“Icons of The Civil Rights Movement”
and how they came to be…
David and I were married in 1963. My first job was that of an Art Editor at Ebony Magazine in Chicago, Illinois. I was one of two whites in a company of 150 employees.
That September, the Sixteenth St. Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, killing four little girls. Then in November, JFK was assassinated! A few times every year, Martin Luther King would come into Ebony. What a year, at the age of 23, I was beginning married life! My husband, a Methodist clergyman, was working on the West side of Chicago at The Ecumenical Institute.
The 60’s and 70’s were years of active protest. Not only did we go on “marches” for civil rights, but we took trips to Washington to protest the Vietnam War.
In 1971 we adopted our first son, and African-American, who joined our 2 biological daughters. Then, in 1975, upon the fall of Saigon, we adopted our second son, an Amer-Asian child of a Vietnamese mother and a black American soldier.
To say that this “movement” was critical in the influence of our lives over the past 45 years is an understatement!
In 2004 my husband and I took a trip through the South, traveling with 100 High School students to all the milestones of the “Movement”. This “Civil Rights Sojourn” ended with a visit to The Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was murdered. This motel is now a powerful Civil Rights Museum.
2008 marks the 40th year since the assassination of MLK. The exhibit, “Icons of The Civil Rights Movement”, will travel during this commemorative year.
