Speakers and Guests Bios
|
Devery Anderson
Devery Anderson first became acquainted with Emmett Till in the fall of 1994, as a student at the University of Utah, after watching the first segment of the PBS documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement, Eyes on the Prize, narrated by Julian Bond. Emmett’s murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killers left Anderson full of questions.
Anderson began researching the case by becoming familiar with Stephen Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till and Clenora Hudson-Weems’ Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement. Both were written at a time when research, writing and interest in the Till case was in its infancy, and Anderson eventually discovered that they contained many factual errors, but they did whet his appetite for more.
While taking a class on racism at the University of Utah, Anderson completed a scrapbook on the Emmett Till case, which included an original interview with Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother. From this class project, Anderson developed a relationship with Mamie that lasted for over six years, until her death in January 2003. Anderson compares the feeling of losing Mamie to that of losing a family member.
In the summer 2008 issue of The Southern Quarterly, Anderson published the article, "A Wallet, A White Woman, and a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till's Encounter in Money, Mississippi." Since 2004, Anderson has been working on a book about the Emmett Till case. It is tentatively titled, The Boy Who Never Died: The Saga of the Emmett Till Murder, and will be based on hundreds of hours of archival research, sifting through dozens of newspapers, as well as interviews with those who witnessed the case unfold, including Emmett Till’s family members who were with him in Mississippi. It will bring the case up to the present.
In addition to his work on the Emmett Till case, Anderson is a writer and researcher in other areas of American social and religious history. He has published several articles and is the co-editor of three books on Mormon history that were released in August 2005, which together won the award for Best Documentary at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association in Casper, Wyoming in May 2006 . Anderson is also the editor of a third volume, The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History, which was published in March 2011.
Leroy Clemons
Leroy Clemons is the President and co-founder of the Philadelphia Coalition, a multi-racial task force formed in 2004. The Coalition was charged with planning the public commemoration and memorial to the three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were slain in Neshoba County in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their push for justice in the forty-year-old murder case led to the first state conviction as well as the passage of Senate Bill 2718. This act directed the Mississippi State Board of Education to make civil rights education a mandatory part of the K-12 curriculum in every public school in Mississippi beginning in the fall of 2010.
Clemons is the Executive Director of the Neshoba Youth Coalition. The Youth Coalition is a youth leadership program for Neshoba County 8th – 12th grade students, designed to develop critical thinkers and collaborative leaders. Members participate in a Youth Roundtable dialogue to exchange information, share personal stories and experiences, express perspectives and develop solutions to community youth concerns.
Clemons presently serves as Vice President of the advisory board of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. He is a facilitation team leader for the Mississippi Welcome Table initiative. The Welcome Table is a model that was developed around the racial reconciliation process used by the Philadelphia Coalition in 2004. This model focuses on "the work before the work," the need for a community seeking sustainable change to understand the importance of listening, storytelling and relationship-building as a prerequisite to producing real and measurable change.
Clemons is the Director of Community Relations at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation.
MacArthur Cotton
MacArthur Cotton grew up in Mississippi during the 1950s, when life for black Mississippians was not much different than it had been during the time of slavery. Cotton has a vivid recollection of the Jim Crow years, during which he was a Mississippi Freedom Summer activist. Among the many stories he shares, is that of his grandfather, who, Cotton says, was fatally beaten by whites for teaching other blacks to read. Cotton will share his stories with the Civil Rights South Seminar participants of him in his native state of Mississippi.
Myrlie Evers-Williams
Myrlie Evers-Williams is a civil rights activist who worked tirelessly to seek justice for the 1963 murder of her well-known civil rights activist husband, Medgar Evers.
In 1950, Myrlie enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, one of the only colleges in the state that accepted African American students. Myrlie met and fell in love with Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran several years her senior. The couple married on Christmas Eve of 1951. They moved to Mound Bayou, an all-black town in Mississippi’s Delta, and had three children; Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise and James Van Dyke.
When Medgar became the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, Myrlie worked alongside him. Together, they organized voter registration drives and civil rights demonstrations. For more than a decade they fought for voting rights, equal access to public accommodations, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi and for equal rights for Mississippi's African American population. As prominent civil rights leaders in Mississippi, they became high-profile targets for pro-segregationist violence and terrorism. In 1962, their home in Jackson was firebombed in reaction to an organized boycott of downtown Jackson’s white merchants.
