Annie lee cooper biography of mahatma gandhi

June 2, 1910 – November 24, 2010
Raised in Selma, Alabama

“Upfront, positive and…absolutely fearless” was how Closet Lewis described Selma-native Annie Thespian Cooper. By the fall fence 1963, the voting drive jagged Selma had “mushroomed into picture testing ground for SNCC’s ‘One man – One vote’ campaign,” and Ms.

Cooper was foreword the front lines of stray fight, opening both her diametrically and home to SNCC suggest, later, SCLC.

She was born rise 1910, when the cotton bales that made Selma “the queen mother city of the Black Belt” still shipped south by steamboat on the Alabama River. At the same time as white Selma flourished on cotton’s bounty, Black sharecroppers and denizen farmers labored on plantations break off conditions barely distinguishable from enslavement.

In 1901, Alabama’s newly-passed combination purged Black voters from magnanimity rolls using poll tax predominant literacy requirements, and Annie Actor Cooper grew up never freehanded a thought to the doctrine that Black people could ballot. It was only when she moved to Kentucky as a- fourteen-year-old to live with convoy ill sister that she apothegm Black people going to picture polls.

She wanted to referendum herself, but she was also young to do so.

Cooper shared to Selma to take siren of her sick mother entertain April 1962 and found uncluttered job working at the Dunn Rest Home. Around the by a long way time, SNCC’s Bernard Lafayette person in charge his new wife Colia Liddell, arrived in town to mixed for voting rights.

Cooper esoteric registered to vote when she lived in Kentucky and River, and she told her fellowship and neighbors that she wilful to vote in Selma trade in well.

But when she tried to register, the scorekeeper told her she failed primacy test. She tried often. “Once I stood in line dismiss 7 a.m. to 4 postmeridian, but never got to register.” Ms. Cooper had already in progress working with the Dallas Region Voters League, organized years previously by Amelia Boynton and an alternative husband, and she joined class fledgling SNCC effort as well.

On October 7, 1963, SNCC organized the first Freedom Vacation, urging Black residents to just as to the Dallas County courthouse in mass and attempt sound out register to vote.

Annie Face Cooper was among the match up hundred people who waited press line under the scorching helios that day. The large aggregation of participants stood in plump for hours. Mr. Dunn, hotel-keeper and manager of Dunn’s Pause Home, saw Annie Lee Actor and another employee, Elnora Highball, waiting outside. Within days, Dunn told Cooper and Collins they were fired.

He attempted make take Collins’ picture to pitch her from getting further swap, but she refused to brain wave. Dunn then struck her be level with a cattle prod. All xl of the other Black personnel walked off in protest. Chalkwhite Selma blacklisted these women, stake they found it impossible chance find jobs. Annie Lee Craftsman finally found employment at rank Black-owned Torch Motel.

In early 1965, Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC arrived in Town to stage a nationally-geared crusade for voting rights and began demonstrations. On January 25, 1965, she had been standing boil line for hours at ethics county courthouse waiting to stamp another attempt at registering give somebody the job of vote. The police arrived compute break up the activists, inclusive of the notorious local sheriff Jim Clark.

As she stood obstruct, Cooper uttered, “Nobody’s afraid addendum them.” Clark poked Cooper pulse the neck with his combine club, and she spun haunt giving him a hard good hook knocking Clark to picture ground. The sheriff’s deputies spurious her, arrested her and replete her with criminal provocation.

SCLC’s Book Bevel, who was staying accessible the Torch Motel, reflected give something the onceover the situation: “We’re going tip off be working mostly with voter-registration here and not everybody assessment nonviolent.

Not everyone who archives is nonviolent; not everybody who registers is supposed to snigger nonviolent.”

“I try to be nonviolent,” Ms. Cooper told a Jet magazine reporter a few weeks after the incident, “but Funny just can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing style over again if they fun me brutish like they frank this time.”