More than 300 people filled Hill Chapel Baptist Church on Saturday morning to honor civil rights leaders from Athens and other parts of the state in the city’s 22nd annual Emancipation Proclamation Observance.
The event marked the 148th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect Jan. 1, 1863. President Abraham Lincoln’s executive order proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the states rebelling during the Civil War.
“What is there to say? You have done so much for me,” said Louise Hollowell, the widow of one man honored at the service, civil rights lawyer Donald Hollowell, who died in 2004.
Hollowell sued the state of Georgia to desegregate the University of Georgia more than 50 years ago, and also represented Martin Luther King Jr.
“Just to have us here today just swells my heart,” Louise Hollowell told the crowd.
Also receiving Pioneer Awards were Ed Turner, the late Miriam Moore and John Taylor, three of Athens’ first black city council members; longtime Clarke County Board of Education member Evelyn Neely; community activists Virginia Walker and the late Jessie Barnett; attorney Janice Mathis of Rainbow/PUSH; State Rep. Tyrone Brooks; the Elbert County NAACP chapter; and the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, which has kept alive memories of four people lynched in Walton and Oconee counties in 1946.
Civil rights lawyers John Mell Clark, Ken Dious and Willie Woodruff; Rev. Lee Avery of Wilkes County; and the Athens Economic Justice Coalition were also among those honored in the ceremony, which began with a gospel concert by the Athens group Brotha and the Wardlaw Brothers of Lyons.
“There are a lot of giants in this room today,” said another honoree, University of Georgia School of Social Work Dean Maurice Daniels.
Daniels is the founder of The Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies and Research and produced a documentary on Horace Ward, a retired federal judge who was turned down for admission to the UGA law school in the 1950s, but later was part of Hollowell’s legal team, which overturned legal segregation at UGA.
Also honored but not present were U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta, former Atlanta mayor and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, the Rev. Joseph Lowery and former state Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond of Athens.
The featured speaker, the Rev. Dr. Carolyn Ann Knight of Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Seminary, wound up the lengthy ceremony with an impassioned sermon that compared the plight of many people today to the plight of the Old Testament figures Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, cast into a furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar because of their faith.
People aren’t facing that today, she said.
“But I know a whole lot of folks who are going through hell right now,” said Knight, who also exhorted the crowd to support President Obama in part of her talk.
“We need to let the whole world know whose side we’re on,” she said.
She also thanked Marvin Nunnally, organizer of the event, for honoring Hollowell, Neely, Walker and the others who got Pioneer Awards on Saturday.
“We ought to say thank you (to Nunnally),” she said.
“We stand on their shoulders,” she said of the honorees.
As reported by Lee Shearer in the Athens Banner-Herald on January 1, 2012.
0 comments:
Post a Comment