The violence reached its peak the following year, when Medgar was gunned down by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, in front of his home on the evening of June 12, 1963. After her husband's murder, Myrlie fought tirelessly to see his killer brought to justice. It took approximately 30 years for justice to be served; Myrlie kept the case alive and pushed for Byron De La Beckwith to pay for his crime, which he did on February 4, 1994.
Emerging as a civil rights activist in her own right, she spoke widely on behalf of the NAACP and co-wrote For Us, the Living, which chronicled her late husband's life and work. She also made two unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Congress in 1970. From 1973 to 1975, Myrlie was the Vice President for advertising and publicity at the New York based firm, Seligman and Lapz. In 1975, she moved to Los Angeles to become the National Director for community affairs at the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). In 1976, she married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and civil rights and union activist who had studied Medgar Evers and his work.
In 1987, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to the Board of Public Works. Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first black woman to serve as a commissioner on the board, a position she held for 8 years. Evers-Williams became a chairperson on the board of the NAACP in 1995, just after her second husband’s death due to prostate cancer. She worked to restore the tarnished image of the organization and helped to improve its financial status, raising enough funds to eliminate its debt.
After leaving her post as chairperson of the NAACP, Evers-Williams established the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. Her autobiography, Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be, was published in 1999. Myrlie Evers-Williams has continued to preserve the memory of her first husband with one of her latest projects. She served as editor on The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (2005).
Whoopi Goldberg played her in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996).
Reverend Robert and Jeannie Graetz
Robert S. Graetz is a Lutheran clergyman who, as the white pastor of a black congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, openly supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark event of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Graetz' first full-time job as a pastor was to a black congregation at Trinity Lutheran Church in Montgomery. He began working there in 1955, the year of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A personal friend of Rosa Parks, Graetz became secretary of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization founded to organize and support the boycott. Graetz' support of the movement included appearing at meetings led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
For his support of the boycott, Graetz and his family were ostracized by other whites and suffered several episodes of harassment, including tire slashings, arrest and bombings. Bombs were planted at his home on three occasions; the largest did not explode.
Graetz wrote A White Preacher's Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott about his experiences. The book, They Walked to Freedom 1955-1956: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by Kenneth M. Hare contains a first person account of his experiences.
Graetz was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia and educated in Columbus, Ohio. In 1950, he graduated from Capital University in Bexley, Ohio and received a B.D. in 1955 from Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. He married Jean Ellis (known as Jeannie) on June 10, 1951.
In 2008, the Graetzes returned to Montgomery, Alabama where they are actively involved in various civic activities including the diversity group One Montgomery and the League of Women Voters. Each year they host the annual Graetz Symposium at the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture at Alabama State University.
Mary E. Howell
Mary E. Howell is a civil rights attorney and graduate of Tulane University Law School who has been in private practice in New Orleans, Louisiana since 1977. She has handled numerous cases involving police misconduct, prisoners’ rights and New Orleans street musicians. Additionally, she has represented victims of hate crimes as well as whistleblowers who have exposed governmental corruption and wrongdoing.
She has been involved for many years in various efforts to reform the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). Among other current cases, Howell represents the Madison family, victims from the notorious 2005 post-Katrina Danziger Bridge incident. To date, five former NOPD officers have pled guilty to federal crimes involving failure to report and cover-up. Another six officers were convicted of crimes related to this 2005 incident.
In recognition of her work to protect and enforce civil rights, Howell has received a number of awards from various civil rights and civil liberties organizations. She is the 2010 recipient of the National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman Award. She has also received the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana, Ben Smith Award. She is the former chair of the Civil Rights Section of the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association and a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
G. Douglas Jones
Doug Jones represents individual, institutional and corporate clients in complex civil and criminal litigation, with particular concentrations in class actions, securities litigation, white-collar criminal defense, False Claims Act and whistleblower litigation, environmental litigation and employment discrimination matters. Mr. Jones served as United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 until 2001, and joined Haskell Slaughter in 2008, after practicing for several years with a Birmingham litigation specialty firm.
As United States Attorney, Mr. Jones personally led the team of prosecutors and investigators in the re-opened case of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Mr. Jones served as lead trial attorney in the successful prosecutions of two former Ku Klux Klansmen for the murder of four young girls killed in the bombing. He also coordinated the federal and state task force that led to the indictment of notorious fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph who ultimately pled guilty to four terrorist bombings and is currently serving a life sentence.
Mr. Jones began his legal career as Staff Counsel to U.S. Senator Howell T. Heflin on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He then served for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney before establishing his private law practice. Since returning to private practice, Mr. Jones has represented individual and corporate defendants and targets in high-profile white-collar litigation in both federal and state courts. He has represented both individual plaintiffs and plaintiff classes in complex securities and annuities litigation, as well as in other complex litigation and investigation matters.
