Some said their deaths marked the end of an era. Others said it was the beginning of a new one.
“With each passing, the torch is being passed,'’ Dorie Ladner, 78, who helped register Blacks to vote in her native Mississippi, told me recently. “We’re mindful of the fact that there is so much work to do for the next generations to come.”
Thousands of “foot soldiers’’ challenged segregation in the Deep South and across the country during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s.
Over the years, I've interviewed countless veterans, including some who worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. Some were well-known and have a place in history books. Many weren’t featured in articles or chapters on the Civil Rights Movement. They nonetheless played critical roles, making lunch for activists, housing them and even hiding them. Cameras weren’t there when they refused to get up from all-white lunch counters. Nobody recorded when they braved picket lines of angry whites to integrate schools.