National Nurses United

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 11 O ne half century ago, on Jan. 12, 1966, two African-American civil rights activists, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Ham - lett, suffered a sudden and brutal death in Tallahatchie County, Miss. County officials ruled the cause of death as an "auto accident" and no investigative reports were filed. But before long, more details began to emerge in a case that remains unresolved. One of those still seeking justice is Keglar's great-granddaughter, Chicago RN Martese Chism, a National Nurses Organizing Commit- tee board member. She will join other nurses and civil rights supporters March 3 to 6, 2016 in Selma, Ala., to commemorate the voting rights struggle. The event, Selma 51, is a vivid remember of why the cause Keglar and Ham - lett fought and died for remain a pressing prior- ity today. As reaffirmed in a resolution passed at the NNU convention in October, the right to vote is a core principle of U.S. democracy, a right that, 50 years after the bloody 1965 attack on civil rights marchers in Selma and the murders of Keglar and Hammet, is far from finished. Why has this come to the fore now? Two years ago, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court virtually dismantled the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, with the assertion that discriminatory practices to suppress voter rights was largely in the past. But as William Faulkner famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Since the Supreme Court ruling, 21 U.S. states have erected new voter restriction laws, clearly intended to protect the entrenched elite from those who, Sen. Bernie Sanders has noted, will "work for all of us" and not just "the corporate class and a handful of the wealthiest people in this country." Expanding, not shrinking the electorate, as Sanders notes, is a central component, along with a broad movement of activists, for achieving social, economic, and racial justice. At stake is not only the rights of African Americans and other underrepresented Americans, but also efforts to secure healthcare for all, workplace protections, retire- ment security, living-wage jobs, equal access to education, a clean and healthy envi- ronment, and all the other elements of a democratic, civil society. "My great-grandmother marched with Dr. King," Martese has noted, "and made the effort trying to get black people in Mississip- pi to register to vote. In January 1966, she went to Jackson, Miss. to give testimony to Senator Robert Kennedy's hearing on being denied their right to vote. On her way back, she was pulled over and (with Adlena Hamlett) murdered…And so at six years old, that's when I made up my mind that when everybody else was crying at the funeral, as a child I didn't cry. I said, 'I will continue your dream, continue your fight.'" In her 2005 Mississippi Civil Rights Re - visited series, author Susan Klopfer describes Keglar as a "small, courageous" woman "well known in the Mississippi Delta (northwestern Mississippi) for speaking out against racism, even when she was very afraid to do so." By the early 1960s, Keglar spent 10 years trying to secure her right to vote, even paying a required "poll tax" rejected by racist county officials. Keglar was among several summoned to appear before an Oxford, Miss. federal court in 1961, in a case brought by federal authori- ties, which put them squarely in the target of white supremacist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan. In response to the national spotlight, local officials conceded she had qualified to vote. Keglar subsequently became the first African American to vote in Tallahatchie County since the end of Reconstruction. But her work was not done. Keglar and Hammet continued their advocacy in the face of peril, including testi- fying be fore the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Jackson, Miss. in February 1965. They were sub sequently warned to cease advocating for their rights and hanged in effigy by local Klansmen. By the mid-1960s, Klan murders of civil rights workers, such as the 1964 slayings of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, had become all too common. On Jan. 11, 1966, the house of prominent Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer was firebombed by KKK night riders. He died of his injuries the next day. The same day Dahmer died, Keglar and Hammet quietly traveled to Jackson to testify at a hearing sponsored by Sen. Kennedy on dis - crimination and poverty in the Mississippi Delta. On their ride home, the two women and other passengers were forced off the road in a small town near Greenwood, Miss. Four of the passengers, including a white Massachu- setts college student, were severely beaten. Family members were barred from the scene, but one of Keglar's sons, Robert Keglar, went to the site and interviewed witnesses. His mother, Birdie, was decapi- tated. Hamlet's arms were severed from her body. County authorities never conducted an investigation and fabricated a tale of an "accident" caused by a drunk driver. Another of Keglar's sons, James, Martese's grandfather, home from the military, worked to uncover the truth. After contacting the FBI, he was mysteriously found dead three months later in a suspicious fire in his home. To this day, the murders remain a "cold case," one of many unresolved in one of the states where the Supreme Court says discrim- inatory voting rights practices are in the past, even as 21 states, encouraged by the court's action, enact new suppression laws. Alabama, where the Selma 51 events next March will recall that long struggle, has enacted some of the most draconian restric- tions, including requiring voters to have the Department of Motor Vehicles issue IDs, RoseAnn DeMoro Executive Director, National Nurses United Unfinished Work RNs champion voting rights for all (Continued on page 15) RN Martese Chism marches in Selma, Ala.

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