Active in numerous professional associations, he has been recognized in Alabama Super Lawyers each year since 2008 and is listed in The Best Lawyers in America in Commercial Litigation, Bet-the-Company Litigation and Criminal Defense: White Collar. In recognition of his work in the area of civil rights, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute recently awarded Mr. Jones with the 15th Anniversary Civil Rights Distinguished Service Award.
He is an alumnus of Leadership Birmingham and in 2009 was named by the Alabama Supreme Court to the Advisory Committee on the Alabama Rules of Evidence. Mr. Jones is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Former U. S. Attorneys.
Jerry Mitchell
He has been called "a loose cannon," "a pain in the ass" and a "white traitor." Whatever he’s been called, Jerry Mitchell has never given up his quest to bring unpunished killers to justice, prompting one colleague to call him "the South’s Simon Wiesenthal." Since 1989, the 50-year-old investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses and quietly pursued evidence in the nation’s most notorious killings from the civil rights era.
His work has helped put four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader, Medgar Evers; Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, for ordering the fatal 1966 firebombing of NAACP leader, Vernon Dahmer; Bobby Cherry, for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls; and Edgar Ray Killen, for helping organize the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
Over the past two decades, Mitchell has endured his share of threats from Klansmen and others. The FBI is currently investigating a series of death threats against him. He recently received the Ralph McGill Medal for Courage for his work over the past two decades.
Mitchell has received more than 30 national awards, including the George Polk Award twice. In 2006, the Pulitzer Board named him a Pulitzer Prize finalist, praising him "for his relentless and masterly stories on the successful prosecution of a man accused of orchestrating the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964."
Camille Morgan
Camille Morgan, an Alabama native, met her husband, Chuck, when both were students at the University of Alabama. The Morgans settled in Birmingham, Alabama. Camille was raising their young son, Charles, and Chuck was practicing law when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed. That event and its aftermath would force them to leave Alabama permanently.
They eventually moved to Washington, D.C., where Camille served as Chuck’s secretary when he was head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Legislative Office and when he was in private practice. In a career full of significant cases, Mr. Morgan's most important might have been the "one-man, one-vote" ruling he won in 1964 from the Supreme Court. The case, Reynolds v. Sims, forced the Alabama legislature to create districts that were equal in population, giving black voters a better chance to elect candidates. He also forced Alabama to integrate its prisons, successfully challenged the southern practice of barring women and blacks from jury duty and represented Julian Bond when the Georgia General Assembly tried to prevent the newly elected legislator from taking his seat after he spoke out against the Vietnam War. Camille now lives in Destin, Florida.
Wendell Pierce
Wendell Pierce is an American actor, best known for his work in HBO dramas, including his portrayal of Detective Bunk Moreland in The Wire and trombonist Antoine Batiste in Treme.
Pierce was born in 1963 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he attended Benjamin Franklin High School. He then attended the Juilliard School's Drama Division where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1985.
Pierce starred in all five seasons of the HBO drama The Wire as Detective Bunk Moreland. He was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for the role in 2007.
Pierce also played a crooked policeman on Third Watch named Conrad "Candyman" Jones. Outside of shooting The Wire, Pierce managed to pick up a recurring role as an FBI clinical psychologist in Numb3rs. An interview with him is featured in Spike Lee's 2006 HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, regarding the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His latest role is in HBO's Treme, created by David Simon, creator of The Wire. Pierce plays Antoine Batiste, a trombone player, for which he took lessons in trombone.
Pierce appeared in Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, and Forrest Whitaker's Waiting to Exhale a year earlier. Pierce played Estragon in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' a post Hurricane Katrina production done under the radar in various locations as part of a larger project which also consisted of a fund to help local rebuilding and reorganizing efforts, and a series of dinners, lectures, classes, and events that unfolded throughout the city during the fall of 2007. The project was entitled Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.
Pierce is the host of the Peabody Award-winning radio program, Jazz at Lincoln Center, which features live recordings from Jazz at Lincoln Center's House of Swing.
In response to a lack of access to quality fresh food in many post-Katrina New Orleans' neighborhoods, Wendell Pierce along with 2 partners started a chain of grocery stores named Sterling Farms in 2012. The stores will be located in lower income neighborhoods that were underserved both prior to and after Katrina.
