James Armstrong, Civil Rights Foot Soldier, Dies at Age 86
As we tweeted last Wednesday, James Armstrong, the Birmingham barber and Civil Rights leader who iconically carried the American flag to lead the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march, has died of heart failure. The United States Civil Rights community has truly lost one of its pivotal, historic members in his passing.
James Armstrong, pictured here at the 40th anniversary re-enactment of the Selma Voting Rights March to Montgomery, known as Bloody Sunday.
One of his most notable and long-standing actions was that Armstrong was the catalyst in initiating the 1957 class-action lawsuit to integrate area schools after wanting to enrolls his sons in the all-white Graymont Elementary school. Speaking to his dedication to the cause, and to his persistence in the fight for equal rights, when interviewed at one of the anniversary marches that he regularly attended in Selma that commemorate the now-famous march, he’s quoted as saying “I’ll keep coming back as long as I can walk. One day, I may even come in a wheelchair.”
Armstrong was a WWII army veteran – having been drafted to fight at age 18 – but his greatest fight may have been right here on American soil. He ran his own business, the barber shop that boasted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a loyal customer, was beneficial to conduct sit-ins and other demonstrations without fear of retribution from an employer.
Perhaps his biggest disappointment – per Shirley Gavin Floyd, the business manager for the Civil Rights Activist Committee in Birmingham – was that he had to cancel his trip to DC this past winter for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, whose election he saw as a culmination of his efforts.
Tags: civil rights, civil rights history, civil rights movement, James Armstrong, sojourn, sojourn to the past
Nice, I am happy to find this well Web