Olin Lamar Weaver (11 January 1928- 6 December 2013) was a political and civil rights activist in the 1950s and 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama. The August 1957 cover of Ebony Magazine referred to Weaver as "The White Man Who Can't Go Home". [1] [2]
Olin Lamar Weaver (11 January 1928- 6 December 2013) was a political and civil rights activist in the 1950s and 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama. The August 1957 cover of Ebony Magazine referred to Weaver as "The White Man Who Can't Go Home". [1] [2]
Born in the rural farming community of Cassville, Georgia, to Willis Almos Weaver and Ruth Aileen Harris Weaver, Lamar Weaver grew up in the impoverished South during the Great Depression. He spent much of his childhood being looked after by various relatives in Cassville, Georgia and the small town of Holly Pond, Alabama. When he was four years old, Weaver witnessed the lynching of a young black male. He later recounted this episode his experience in his 2001 memoir Bury My Heart In Birmingham, published by Writers Club Press. Weaver attended South Eastern Bible College.
Weaver was a steelworker by trade [3] and a lay minister. [4] He later became an ordained minister. He and several members of his church became actively involved in the registration of black voters in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida.
Weaver ran for a seat on the Birmingham City Commission against Birmingham's former chief of police, Bull Conner, an avowed segregationist. He ran on an anti-segregationist platform. [5] Weaver also wrote to Missouri senator Thomas C. Hennings, offering to appear before the Senate's Judiciary Constitutional Rights Subcommittee hearings about discrimination in the South. [5]
On March 6, 1957, Weaver accompanied the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a black minister and founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, and Mrs. Shuttlesworth, as they sat in the "White Interstate Waiting Room" of Birmingham's Terminal Railway Station, protected by police, as a peaceful protest of the segregationist laws. When Weaver exited the terminal station, he several members of a crowd which had gathered outside the station threw rocks and bricks at Weaver as he tried to leave in his car, shattering the side windows and cracking the windshield. [6] Then the mob attempted to flip the car over with Weaver inside, all the while screaming threats and cursing him. The police did nothing to prevent the 'vigilante violence' occurring just outside the station. [7] [8]
Weaver escaped, but he was fined twenty-five dollars for "reckless" driving" [9] and told by City Judge Ralph Parker to "get out of town". [10] Weaver withdrew from the commissioner's race and was secretly escorted out of Birmingham by ACMHR members in a hearse. [5] This incident made the front page of the Birmingham Post-Herald and was picked up by news-wire services, and caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who mentioned it in her My Day Column, on March 11, 1957. [11]
The next day Weaver flew overnight to Washington, D.C. (flying under the name "James Bishop" for security reasons). On March 8, 1957, he became the first white man to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee for proposed Civil Rights. Weaver spoke out against the KKK, racial segregation, voter oppression, and violent mob rule in the South.
Weaver, who most recently lived in Kennesaw, Ga., died on Dec. 6, 2013. He had six children.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
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Arthur George Gaston was an American businessman who established a number of businesses in Birmingham, Alabama, and who played a significant role in the struggle to integrate Birmingham in 1963. In his lifetime, Gaston's companies were some of the most prominent African-American businesses in the American South.
Frederick Lee "Fred" Shuttlesworth was a U.S. civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, initiated and was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. He helped Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.
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Andrew Michael Manis is a historian, author, and professor at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.
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Clarence H. Mullins was an American jurist from the state of Alabama. He served as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama from 1943 until his death in 1957. He was the Chief Judge of the District court from 1948 until he assumed senior status in 1953 as a result of disability. Mullins was notable for his rulings in the 1940s in favor of desegregation, especially in housing discrimination.
Lola Mae Haynes Hendricks was corresponding secretary for Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights from 1956 to 1963. She assisted Wyatt Walker in planning the early portions of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's involvement in the 1963 Birmingham campaign during the Civil Rights Movement.
The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was a civil rights organization in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, which coordinated boycotts and sponsored federal lawsuits aimed at dismantling segregation in Birmingham and Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, served as president of the group from its founding in 1956 until 1969. The ACMHR's crowning moment came during the pivotal Birmingham Campaign which it coordinated along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Spring of 1963.
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Stone Johnson was an African-American activist in the Civil Rights Movement. A railway worker and union representative by trade, he got involved in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama in the mid 1950s, working with Fred Shuttlesworth. He started a civil rights organization called the Civil Rights Guards that protected homes and business involved in the movement, usually while armed.
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Johnny Robinson (1947–1963) was a young African-American teenager who, at age 16, was shot and killed by a police officer in the unrest following the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Robinson and several others were allegedly throwing rocks at a car draped with a Confederate flag. A Birmingham police officer, Jack Parker, who was riding in the back seat of a police car, shot and killed Robinson. Parker was never indicted for the killing and claimed that he had only fired a warning shot, and that a stray pellet must have killed Robinson.
James W. Morgan was a mayor of the city of Birmingham, Alabama, United States, from 1953–1961. Morgan was born in 1891 in Birmingham and educated in that city. He served as a politician in Birmingham from 1934 when he was appointed to the Parks and Recreation Board until 1964 when he resigned from that board. He was mayor from 1953–1961, replacing W. Cooper Green. In 1955, Morgan led the fundraising drive for the Birmingham Zoo, which initially bore his name.
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