Dr. Lawrence Powell
Lawrence N. Powell teaches southern history, race relations and Holocaust studies at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1976. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has published books and articles on Reconstruction history and Louisiana politics.
Dr. Powell was vice-chair of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which he helped found, and a board member of the Amistad Research Center. He was the chairman of the Amistad Center's 1989 National Civil Rights Conference, "A Continuing American Dilemma" and of the 1996 Plessy Centennial Conference, "When the Future Was the Past." Dr. Powell has been an expert witness in several federal voting rights cases in Louisiana.
In 1998, he received the "George Washington Lucas Community Service Award" from the New Orleans branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A year later, he was named "Louisiana Humanist of the Year" by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. At present, he is the executive committee chairperson of the Southern Institute for Education and Research. He is also the executive director of the Tulane-Xavier National Center for the Urban Community, whose mission is to improve the living conditions and life chances of public housing residents in New Orleans. It also administers the city’s major competitive Welfare-to-Work grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Devery Anderson first became acquainted with Emmett Till in the fall of 1994, as a student at the University of Utah, after watching the first segment of the PBS documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement, Eyes on the Prize, narrated by Julian Bond. Emmett’s murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killers left Anderson full of questions.
Anderson began researching the case by becoming familiar with Stephen Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till and Clenora Hudson-Weems’ Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement. Both were written at a time when research, writing and interest in the Till case was in its infancy, and Anderson eventually discovered that they contained many factual errors, but they did whet his appetite for more.
While taking a class on racism at the University of Utah, Anderson completed a scrapbook on the Emmett Till case, which included an original interview with Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother. From this class project, Anderson developed a relationship with Mamie that lasted for over six years, until her death in January 2003. Anderson compares the feeling of losing Mamie to that of losing a family member.
In the summer 2008 issue of The Southern Quarterly, Anderson published the article, "A Wallet, A White Woman, and a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till's Encounter in Money, Mississippi." Since 2004, Anderson has been working on a book about the Emmett Till case. It is tentatively titled, The Boy Who Never Died: The Saga of the Emmett Till Murder, and will be based on hundreds of hours of archival research, sifting through dozens of newspapers, as well as interviews with those who witnessed the case unfold, including Emmett Till’s family members who were with him in Mississippi. It will bring the case up to the present.
In addition to his work on the Emmett Till case, Anderson is a writer and researcher in other areas of American social and religious history. He has published several articles and is the co-editor of three books on Mormon history that were released in August 2005, which together won the award for Best Documentary at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association in Casper, Wyoming in May 2006 . Anderson is also the editor of a third volume, The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History, which was published in March 2011.
Leroy Clemons
Leroy Clemons is the President and co-founder of the Philadelphia Coalition, a multi-racial task force formed in 2004. The Coalition was charged with planning the public commemoration and memorial to the three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were slain in Neshoba County in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their push for justice in the forty-year-old murder case led to the first state conviction as well as the passage of Senate Bill 2718. This act directed the Mississippi State Board of Education to make civil rights education a mandatory part of the K-12 curriculum in every public school in Mississippi beginning in the fall of 2010.
Clemons is the Executive Director of the Neshoba Youth Coalition. The Youth Coalition is a youth leadership program for Neshoba County 8th – 12th grade students, designed to develop critical thinkers and collaborative leaders. Members participate in a Youth Roundtable dialogue to exchange information, share personal stories and experiences, express perspectives and develop solutions to community youth concerns.
Clemons presently serves as Vice President of the advisory board of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. He is a facilitation team leader for the Mississippi Welcome Table initiative. The Welcome Table is a model that was developed around the racial reconciliation process used by the Philadelphia Coalition in 2004. This model focuses on "the work before the work," the need for a community seeking sustainable change to understand the importance of listening, storytelling and relationship-building as a prerequisite to producing real and measurable change.
Clemons is the Director of Community Relations at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation.
MacArthur Cotton
MacArthur Cotton grew up in Mississippi during the 1950s, when life for black Mississippians was not much different than it had been during the time of slavery. Cotton has a vivid recollection of the Jim Crow years, during which he was a Mississippi Freedom Summer activist. Among the many stories he shares, is that of his grandfather, who, Cotton says, was fatally beaten by whites for teaching other blacks to read. Cotton will share his stories with the Civil Rights South Seminar participants of him in his native state of Mississippi.
Myrlie Evers-Williams
Myrlie Evers-Williams is a civil rights activist who worked tirelessly to seek justice for the 1963 murder of her well-known civil rights activist husband, Medgar Evers.
