Scholar, minister and activist the Rev. Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr. was the guest speaker at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center’s “Perspectives on Black-Jewish Relations in The Fight for Civil Rights” discussion held Dec. 6, on the 68th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), who began his grassroots political activism being a civil rights champion through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while a student at Tougaloo College, will receive the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) 2020 National Leadership Award.
In 1965, Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led what was planned as a peaceful 54-mile march through Alabama from Selma to Montgomery. The march, a protest of the discriminatory practices and Jim Crow laws that prevented African Americans from voting, would be remembered in history as “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most dramatic and violent incidents of the American Civil Rights Movement.