An outspoken civil rights activist who was born to sharecroppers in the segregated South and rose to become the first African American woman to win a mayor's race in Mississippi has died.
Unita Blackwell, the first black woman elected mayor in Mississippi, shows an audience the gold-minted coin given to her in recognition of her pioneering struggles for voting rights in 2006.
Blackwell became active in the civil rights movement in the Delta in 1964 as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She and other black residents of Issaquena County tried to register to vote that year but were rejected because of a test rigged for them to fail. “And at that particular point, our children only went to school two to three months out of the year. And for the whites, they understood it even larger than that in terms of political power, and we hadn’t even heard that word, political power, because it wasn’t even taught in the black schools.”Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
In 1967, a group of U.S. senators that included Democrat Robert F. Kennedy of New York traveled to Mississippi to hold hearings about poverty. During a hearing in Jackson, Blackwell told them about dire conditions in Issaquena County. With a high school equivalency diploma and financial support from a rural fellowship, she was accepted in 1982 into a regional planning program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She completed her master’s degree there in 1983.
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