In 1950, Myrlie enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, one of the only colleges in the state that accepted African American students. Myrlie met and fell in love with Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran several years her senior. The couple married on Christmas Eve of 1951. They moved to Mound Bayou, an all-black town in Mississippi’s Delta, and had three children; Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise and James Van Dyke.
When Medgar became the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, Myrlie worked alongside him. Together, they organized voter registration drives and civil rights demonstrations. For more than a decade they fought for voting rights, equal access to public accommodations, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi and for equal rights for Mississippi's African American population. As prominent civil rights leaders in Mississippi, they became high-profile targets for pro-segregationist violence and terrorism. In 1962, their home in Jackson was firebombed in reaction to an organized boycott of downtown Jackson’s white merchants.
The violence reached its peak the following year, when Medgar was gunned down by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, in front of his home on the evening of June 12, 1963. After her husband's murder, Myrlie fought tirelessly to see his killer brought to justice. It took approximately 30 years for justice to be served; Myrlie kept the case alive and pushed for Byron De La Beckwith to pay for his crime, which he did on February 4, 1994.
Emerging as a civil rights activist in her own right, she spoke widely on behalf of the NAACP and co-wrote For Us, the Living, which chronicled her late husband's life and work. She also made two unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Congress in 1970. From 1973 to 1975, Myrlie was the Vice President for advertising and publicity at the New York based firm, Seligman and Lapz. In 1975, she moved to Los Angeles to become the National Director for community affairs at the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). In 1976, she married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and civil rights and union activist who had studied Medgar Evers and his work.
In 1987, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to the Board of Public Works. Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first black woman to serve as a commissioner on the board, a position she held for 8 years. Evers-Williams became a chairperson on the board of the NAACP in 1995, just after her second husband’s death due to prostate cancer. She worked to restore the tarnished image of the organization and helped to improve its financial status, raising enough funds to eliminate its debt.
After leaving her post as chairperson of the NAACP, Evers-Williams established the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. Her autobiography, Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be, was published in 1999. Myrlie Evers-Williams has continued to preserve the memory of her first husband with one of her latest projects. She served as editor on The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (2005).
Whoopi Goldberg played her in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996).
Reverend Robert and Jeannie Graetz
Robert S. Graetz is a Lutheran clergyman who, as the white pastor of a black congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, openly supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark event of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Graetz' first full-time job as a pastor was to a black congregation at Trinity Lutheran Church in Montgomery. He began working there in 1955, the year of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A personal friend of Rosa Parks, Graetz became secretary of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization founded to organize and support the boycott. Graetz' support of the movement included appearing at meetings led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
For his support of the boycott, Graetz and his family were ostracized by other whites and suffered several episodes of harassment, including tire slashings, arrest and bombings. Bombs were planted at his home on three occasions; the largest did not explode.
Graetz wrote A White Preacher's Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott about his experiences. The book, They Walked to Freedom 1955-1956: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by Kenneth M. Hare contains a first person account of his experiences.
Graetz was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia and educated in Columbus, Ohio. In 1950, he graduated from Capital University in Bexley, Ohio and received a B.D. in 1955 from Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. He married Jean Ellis (known as Jeannie) on June 10, 1951.
In 2008, the Graetzes returned to Montgomery, Alabama where they are actively involved in various civic activities including the diversity group One Montgomery and the League of Women Voters. Each year they host the annual Graetz Symposium at the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture at Alabama State University.
Mary E. Howell
Mary E. Howell is a civil rights attorney and graduate of Tulane University Law School who has been in private practice in New Orleans, Louisiana since 1977. She has handled numerous cases involving police misconduct, prisoners’ rights and New Orleans street musicians. Additionally, she has represented victims of hate crimes as well as whistleblowers who have exposed governmental corruption and wrongdoing.
She has been involved for many years in various efforts to reform the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). Among other current cases, Howell represents the Madison family, victims from the notorious 2005 post-Katrina Danziger Bridge incident. To date, five former NOPD officers have pled guilty to federal crimes involving failure to report and cover-up. Another six officers were convicted of crimes related to this 2005 incident.
In recognition of her work to protect and enforce civil rights, Howell has received a number of awards from various civil rights and civil liberties organizations. She is the 2010 recipient of the National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman Award. She has also received the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana, Ben Smith Award. She is the former chair of the Civil Rights Section of the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association and a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
G. Douglas Jones
Doug Jones represents individual, institutional and corporate clients in complex civil and criminal litigation, with particular concentrations in class actions, securities litigation, white-collar criminal defense, False Claims Act and whistleblower litigation, environmental litigation and employment discrimination matters. Mr. Jones served as United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 until 2001, and joined Haskell Slaughter in 2008, after practicing for several years with a Birmingham litigation specialty firm.
