Longtime Mississippi civil rights activist Hollis Watkins has died
Watkins — who also sometimes went by Hollis Watkins Muhammad — died Wednesday at his home in the Jackson suburb of Clinton, Mississippi, according to the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, a group for which he was chairman.
He would walk to school through the woods, even as white children rode buses to their segregated and better-equipped school. Questioning inequality that shaped his family’s life, Watkins joined a youth chapter of the NAACP. In 1961, Watkins became one of the first Mississippi residents to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, after he met Moses, an SNCC coordinator, in McComb, Mississippi, and Moses showed him how to fill out a voter registration form.“Even though I was a SNCC staff person, Medgar and I had a close relationship. We worked together all across the state,” Watkins told The Associated Press in a 2013 interview.
Also in 1962, Watkins and Hayes went to south Mississippi’s Forrest County at the invitation of local NAACP leaderto work on Black voter registration. Dahmer was killed in January 1966 when Ku Klux Klansmen firebombed his family’s home. “We realized that Medgar was gone, but we would not receive a defeat in Medgar having been assassinated,” he said. “And to prove we did not see it as a defeat, we decided and became more determined that we would get more people registered to vote in the name of Medgar.”
“This is an idea that came to fruition as a result of me realizing that I was not getting any younger, and people from all across the state and even other states had began to call on me to work with them and provide them certain kinds of training and technical assistance,” Watkins said in the interview with UNC Greensboro.
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