Longtime Mississippi civil rights activist Hollis Watkins has died.
Watkins — who also sometimes went by Hollis Watkins Muhammad — died Wednesday at his home in the Jackson suburb of Clinton, Mississippi, according to the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, a group for which he was chairman.
He would walk to school through the woods, even as white children rode buses to their segregated and better-equipped school. Questioning inequality that shaped his family's life, Watkins joined a youth chapter of the NAACP. Watkins organized Black voter registration drives in McComb and Pike County, near where he had grown up. He and another SNCC activist, Curtis Hayes, were arrested after they conducted a sit-in to try to integrate the Woolworth’s lunch counter in McComb, on Aug. 26, 1961.
“We turned that mass meeting into a prayer service, and then we turned the prayer service into a motivational piece to get people, more people, to become registered to vote,” Watkins said in the 2013 AP interview.
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