"Look back, but march forward"
Johnnie Carr died last Friday. I had not know about her but it looks to me like she was a truly great person.
"Johnnie Carr is one of the three major icons of the Civil Rights Movement: Dr. King, Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr," said Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "I think ultimately, when the final history books are written, she'll be one of the few people remembered for that terrific movement."
Carr succeeded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1967, a post she held at her death. It was the newly formed association that led the boycott of city buses in the Alabama capital in 1955 after Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to whites on a crowded bus.
As president of the MIA the past four decades, Carr had been a leader in numerous initiatives to improve race relations and conditions for black people. She was involved in a suit to desegregate Montgomery schools, with then 13-year-old Arlam the named plaintiff.
"She was always an encourager and not a divider," Mayor Bobby Bright told the Montgomery Advertiser. "She was just a loving person. She was truly the mother figure that we all so desperately needed in Montgomery during a very trying period of our history.
Read more here and here,
2 comments:
How much that face reveals! what a beautiful soul.
"Look back, but march forward." That could be a slogan for Freemasonry as well. Respecting the contributions of George Washington to both our country and our fraternity is one thing, but placing him on a pedestal for near worship status is quite another. I get so tired of hearing the neverending mantra of "who used to be a Mason" being used to encourage men that they too should become a member. It's a postscript in our fraternity, to be respected and not forgotten, but most certainly NOT a reason to join. Look forward. What can the fraternity do TODAY and TOMORROW for me, for you, and for society.
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