Blackwell, Unita

March 18, 1933

Born in Lula, Mississippi, civil rights activist and politician Unita Blackwell grew up during the depression and spent her first thirty years migrating from farm to farm in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Blackwell has been an exemplar of grass-roots activism and organization within rural African-American communities.

In 1962 Blackwell and her first husband settled in the then-unincorporated town of Meyersville in Issaquena County, Mississippi, where she chopped cotton in the fields for three dollars a day. Inspired by visiting civil rights workers, she registered to vote and began to encourage other laborers to register. Fired by her employers for her activism, Blackwell joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee full-time. In 1964 she helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the party in its failed attempt to be seated. In 1968 she would serve as a state delegate at the Democratic convention in Chicago. In 1965 and 1966 she initiated Blackwell v. Board of Education, a landmark case that furthered school desegregation in Mississippi.

In 1976, equipped with the political and administrative skills she had developed in the civil rights movement, Blackwell set out to incorporate the 691-acre town of Mayersville, Mississippi, organizing town meetings, filing petitions, and having the land surveyed. The incorporation became official on December 28, 1976. Blackwell was elected mayor, the first African-American woman mayor in Mississippi, a post she held for four terms. An expert on rural housing and development, Blackwell has campaigned successfully for state and federal funds for public housing and welfare. She was selected as chairperson of the National Conference of Black Mayors, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.

See also Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Bibliography

Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Black Women in America. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993, pp. 138–139.

Kilborn, Keter. "A Mayor and Town Pulled Up." New York Times Biographical Service 23 (June 1992): 760.

nancy yousef (1996)

greg robinson (1996)