http://www.gainesville.com/article/20091119/GUARDIAN/911191033/1002
ROSA PARKS AWARDS
By CLEVELAND TINKER
November 19, 2009
Four women who have spent their adult lives committed to the struggle
for civil and human rights and justice have been chosen as the
recipients of the 2009 Rosa Parks Quiet Courage Committee of
Gainesville "Quiet Courage Award."
They are: Mary Hall Daniels, Dr. Gwendolyn Zohara Simmons, Cora
Roberson and Carol Thomas, and they will receive special crystal
memorial plaques.
The ceremony will be held at 4 p.m. Nov. 29 at Compassionate Outreach
Ministries, 320 SE 43rd St. and will feature a presentation by
Georgette M. Norman, director of the Troy University Rosa Parks
Museum in Montgomery, Ala.
The committee was founded by the Rev. Milford L. Griner in 2006 to
honor the legacy of Parks, a civil rights icon who became famous when
she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man in
Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955. The incident sparked the
Montgomery bus boycott that ended with blacks being able to sit
anywhere they chose on buses. Parks died in Detroit at the age of 92
on Oct. 24, 2005.
In May, the committee sent a formal request to Florida Gov. Charlie
Crist seeking statewide recognition of Dec. 1, 2009 as "Rosa Parks
Day." Griner said Crist has not responded, but he said he expects
Dec. 1 to be proclaimed "Rosa Parks Day" by city of Gainesville and
Alachua County connissioners, which is what has been the past several years.
Griner said the committee is honoring another distinguished group of
award winners this year.
"This year's class of honorees is truly amazing and represent a
wealth of experience in the civil rights movement," Griner said. "We
are blessed to still have them in our midst to share their
experiences and to teach us about the struggle for civil rights and justice."
Roberson is a lifelong east Gainesville resident and retired
educator. She graduated from all-black Lincoln High School in 1943
when it was located at what is now the A. Quinn Jones Center on NW
7th Avenue. She received her bachelor's degree from Florida Normal
Industrial Institute in St. Augustine in 1950. The school is now
known as Florida Memorial University and is located in Miami.
Roberson earned her master's degree in education in 1962 from
Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, in Tuskegee, Ala.
Roberson, 85, said she is the first woman to ever run for the
Gainesville City Commission. That was in 1968, and she said she was
deputized by the NAACP in the 1950s to help register blacks to vote.
"Back in those days, a lot of blacks were scared to vote because they
(whites) would ask questions like, 'How many marbles are in this
jar,' and of course, it was no way anybody could tell how many were
in the jar, and when you answered the question wrong, they would call
you ignorant and tell you you couldn't vote," Roberson said.
She also was very active in the group, Gainesville Women for Equal
Rights in the 60s and 70s. She said the group was comprised of
working black women and white women who were wives of University of
Florida professors.
She said the women in the group fought hard to get equal pay for
black teachers when they found out blacks were getting paid less than
their white counterparts to do the same work. She said she was
motivated by the teachings of the great black scholar, W.E.B. DuBois,
"because he was pushy about integration and equal rights."
Roberson was married to her husband, Charlie Roberson, for 54 years.
He died last year. She has two children. She was raised in the
immediate vicinity of Johnson Chapel Baptist Church, where she has
been a faithful member all of her life.
Thomas, 75, was the wife of a UF physics professor when she joined
Gainesville Women for Equal Rights in the 1960s. She also has been
involved in the NAACP for many years, helping out with voter
registration drives and education issues.
Thomas said she and others fought hard to get female correctional
officers hired when it became known that black female inmates in
Gainesville were being abused by white male jailers.
Thomas said she was raised in Detroit, and remembers a terrible race
riot that occurred there during World War II. "I was appalled,"
Thomas said. "I couldn't imagine how people could treat other human
beings so cruelly."
Thomas describes herself as a "retired revolutionary" who once had a
"price on my head in Gainesville" because she was so active in the
local civil rights movement. She said receiving the "Quiet Courage
Award" is a big honor to her.
"I feel overwhelmed because the African-American community has been
the conscious of this country, and I have surely learned a lot from
it," she said.
Thomas, who has a bachelor's degree in history and political science
from Vanderbilt University, is divorced and has three children and
three grandsons. She lives in Alachua.
Daniels, 90, was 3 years old in 1923 when a white mob destroyed
Rosewood, a tiny, mostly black town west of Gainesville in Levy
County, because a white woman falsely accused a black man of rape.
She is one of only two Rosewood survivors still living.
Griner said the committee is honoring Daniels, who lives in Hilliard
near Jacksonville, because she not only survived the massacre, but
she "has been teaching others about it."
Dr. Karen Cole-Smith, the second vice-chair of the committee, wrote
in an e-mail that, "Through quiet courage, she (Daniels) has survived
and has received Florida reparation funds for the severe injustices
done to her and other family members who survived and those who were killed."
Simmons, 65, a professor in the religion department at UF, dropped
out of Spellman College in June 1964 to travel to Laurel, Miss., to
work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in
what was billed as "Freedom Summer." She said she had only planned to
stay in Mississippi for three months, but ended up staying there for
16 months after seeing the needs of the people.
"Most people know about Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, but
there were a lot of us who immersed ourselves into the work we were
doing there," Simmons said.
Freedom Summer, also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, was a
campaign to attempt to register as many black voters as possible in
Mississippi, which was notorious at that time for keeping blacks from voting.
The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations,
a coalition of four established civil rights organizations: The
NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and SNCC, with SNCC playing the lead role.
Simmons said she was one of only three women project coordinators who
participated in Freedom Summer.
Simmons also participated in marches led by civil rights giants like
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy Sr.
Simmons has lived in Gainesville for eight years. She was born in
Memphis, Tenn., and is the mother of one daughter. She received her
bachelor's degree in sociology from Antioch College in Yellow
Springs, Ohio, and her master's and doctorate degrees from Temple
University in Philadelphia.
The theme of the program this year will be "Boldness Beyond Measure:
A Call to Action. It also will feature the Compassionate gospel
choir, soloists and the honor guard from the Reichert House, an
after-school program for male students. City and county elected
officials also have been invited.
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