As United States Attorney, Mr. Jones personally led the team of prosecutors and investigators in the re-opened case of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Mr. Jones served as lead trial attorney in the successful prosecutions of two former Ku Klux Klansmen for the murder of four young girls killed in the bombing. He also coordinated the federal and state task force that led to the indictment of notorious fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph who ultimately pled guilty to four terrorist bombings and is currently serving a life sentence.
Mr. Jones began his legal career as Staff Counsel to U.S. Senator Howell T. Heflin on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He then served for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney before establishing his private law practice. Since returning to private practice, Mr. Jones has represented individual and corporate defendants and targets in high-profile white-collar litigation in both federal and state courts. He has represented both individual plaintiffs and plaintiff classes in complex securities and annuities litigation, as well as in other complex litigation and investigation matters.
Active in numerous professional associations, he has been recognized in Alabama Super Lawyers each year since 2008 and is listed in The Best Lawyers in America in Commercial Litigation, Bet-the-Company Litigation and Criminal Defense: White Collar. In recognition of his work in the area of civil rights, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute recently awarded Mr. Jones with the 15th Anniversary Civil Rights Distinguished Service Award.
He is an alumnus of Leadership Birmingham and in 2009 was named by the Alabama Supreme Court to the Advisory Committee on the Alabama Rules of Evidence. Mr. Jones is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Former U. S. Attorneys.
Jerry Mitchell
He has been called "a loose cannon," "a pain in the ass" and a "white traitor." Whatever he’s been called, Jerry Mitchell has never given up his quest to bring unpunished killers to justice, prompting one colleague to call him "the South’s Simon Wiesenthal." Since 1989, the 50-year-old investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses and quietly pursued evidence in the nation’s most notorious killings from the civil rights era.
His work has helped put four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader, Medgar Evers; Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, for ordering the fatal 1966 firebombing of NAACP leader, Vernon Dahmer; Bobby Cherry, for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls; and Edgar Ray Killen, for helping organize the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
Over the past two decades, Mitchell has endured his share of threats from Klansmen and others. The FBI is currently investigating a series of death threats against him. He recently received the Ralph McGill Medal for Courage for his work over the past two decades.
Mitchell has received more than 30 national awards, including the George Polk Award twice. In 2006, the Pulitzer Board named him a Pulitzer Prize finalist, praising him "for his relentless and masterly stories on the successful prosecution of a man accused of orchestrating the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964."
Camille Morgan
Camille Morgan, an Alabama native, met her husband, Chuck, when both were students at the University of Alabama. The Morgans settled in Birmingham, Alabama. Camille was raising their young son, Charles, and Chuck was practicing law when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed. That event and its aftermath would force them to leave Alabama permanently.
They eventually moved to Washington, D.C., where Camille served as Chuck’s secretary when he was head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Legislative Office and when he was in private practice. In a career full of significant cases, Mr. Morgan's most important might have been the "one-man, one-vote" ruling he won in 1964 from the Supreme Court. The case, Reynolds v. Sims, forced the Alabama legislature to create districts that were equal in population, giving black voters a better chance to elect candidates. He also forced Alabama to integrate its prisons, successfully challenged the southern practice of barring women and blacks from jury duty and represented Julian Bond when the Georgia General Assembly tried to prevent the newly elected legislator from taking his seat after he spoke out against the Vietnam War. Camille now lives in Destin, Florida.
Wendell Pierce
Wendell Pierce is an American actor, best known for his work in HBO dramas, including his portrayal of Detective Bunk Moreland in The Wire and trombonist Antoine Batiste in Treme.
Pierce was born in 1963 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he attended Benjamin Franklin High School. He then attended the Juilliard School's Drama Division where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1985.
Pierce starred in all five seasons of the HBO drama The Wire as Detective Bunk Moreland. He was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for the role in 2007.
Pierce also played a crooked policeman on Third Watch named Conrad "Candyman" Jones. Outside of shooting The Wire, Pierce managed to pick up a recurring role as an FBI clinical psychologist in Numb3rs. An interview with him is featured in Spike Lee's 2006 HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, regarding the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His latest role is in HBO's Treme, created by David Simon, creator of The Wire. Pierce plays Antoine Batiste, a trombone player, for which he took lessons in trombone.
