I am sorry to say that I had not heard the story

Juliette Hampton Morgan

of Juliette Hampton Morgan, a white librarian from Montgomery, Alabama, who faced down her city's prejudice and bigotry with editorials typed and sent to the newspaper despite everything from being spat at on the sidewalk to calls for her dismissal to having a cross burned on her front lawn, until I read a post on the Facebook Page Buzzing America. Her story is courageous, sad, and inspiring, all at once. It shows that it's important to find your voice despite attempts to quash it, because what matters is what is right, not what others spout. She was a true librarian heroine. I am so sorry she did not live to see what I hope we can call a flawed but somewhat better world, although we have our ups and downs.  We need more like her today, and librarians like her are at the forefront of a cultural war that threatens to overwhelm patrons' ability to read and think for themselves. The main library of the city where the mayor demanded her dismissal for supporting the rights of Blacks riding the buses of Montgomery is now named for her, and that is part of her legacy, but the story is well worth reading, remembering, and retelling.

She is also an example of how courage often comes in strange packages.  A nervous woman, she had major driving anxiety (boy do I understand that--it's taken years of therapy to mostly be able to drive without too much trouble around town, and I still avoid major roads like New Circle and Nicholasville Road when possible, and I've driven on the Interstate four times since 1993, twice in the dead of night with little traffic). She relied on medicine and the bus system. It was because she rode the bus that she witnessed how Black riders were treated by White drivers, such as pulling off after they'd paid for their fare at the front but before they could board in the back. Despite that nervous disposition, and the fact that it obviously did contribute to the toll the hate speech and crimes against her took, along with her decision to take her life in the end, the fact that time after time she returned to her typewriter for so long, despite it all was very brave, and showed a force of will that many would have found surprising in an otherwise meek-seeming librarian, at least in the 1950s, when we were all supposed to be unmarried, wear sensible shoes, and go 'Shhh.'.

I think next time I dress for Halloween, instead of dressing as something spooky or Disney or such, I'd be tempted to dress in a pinstripe dress with a hydrangea pinned at the neck, with hydrangea earrings and if I can manage it, pin curls, because I instantly felt a kinship with this fine lady, and it would be an opportunity to tell her story. I would hope it wouldn't be an affront to her family; I would mean it as an homage. I'm glad the city decided to honour her by naming the library after her. Times do, fortunately, change.

Such a beautiful song and legacy

Guy Carawan Dies at 87; Taught a Generation to Overcome, in Song

On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.

The song was “We Shall Overcome.”

Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labor anthem and a hymn of protest, had woven in and out of American oral tradition for centuries, embodying the country’s twinned history of faith and struggle. Over time, it was further polished by professional songwriters.

But in teaching it to hundreds of delegates at the inaugural meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — held in Raleigh on April 15, 1960 — Mr. Carawan fathered the musical manifesto that, more than any other, became “the ‘Marseillaise’ of the integration movement,” as The New York Times described it in 1963.

Here he is, singing the song:

The son of Southern parents, Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. was born on July 28, 1927, in Santa Monica, Calif. His mother was a poet, his father an asbestos contractor who later died of asbestosis. After Navy service stateside at the end of World War II, the younger Mr. Carawan earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Occidental College in Los Angeles, followed by a master’s in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Around this time, Mr. Carawan, who sang and played the guitar, banjo and hammered dulcimer, became deeply interested in the use of folk music to foster social progress. But Wayland Hand, a distinguished folklorist with whom he studied at U.C.L.A., warned him against mixing folk music with activism — they had been combined to devastating effect, Professor Hand pointed out, in Nazi Germany.

Mr. Carawan disregarded the warning. Moving to New York, he became active in the folk revival percolating in Greenwich Village. In 1953, he and two friends, Frank Hamilton (later a member of the Weavers, the musical group closely associated with Mr. Seeger) and Jack Elliott (soon to be known as the folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott), took to the road, collecting folk songs and singing for their supper throughout the South.

A remarkable woman

Dorothy Height, civil rights activist, dies at 98

Dorothy Height, who as longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women was the leading female voice of the 1960s civil rights movement, died Tuesday. She was 98.

She continued speaking publically into her 90s. I do hope that oral historians were able to record her experiences.

The late activist C. DeLores Tucker once called Height an icon to all African-American women.

"I call Rosa Parks the mother of the civil rights movement," Tucker said in 1997. "Dorothy Height is the queen."

Rest well.