Longtime Mississippi civil rights activist Hollis Watkins has died. He was 82. Watkins started challenging segregation and racial oppression in his home state when he was a teenager, and he worked alongside civil rights icons including Medgar Evers and Bob Moses.
Watkins was born July 29, 1941 — the youngest of 12 children whose parents were sharecroppers in the rural Chisholm Mission community in southwest Mississippi’s Lincoln County. Watkins said he was 4 years old when he started carrying water to his parents and siblings as they worked in the fields. As he got older, he helped pick cotton, uproot corn and dig up stumps.
“I was just on a quest to find the answers to why white people could get away with all of this, and we had to treat white people this way, and they could go here, and we couldn’t go there, and all of us are supposed to be treated equal,” Watkins said in a 2010 interview with a crew from the University of North Carolina Greensboro for a series onWatkins attended Tougaloo College, a historically Black school in Jackson that was a safe haven for civil rights workers.
Watkins was arrested and jailed multiple times, including in 1962, when he and other activists were sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman after registering Black people to vote in Greenwood. “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.
Watkins in 1989 founded Southern Echo, a group that worked in community organizing, politics, education and agriculture.
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