Pierce appeared in Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, and Forrest Whitaker's Waiting to Exhale a year earlier. Pierce played Estragon in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' a post Hurricane Katrina production done under the radar in various locations as part of a larger project which also consisted of a fund to help local rebuilding and reorganizing efforts, and a series of dinners, lectures, classes, and events that unfolded throughout the city during the fall of 2007. The project was entitled Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.
Pierce is the host of the Peabody Award-winning radio program, Jazz at Lincoln Center, which features live recordings from Jazz at Lincoln Center's House of Swing.
In response to a lack of access to quality fresh food in many post-Katrina New Orleans' neighborhoods, Wendell Pierce along with 2 partners started a chain of grocery stores named Sterling Farms in 2012. The stores will be located in lower income neighborhoods that were underserved both prior to and after Katrina.
Dr. Lawrence Powell
Lawrence N. Powell teaches southern history, race relations and Holocaust studies at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1976. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has published books and articles on Reconstruction history and Louisiana politics.
Dr. Powell was vice-chair of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which he helped found, and a board member of the Amistad Research Center. He was the chairman of the Amistad Center's 1989 National Civil Rights Conference, "A Continuing American Dilemma" and of the 1996 Plessy Centennial Conference, "When the Future Was the Past." Dr. Powell has been an expert witness in several federal voting rights cases in Louisiana.
In 1998, he received the "George Washington Lucas Community Service Award" from the New Orleans branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A year later, he was named "Louisiana Humanist of the Year" by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. At present, he is the executive committee chairperson of the Southern Institute for Education and Research. He is also the executive director of the Tulane-Xavier National Center for the Urban Community, whose mission is to improve the living conditions and life chances of public housing residents in New Orleans. It also administers the city’s major competitive Welfare-to-Work grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Lecia Brooks
Lecia Brooks leads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) outreach efforts on key initiatives and social justice issues. As outreach director, she frequently gives presentations around the country to promote tolerance and diversity. She also serves as director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama, an interpretive center designed to provide visitors to the Civil Rights Memorial with a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement. She joined the SPLC staff in 2004 as director of Mix It Up at Lunch Day, a Teaching Tolerance program designed to help break down racial, cultural and social barriers in schools.
Previously, she worked for 12 years in a number of capacities for the National Conference for Community and Justice in its Los Angeles office. She is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University.
Richard Cohen
A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Virginia School of Law ‘79, Richard Cohen came to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 1986 as its legal director after practicing law in Washington, D.C., for seven years. Under his guidance, the SPLC won a series of landmark lawsuits against some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist organizations. He also successfully litigated a wide variety of important civil rights actions which include: defending the rights of prisoners to be treated humanely, working for equal educational opportunities for all children and bringing down the Confederate battle flag from the Alabama State Capitol.
In 1997, the national legal magazine, The American Lawyer, selected him as one of 45 public sector lawyers "whose vision and commitment are changing lives." In 1999, he was a finalist for the national Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for his work on Macedonia Baptist Church v. Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a lawsuit that ended with a record $37.8 million judgment against a Klan group for its role in the burning of a South Carolina church. Prior to becoming President of the SPLC in 2003, Cohen served as its Vice President for Programs, which include the Intelligence Project and Teaching Tolerance.
Morris Dees
Morris Dees co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 1971, following a successful business and law career. He started a direct mail sales company specializing in book publishing while still a student at the University of Alabama, where he also obtained a law degree.
After launching a law practice in Montgomery in 1960, he won a series of groundbreaking civil rights cases that helped integrate government and public institutions.
Known for his innovative lawsuits that crippled some of America’s most notorious white supremacist hate groups, he has received more than 20 honorary degrees and numerous awards. Those include: Trial Lawyer of the Year from Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award from the National Education Association and The Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice.
He was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal in 2006. In addition, the University of Alabama Law School and the New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, jointly created the annual Morris Dees Justice Award to honor a lawyer devoted to public service work. Dees has written three books: his autobiography, A Season For Justice; Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi; and Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. In 1991, NBC aired the made-for-TV movie, Line of Fire, about Dees and his landmark legal victories against the Ku Klux Klan.
David Lee Jordan
David Lee Jordan was born in Leflore County, MS. He received his education from the Mississippi Valley State University and University of Wyoming. Jordan has served as Mississippi State Senator since 1993. As Senator, he serves on numerous committees, including: Drug Policy (of which he is chair); Agriculture; County Affairs; Education; Environment Protection, Conservation and Water Reserves; Finance; Forestry; Housing; Municipalities; and Tourism. He is a retired science teacher and the founder of the Greenwood Voters League. Jordan is married to the former Christine Bell.
