Ester King, someone most of us have never heard of, but who spent more than four decades on the front lines of protests and progressive organizing in the modern civil rights movement, is dead.
As he grew older, found a career, married and had children, the movement of his youth became the calling of his life, writes Cindy George for the Houston Chronicle.
He founded the National Black United Front, he relentlessly organized and agitated until an episode of cardiac arrest in mid-August. King, 68, died Thursday, according to a story carried in the Houston Chronical.
I've put a link up to King's entire story, and it is worthy of reading if you are interested in true civil rights history, and not the whitewash put out by Hollywood in movies like The Help.
What particularly drew me to King's story was his explanation about his initial interest in social justice: "There was one incident that really caught my attention, the Emmett Till lynching in Money, Mississippi in 1955. He was my age, on vacation with relatives in a rural farming town just like Magnolia Springs. As I looked at that infamous picture of his coffin-enclosed corpse (almost recognizable as human) in Jet magazine, I learned to my utter horror that lynching was not reserved for adults."
Here's the link to the Houston post --
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