By PATRICIA BROOKS

I was pleased to again participate in the St. Augustine church’s yearly celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, held this year at Trinity Lutheran Church. The program is always inspiring, but this year I especially appreciated the focus on the fact that the civil rights movement in the South in the ‘60s was not one led from the top down; it was a grassroots movement in every way.

I participated in many activities in the deadly summer of ’64, as an activist journalist, moving from one hotspot to another; and everywhere, somebody died. You wouldn’t recognize any of their names because most were local blacks, not high-profile whites from the North. You may recognize the name James Chaney only because that local black man was killed along with two white civil rights workers from the North, Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner.

The most inspiring of the many marches I participated in was in a small town in Mississippi (I no longer remember its name and my articles from that period are long gone, as I’ve moved many times since). It was a children’s march to demand they be allowed to order from the local chicken shack from the front window, not the rear that served blacks. I was so impressed that children of that age, maybe 6 to 10, having been raised in segregation their whole lives, had the self-esteem and assertiveness to make such a demand. Their spirits couldn’t have been higher as they marched, under the scowls of stereotypical rednecks with shotguns. And when they were rounded up and loaded in a pickup truck to be taken to jail, they were all smiles, their young voices singing lustily, “We Shall Overcome.”

So far as I know, none of the children were injured in captivity; but the three adult blacks who had organized the march, two young men and a woman, were held without bail all that day, then suddenly set outside the jail that night, and a truckful of white men were waiting to mow them down with shotguns.

Everywhere we went, just such obscenities occurred. And unless you read the national newsweekly I worked for at the time, you never knew — and at 72, I can no longer remember either — all their names.

Dr. King was an eloquent spokesman for the movement, but he didn’t start it and he didn’t attend nearly all the dangerous activities in those years. Local people organized them and supervised them — and often died for them.

Patricia Brooks lives in Coupeville.