The Movement and Its Legacy: A Panel Discussion with Civil Rights Veterans
Six staff who worked for CORE, SNCC and other civil rights organizations in the 1960s will give a panel discussion from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 17, at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street. Admission is free.
Visit for a chance to listen to these six staff discuss their experiences on the movement’s front lines. Their work spanned the entire 1960s, from early Freedom Rides to Black Power. They participated in desegregation struggles in Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee, and gathered much of the Wisconsin Historical Society‘s nationally known research collection on civil rights.
Mimi Feingold Real volunteered with CORE from 1961 to 1966. One of the early Freedom Riders, she was jailed in Mississippi’s Parchman Prison in 1961 and later did voter registration work in Louisiana. Bob and Vicki Gabriner worked on the 1963-1964 Harlem rent strike and volunteered with the Cornell West Tennessee Voter Registration Project, 1964-1965.
Alicia Kaplow headed the University of Wisconsin-Madison Friends of SNCC from 1963 to 1966 and raised funds for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Gwen Gillon Ozanne was on SNCC’s staff from 1963 to 1966 and participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. Leah Johnson Wise joined SNCC’s Atlanta staff in 1967 as it transformed itself into a national force for Black Power under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.
The traveling exhibit Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Exhibit for Students will be on display at the museum that evening as well.
The six panelists worked for the Wisconsin Historical Society during the mid-60s and are largely responsible for gathering its massive civil rights archives. The story of their collecting will be told in the summer 2014 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History and in the book, Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader, both available in June.
Want more information? Contact organizer Michael Edmonds at michael.edmonds@wisconsinhistory.org or608-264-6538.
A video recording of the panel is now available on Vimeo for those who could not attend.