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Civil Rights Movement ‘shero’ addresses MUH audience

Photos: Civil rights activist at MUH

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By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer Updated 11:18 AM Friday, February 5, 2010

HAMILTON — Flonzie Brown Wright began with a soft, impassioned a capella version of “We Shall Not Be Moved,” one of the anthems of the Civil Rights Movement.

Wright was the keynote speaker for the 23rd installment of the Racial Legacies & Learning program, Thursday, Feb. 4, at Miami University Hamilton.

Her talk was titled “Looking Back to Move Ahead,” the same title of her 1994 autobiography, and like the book chronicled her formative years growing up in rural Mississippi, just three generations removed from slavery.

With family photos and news clippings projected behind her, she told how her father painted an old door black and hung it sideways in her one-room school so that it at least looked like they had a blackboard. She told about her deaf grandfather, “Papa Rob,” who supported his wife and 13 children by making molasses, digging graves and killing hogs.

And she told about how she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 when Medgar Evers was shot down on the front porch of his home for having the audacity to attend an NAACP meeting.

“That was my defining moment,” Wright said. “I knew that if I was going to learn about civil rights and injustice, I had to get involved.”

After a bad experience trying to register to vote, she ran for a seat on the election commission of Madison County, Miss., then known as Flonzie Goodloe, becoming the first African-American woman to hold public office in that state, and became known as a “mover and shaker” in Canton.

So when Martin Luther King Jr. approached her town on a march to the state capitol, he called on Wright to find food and sleeping quarters for 3,000 people.

She recalled a later meeting with King in which he predicted his assassination and so compelled Wright and 11 others to sign a pledge to continue the Civil Rights struggle after he was gone.

“There are six of us still living,” she said, “but we have continued the promise we made to make things better for people around the world.

And she told about the “sheroes” who influenced her life, including Sojourner Truth and Oseola McCarty, a woman who started a $150,000 scholarship fund at the University of Southern Mississippi from her ironing income.

“If your space is no better when you leave than when you came,” she challenged the audience, “you need to redefine your journey.”

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.

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