Voting rights

[freshwest]

3. Holder's life and work is seldom acknowledged.

First African-Americans at UA Share their Experiences

A look at the Panel Discussion on the Early Days of UA's Desegregation

Autherine Lucy Foster, Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood are three brave individuals who took a stand for change at a crucial time in the history of UA. Their courageous strides in 1956 and 1963 marked the beginning of UA's steady progress toward the inclusive and diverse campus we celebrate today.

Mrs. Foster, Mr. Hood and a family member of the late Vivian Malone Jones participated in a panel discussion about UA's early movement toward desegregation. Moderating the event was Dr. E. Culpepper Clark, former dean of the College of Communication and Information Sciences and author of the book The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at The University of Alabama.

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs019/1102213308111/archive/1103936530484.html

More of the history and activism of the Holder family:



Sharon Malone, Eric Holder’s wife, to appear in PBS special ‘Slavery by Another Name’

By Annie Groer - 02/10/2012

Going with the 4 paragraph limit:

...Henry Malone's real crime, of course, was being black in the Deep South between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II. Over that time, a shocking 800,000 African Americans were run through corrupt courts that jailed a majority of them on false or flimsy charges, imposed sky-high fines they could not pay and then leased them into forced labor.

By the late 1800s, tens of thousands of vulnerable freed blacks were made to work in white-owned coal mines, turpentine camps, steel mills, road gangs and farms, explains Douglas Blackmon, co-producer of the film, which is based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of this little-known part of American history.

“The number of people arrested never had anything to do with how much crime was being committed, but how much labor was needed,” Blackmon told me. The convicts, including a small percentage of black women, were underfed, overworked, tortured, sold or murdered with impunity, all in the name of replacing former slaves with the cheapest possible workers.

“It wasn't just that bad things were done to black people, but the level of highly synchronized brutality stripped them of all opportunity for 70 years,” he said...

Worth reading it all:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/sharon-malone-eric-holders-wife-on-her-uncles-post-emancipation-re-enslavement/2012/02/09/gIQA9DtY4Q_blog.html

'Still waters run deep.' I respect this man.