A near-capacity crowd turned out late Sunday afternoon at the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle to cheer an unprecedented event on the Vineyard - the first Freedom Fund rally to support equal rights for Negroes throughout the country. The sponsor of the affair was the Cape Cod branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The site was highly appropriate, for Oak Bluffs and, more specifically, the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association which operates the historic Tabernacle, have long epitomized the goals of equality that the NAACP actively promotes.
“Mainly we’re taking food and morale,” Mrs. Stanley Murphy of Chilmark remarked on Tuesday, on the eve of the departure of five Vineyard women - Mrs. David E. Lilienthal Jr., Mrs. Henry C. Smith, Mrs. Nancy Hodgson, Mrs. Milton Mazer, and Mrs. Murphy - for Williamston, N. C., that southern community in which the segregated black population has become allied with the Vineyard in a freedom movement.
The following Statement of Interpretation was given at Grace Church, Vineyard Haven, on Sunday morning, by the Rev. D. Norman Brady of Falmouth. Mr. Brady was supplying at the service of morning prayer in the absence of the Rev. Henry L. Bird, rector. The statement:
In a letter to Rev. Henry L. Bird, the text of which follows, Mrs. Robert W. Nevin of Edgartown has expressed her support and admiration for his decision to join the civil rights demonstration in North Carolina:
“As one of your parishioners and a fellow citizen, I want to give full support to your decision to join an anti-segregation demonstration in Williamston, N. C., with its almost inevitable result of your having been jailed there.
The action which led to the jailing of the Rev. Henry L. Bird in Williamston, N. C., last week, is reminiscent of an anecdote about Henry Thoreau of Massachusetts. Thoreau was put into Concord jail because he refused action which he believed was immoral. Emerson strolled down to the jail to visit his friend. “Why are you here, Henry?” he said. “Why are you not here, Waldo?” replied Thoreau.
Williamston. Town (Pop. 3,966) co, seat of martin Co., n.e. N. C., on the Roanoke and ESE of Rocky Mount; inc. 1779. It is a tobacco market and has fisheries, a peanut processing factory, and lumber mills.
President Clinton shed the defiance that characterized the televised address following his August 17 grand jury testimony for a more humble tone when he spoke about forgiveness to a diverse gathering of more than 500 Vineyard residents and visitors at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs on Friday.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s helped define the way our society thinks and acts today. Since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march on Washington, D.C., 35 years ago, millions of people have viewed their place in America in a different light.
Now, the Vineyard has the chance to experience part of that legacy. Cong. John Lewis visits the Island today to celebrate the anniversary of the movement and reflect on the meaning of acts of service.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia visits Martha’s Vineyard on Friday, August 28 to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and to introduce Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. One of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement, John Lewis is the only major speaker at the 1963 March on Washington still living.
