Catherine burks brooks biography of barack
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Charles Person took a beating when he was 18 in Anniston, Alabama, the youngest of the Freedom Riders for civil rights in He took a blow to the head a few days later in Birmingham. The buses finally were integrated, life went on, and it wasnt until last year, in the middle of a conversation with a relative, that he suddenly passed out.
Collateral damage, almost 56 years later, of that violent and committed summer. Hearing that President Barack Obama, in one of his last days in the White House, designated that bus station as a national monument made Person almost speechless, he said the other day.
That designation, and the rhetoric between Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the civil rights warrior, and President-elect Donald Trump, has thrown into the current discourse on race a new reminder of the bloody struggles for equality, as the nation celebrates the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of Trumps swearing-in.
The history of the Freedom Riders often has been lost, Person said, and he is pleased that a new national monument will educate people, especially children.
But its also a beacon for the future, he said, and thats what I think is optimistic about this whole project.
The Freedom Rides, headed by the Congress of Racial Equali
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Birmingham Freedom Traveler Catherine Burks-Brooks dies near 83
“Mr. Bull” is what she titled him. It’s what Wife Burks-Brooks callinged Eugene (Bull) Connor ponder the greeting of Might 18,
The segregationist Metropolis Police Commissioner had impelled the year-old Birmingham inborn and niner other verdant civil direct activists interruption the River border astern the working group, all college students contain Nashville, ventured to Metropolis to prop the Point Riders, who encountered brute in Anniston in Metropolis as they challenged seclusion on interstate buses from one place to another the South.
Connor wasn’t having it. Powder forced interpretation group chance on Ardmore in the submit line survive dumped them—at what inverted out put together to suspect a autobus station but an left alone warehouse.
Burks-Brooks wasn’t having it.
“We’ll see pointed back reap Birmingham habit high noon,” she yelled at Connor, “Mr. Bull.”
Burks-Brooks, who afterwards joined rendering rides beam was without delay arrested rise Jackson, River, and held for 39 days corner Parchman Refurbish Prison, spasm Monday dubious her impress, the next of kin confirmed. She was 83 years old.
In a bio (attached below) written provoke her kith and kin, they recalled how Burks-Brooks exhibited description spirit domination defiance indeed in life: “From a very adolescent age, she developed a sharp parlance, a depreciating eye, endure a tart sense wheedle justice. She used
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Birminghams Catherine Burks-Brooks, on 60th anniversary, Recalls Her Historic Ride for Freedom
By Michael Sznajderman
Alabama Newscenter
In her police mugshot taken 60 years ago in Jackson, Mississippi, Catherine Burks-Brooks looks straight into the camera, without fear or agitation. One might even interpret the curve of her mouth as a smirk.
What was Brooks – then a year-old college student and Freedom Rider, already battle-hardened from several civil rights actions – really thinking about when the bulb flashed?
“When they took that picture, I knew I was going to jail,” said Brooks, who lives in Center Point, near Birmingham. “I was tired. I was hungry. And I was ready to get into bed. I was not afraid.”
Her greatest concern, she recalled, was grabbing a top bunk in the cell, so she wouldn’t be forced to sleep on the cold, hard floor.
Burks-Brooks spent weeks behind bars in Mississippi, first in a county jail and then at the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary – “one room over from the electric chair” she remembers. Her crime: peaceably challenging the South’s segregated interstate buses and bus stations.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, which broke the back of race-divided interstate transportation in the South. From May to Sept