By Sam Roberts
Charles McDew, whose three arrests in two days as a college student for violating South Carolina’s forbidding racial codes transformed him into a civil rights pioneer, died on April 3 in West Newton, Mass. He was 79.
The cause was a heart attack he had while visiting his longtime partner, Beryl Gilfix, for the Passover holiday, his daughter, Eva Goodman, said. Mr. McDew, who had converted to Judaism, lived in St. Paul.
In 1960, just months after those three arrests, Mr. McDew, as a college freshman from Ohio, became a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group dedicated to direct action but nonviolent tactics in fighting for racial justice.
From later that fall until 1963, he was the organization’s second chairman, serving between Marion Barry, who went on to become the mayor of Washington, D.C., and John Lewis, who was later elected to Congress from Georgia.
In the early 1960s, a growing number of audacious adolescents and young adults gravitated to SNCC (or Snick, as it was popularly called) because they were disenchanted with traditional rights groups.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The New York Times
The cause was a heart attack he had while visiting his longtime partner, Beryl Gilfix, for the Passover holiday, his daughter, Eva Goodman, said. Mr. McDew, who had converted to Judaism, lived in St. Paul.
In 1960, just months after those three arrests, Mr. McDew, as a college freshman from Ohio, became a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group dedicated to direct action but nonviolent tactics in fighting for racial justice.
From later that fall until 1963, he was the organization’s second chairman, serving between Marion Barry, who went on to become the mayor of Washington, D.C., and John Lewis, who was later elected to Congress from Georgia.
In the early 1960s, a growing number of audacious adolescents and young adults gravitated to SNCC (or Snick, as it was popularly called) because they were disenchanted with traditional rights groups.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The New York Times
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