Rutha Harris (of Rutha Harris and the Freedom Singers)
Music played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement, allowing mass meeting crowds to say things in song they might not say elsewhere and to create a sense of community. An original Freedom Singer, Rutha Harris has told the story of the Civil Rights Movement through song. She once traveled 50,000 miles in nine months to 48 states, singing and telling the stories of the movement. In an effort to obtain voting rights for all Americans and as a worker for the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Harris participated in multiple registration drives, picket lines and demonstrations.
Harris was jailed three times, for a total of fourteen days due to her efforts. Harris continues to sing freedom songs and educate individuals about the struggles and triumphs of the movement. She recently organized a group of singers in Albany, Georgia for the Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum. This group performs the second Saturday of each month.
Lecia Brooks leads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) outreach efforts on key initiatives and social justice issues. As outreach director, she frequently gives presentations around the country to promote tolerance and diversity. She also serves as director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama, an interpretive center designed to provide visitors to the Civil Rights Memorial with a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement. She joined the SPLC staff in 2004 as director of Mix It Up at Lunch Day, a Teaching Tolerance program designed to help break down racial, cultural and social barriers in schools.
Previously, she worked for 12 years in a number of capacities for the National Conference for Community and Justice in its Los Angeles office. She is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University.
Richard Cohen
A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Virginia School of Law ‘79, Richard Cohen came to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 1986 as its legal director after practicing law in Washington, D.C., for seven years. Under his guidance, the SPLC won a series of landmark lawsuits against some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist organizations. He also successfully litigated a wide variety of important civil rights actions which include: defending the rights of prisoners to be treated humanely, working for equal educational opportunities for all children and bringing down the Confederate battle flag from the Alabama State Capitol.
In 1997, the national legal magazine, The American Lawyer, selected him as one of 45 public sector lawyers "whose vision and commitment are changing lives." In 1999, he was a finalist for the national Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for his work on Macedonia Baptist Church v. Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a lawsuit that ended with a record $37.8 million judgment against a Klan group for its role in the burning of a South Carolina church. Prior to becoming President of the SPLC in 2003, Cohen served as its Vice President for Programs, which include the Intelligence Project and Teaching Tolerance.
Morris Dees
Morris Dees co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 1971, following a successful business and law career. He started a direct mail sales company specializing in book publishing while still a student at the University of Alabama, where he also obtained a law degree.
After launching a law practice in Montgomery in 1960, he won a series of groundbreaking civil rights cases that helped integrate government and public institutions.
Known for his innovative lawsuits that crippled some of America’s most notorious white supremacist hate groups, he has received more than 20 honorary degrees and numerous awards. Those include: Trial Lawyer of the Year from Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award from the National Education Association and The Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice.
He was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal in 2006. In addition, the University of Alabama Law School and the New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, jointly created the annual Morris Dees Justice Award to honor a lawyer devoted to public service work. Dees has written three books: his autobiography, A Season For Justice; Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi; and Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. In 1991, NBC aired the made-for-TV movie, Line of Fire, about Dees and his landmark legal victories against the Ku Klux Klan.
David Lee Jordan
David Lee Jordan was born in Leflore County, MS. He received his education from the Mississippi Valley State University and University of Wyoming. Jordan has served as Mississippi State Senator since 1993. As Senator, he serves on numerous committees, including: Drug Policy (of which he is chair); Agriculture; County Affairs; Education; Environment Protection, Conservation and Water Reserves; Finance; Forestry; Housing; Municipalities; and Tourism. He is a retired science teacher and the founder of the Greenwood Voters League. Jordan is married to the former Christine Bell.
Rutha Harris (of Rutha Harris and the Freedom Singers)
Music played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement, allowing mass meeting crowds to say things in song they might not say elsewhere and to create a sense of community. An original Freedom Singer, Rutha Harris has told the story of the Civil Rights Movement through song. She once traveled 50,000 miles in nine months to 48 states, singing and telling the stories of the movement. In an effort to obtain voting rights for all Americans and as a worker for the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Harris participated in multiple registration drives, picket lines and demonstrations.
Harris was jailed three times, for a total of fourteen days due to her efforts. Harris continues to sing freedom songs and educate individuals about the struggles and triumphs of the movement. She recently organized a group of singers in Albany, Georgia for the Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum. This group performs the second Saturday of each month.