, and his mother worked as a school teacher. His father had a small business selling meat. They abhorred the KKK, but accepted the realities of "separate but equal" as it was relentlessly practiced in the Jim Crow South. Accepted into the law school at the University of South Carolina, Pitts sought to utilize the practice of law as a way of promoting social good. He clerked at the public defender's office and began to get involved in the civil rights movement. In 1976 Pitts and a fellow progressive lawyer named Bob Warren came up with a bold plan. Together they did a revolutionary thing—they opened a practice for poor African-Americans and whites in Allendale, SC. They did the work practically pro-bono, and began winning some cases that changed the law, challenging the establishment on a number of fronts. Moving to Greensboro, NC in 1980, Pitts became involved with the victims of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, and in 1985 won the groundbreaking civil case that found police, KKK and Nazis responsible for the death of one of the five murdered that day. For that fight Pitts worked with the legendary attorney Flint Taylor (also an interviewee in this archive.) In the years that followed Pitts joined Legal Aid of NC, and worked tirelessly in the areas of mental health reform and the rights of children. Lewis Pitts has dedicated his life to the civil rights movement and to human justice. He is a tireless fighter who at age 72 still breathes the fire of commitment, based on a deep faith that justice can prevail, no matter the odds.
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Oral history interview with Buford Posey
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In 1925, Buford Posey was born to well-to-do parents in Philadelphia, MS. A voracious reader as a child, Posey developed a political consciousness early and stood out from his more conservative friends and family members. In addition to speaking out against the racism and mistreatment of Black soldiers during his time in the U.S. Army, Posey, in 1946, became the first white person in Mississippi to join the NAACP. Having graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a degree in History, Posey later served in several U.S. government agencies and worked as an Ambassador at the United Nations. An avid civil rights activist, Posey was a regular at Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, which trained activists in the arts of political organizing and nonviolent direct action. He also worked alongside Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and several other prominent activists of the era. Posey was one of the few white people who dared to submit a letter of recommendation on behalf of Clyde Kennard, who died as a result of being sent to prison for attempting to desegregate the University of Southern Mississippi. Posey also became the target of violent attacks after he informed the FBI that he knew that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and other law enforcement officers had worked with the Klan to murder civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The three became targets of the Klan after seeking to register Blacks to vote during Mississippi's 1964 Freedom Summer. State trials and history proved Posey's information correct and he remained a pariah among many conservatives in the state. At age 90, Posey died at his home in Hattiesburg in 2015.
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Oral history interview with Mark Rabil
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Born on June 28, 1955, Mark Rabil grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He attended Davidson College and upon graduation made the key decision to become a lawyer. In 1980 Mark graduated from University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill; he subsequently joined a law firm in Winston-Salem. In 1984, when he was just 29 years old, Mark was assigned to the Darryl Hunt case, which became known nationally as a shocking example of prosecutorial racism. In that year, Hunt was accused and found guilty of the gruesome rape-murder of Deborah Sykes, a white journalist. The case against him was built on testimony from dubious “eyewitnesses,” including a former member of the Ku Klux Klan; there was no physical evidence. The case shocked the city of Winston-Salem and divided the Black and White communities down the middle. It became Mark’s life’s work for the next 20 years, during which Hunt became one of his closest friends. From the very beginning Darryl Hunt was determined to fight the charge. Insisting he was innocent, he turned down plea deals that would have gotten him his freedom much earlier. Mark spent the next 19 years representing Hunt, investing thousands of hours of grueling work on multiple depositions, appeals, and trials. Despite clear evidence of Hunt’s innocence, multiple trials led to repeated guilty verdicts by all-White juries. For example, in 1994 DNA testing excluded Hunt as the source of the semen in the rape of Deborah Sykes, but a judge ruled the evidence insufficient for a new trial. Ultimately, the only way to win was to solve the case. Working with Richard McGough, a tireless private investigator, the team was able to match DNA evidence to the man responsible for the crime, and Hunt was cleared and released from prison in 2003. The decades in prison took their toll, however; tragically, Hunt was found dead in his vehicle in 2016. (Note: please see interview with Richard McGough in the Archive.) For his work defending Darryl Hunt, Rabil was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award, among many honors. His commitment to racial and social justice led directly to the establishment of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which has reviewed over 3,000 cases and secured exoneration for fifteen people. An important part of Rabil’s work is training future lawyers to recognize and fight racial injustice in the law. He has been the director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at Wake Forest University School of Law since 2009 and has been a clinical professor there since 2013; he also teaches Trial Advocacy, Criminal Procedure, and Contemplative Practices.
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Oral history interview with Linda Sutton
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Linda Sutton was born on March 17, 1950 in Winston-Salem, NC. Attending segregated schools, she graduated from Atkins High School in 1968. Raised in a church-going and closely knit family, she early on recognized the importance of the Civil Rights Movement, and became an ardent activist in the Winston-Salem area. This has continued for her whole adult life. After graduation she became a customer service representative at BellSouth, and quickly became a member of the Communications Workers of America local in Winston-Salem. Rising up in the union, she held a panoply of positions with the local and beyond, and was active in the state and national AFL-CIO. She believes deeply in the power and sense of shared community she has found in the Labor Movement. She has seen how organized workers can win better conditions, even in the South. Her work as a union activist has intersected organically with her years in the Civil Rights Movement. She has worked tirelessly in the many struggles around North Carolina and beyond. In the last 10 years she was highly active in the. Moral Movement Movement led by Reverend Barber, and is now an Organizer for Democracy North Carolina. (Note: Regarding the Moral Monday Movement please see the interviews with Reverend Bass and Reverend Mendez.) Ms. Sutton has had a truly amazing range of civic activities in tandem with her heavy involvement with the Civil Rights and Labor movements. She has done extensive work in the area of Voter Registration, which has been her key area of focus for the last decade. She regards voting as the penultimate battlefield for the Human Rights movement in the U.S. Despite her formidable optimism, she is worried about our country and deeply troubled by the resurgent racism. Deeply concerned with the fascist attacks on democracy now rampant in the U.S., she relies on a deep sense of faith held since infancy as a member of the Goler Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church.
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Oral history interview with Flint Taylor
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Flint Taylor was born and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of a college professor. Following his undergraduate education at a Providence, Rhode Island Ivy League college, Taylor was accepted at Northwestern University's Law School. He arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1968, a week after the Democratic Convention and the notorious police riots that convulsed the nation. While in law school Taylor became a political progressive, and got involved with the campaigns to defend members of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the SDS from various charges. Upon graduation from law school Taylor and associates founded the Peoples' Law Firm, taking on multiple cases that no one else would touch. Following the murder of Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther Party by officers of the Chicago PD, Taylor waged a 13-year legal fight, uncovering evidence of the FBI's collusion in what was an assassination-not a "shootout" but a "shootin". Taylor's next big-scale case was a civil suit launched in 1985 concerning the November 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which five civil rights/labor activists were murdered by members of the KKK and Nazis. Working with Greensboro attorney Lewis Pitts, Taylor was successful in this landmark case, winning an historic victory for the relatives of the victims. During this trial Taylor's life (and that of Pitts) was repeatedly threatened. During the late 1980s Taylor undertook a 30 year campaign to uncover and stop the systemic torture of African-American men by officers of the Chicago Police Department, who forced confessions of over 150 men. This legal battle led to prison sentences and millions of dollars in reparations for the victims. Over his 50 year career Mr. Taylor has unflinchingly stood for justice, twice arguing cases in the U.S. Supreme Court-both successfully! As he puts it, "you gain strength from the people you represent". He is not done yet, and is truly an Unsung Hero.
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