Bob Mants
Bob Mants | |
---|---|
Born | Robert Mants (1943-04-25)April 25, 1943 Atlanta, Georgia |
Died | December 7, 2011(2011-12-07) (aged 68) Atlanta, Georgia |
Occupation(s) | Civil rights activist; politician |
Years active | 1964–2011 |
Known for | Field secretary for SNCC |
Spouse | Joann Christian |
Children | 3 |
Robert "Bob" Mants, Jr. (April 25, 1943 – December 7, 2011) was an American civil rights activist, serving as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Mants moved to Lowndes County, working for civil rights for the remainder of his life. Lowndes County contained the majority of the distance covered by the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and was then notorious for its racist violence.
Early life
Mants was born in Atlanta, Georgia.[1] He graduated in 1961 from East Point/South Fulton High School,[1] a segregated black high school. While he was attending high school, Mants was a member of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (which would later develop into the Atlanta Student Movement) and volunteering for administrative tasks at the headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,[1] two blocks from his home.[2] He would go on to attend Morehouse College with the intention of majoring in medicine,[2] but left without graduating, working in 1964 with SNCC in Americus, Georgia. At the beginning of 1965 Mants moved to Lowndes County, AL for his job.[1]
Civil rights activism
While in Americus, Mants reported over the Wide Area Telephone Service that "negro and white" mobs were forming on the evening of July 6, 1964, possibly in response to riots the evening before or the integration of two downtown restaurants earlier in the day, which had occurred without incident. Mants was working to calm and disperse the mobs. An hour later, Mants reported a drive-by shooting with no reported injuries or deaths.[3]
Mants and Stokely Carmichael from the SNCC first arrived in Selma to participate in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march;[4] in photographs of Bloody Sunday taken by Spider Martin, Mants can be seen wearing a patterned cap, marching next to Albert Turner just behind John Lewis after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge;[5][6] earlier that morning, Mants had participated in a prayer at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the march originated, with John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and Andrew Young.[7] During the violent suppression on Bloody Sunday, Mants saved a woman from a possible beating and took her away from the tear gas cloud.[8]
While marching to Montgomery in late March 1965, Mants was passing out buttons and leaflets when a resident of Lowndes County, pleased the civil rights movement was coming to her, memorably quoted Revelation 7:9 to him.[4] In 1964, Lowndes County had no registered black voters,[9] even though the county's population was predominantly black.[10] The county was known as "Bloody Lowndes" or the rusty buckle of the Black Belt of Alabama because of its long, violent history of whites retaliating against blacks who tried to register to vote.[11][4] When Mants and other SNCC officials began to register black voters,[8] the newly registered voters, many of which still lived on plantations, were made homeless by the predominantly white landowners.[4] Many of the displaced black residents were housed in a temporary "Tent City" and subject to intimidation over the next two years as shots were regularly fired into the encampment.[2] In response, SNCC set up the Alabama Poor People's Land Fund to purchase plots of land and building materials to help the displaced black residents to build new homes.[4]
SNCC also tried a new strategy in Lowndes County, setting up the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in 1966 as an independent Black political party, adopting a snarling black panther as its logo. LCFO would in turn inspire other leaders, such as Stokely Carmichael, who adopted the structure of LCFO for Black Power, and Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the black panther logo for the Black Panther Party.[11]
Mants remained in Lowndes County after the march, saying "if there was any place I wanted to raise my kids, it would be here, because they could see black people moving forward, advancing ourselves as a race."[12] Mants served as a farm management specialist at Tuskegee University.[8] In 1984, Mants was elected to the Lowndes County Commission, unseating a white incumbent, and served one term.[2][8]
In 2000, Mants opposed the creation of a landfill along U.S. Route 80, the highway taken by marchers in the third Selma to Montgomery march, calling it "an insult." As head of Lowndes County Friends of the Trail, he noted "you can't commemorate [the route of the march] on the one hand and desecrate it on the other."[13]
Bob Mants died after a heart attack on December 7, 2011, while visiting Atlanta.[8] A memorial service was held in Lowndes County on December 17, 2011, where several speakers praised him and his three children (Kadejah, Kumasi, and Katanga) expressed their appreciation for the honors bestowed to him.[8] In addition to his three children, Mants is survived his wife, Joann Christian (also a noted civil rights activist) and seven grandchildren.[1][8] Mants is also survived by three sisters (Dorothy, Roberta, Otelia).
References
- ^ a b c d e Kranz, Sharlene (7 December 2011). "Robert "Bob" Mants (1943–2011)". SNCC Legacy Project. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ a b c d "Bob Mants: April 25, 1943–December 7, 2011; Raised in Atlanta, Georgia". SNCC Digital. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 2012. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ King, Mary E. (1962–1999). King—July, 1964 WATS Line Calls (Report). Wisconsin Historical Society: Freedom Summer Collection. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ a b c d e Bob Mants (18 October 1988). "Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985" (Interview). Interviewed by Carroll Blue. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Martin, Spider (7 March 1965). "1/5 'Selma 1965 Bloody Sunday': Hosea Williams and John Lewis leading marchers over the Alabama River". Spider Martin. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Martin, Spider (7 March 1965). "1/7 'Two Minute Warning': Hosea Williams and John Lewis confront troopers on Bloody Sunday". Spider Martin. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Martin, Spider (7 March 1965). "Bob Mants, John Lewis, Hosea Williams and Andrew Young with Brown's Chapel AME Church in the Background". Steven Kasher Gallery. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ a b c d e f g Benn, Alvin (1 March 2015). "Never one to promote himself, Mants was part of legacy". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Firestone, David (14 March 2002). "Ex-Black Militant Gets Life for Murdering Deputy". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Smothers, Ronald (5 March 1990). "A Selma March Relives Those First Steps of '65". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
Two months after Bloody Sunday, Robert Mants said as he marched today, an organization he was in got to work in nearby Lowndes County, which was 81 percent black and had fewer than 30 black registered voters and no black elected officials.
- ^ a b Jeffries, Hasan Kwame (August 2010). Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt. New York, New York: New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-81474-331-7. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Applebome, Peter (2 August 1994). "In Selma, Everything and Nothing Changed". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- ^ Sengupta, Somini (2 October 2000). "At Odds in Alabama Over a Landfill on a Historic Trail". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
External links
- SNCC Digital Gateway: Bob Mants, Documentary website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, telling the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee & grassroots organizing from the inside-out
- We Shall Not Be Moved: The Life and Times of the SNCC 1960–1966, Part H on Vimeo. Part of a 10-part series of videorecordings of a conference entitled We Shall Not Be Moved: The Life and Times of the SNCC, 1960–1966 held at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, on 14–16 April 1988.
- Voices of Freedom: Bob Mants on Vimeo. "My maternal grandfather ... was born a slave, had witnessed slavery, and he had also witnessed freedom. The notion of his enslavement and him being able to witness the freedom empowered me for the moment. And it still does."
- Mants, Joann Christian (2010). "We Turned This Upside-Down Country Right Side Up". In Holsaert, Faith S.; Noonan, Martha Prescod Norman; Richardson, Judy; Robinson, Betty Garman; Young, Jean Smith; Zellner, Dorothy M. (eds.). Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. pp. 128–140. ISBN 978-0-252-03557-9. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- Kranz, Sharlene (8 December 2011). "Robert "Bob" Mants (1943–2011)". Civil Rights Movement Archive. SNCC Legacy Project. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
- v
- t
- e
(timeline)
groups
- Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights
- Atlanta Student Movement
- Black Panther Party
- Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
- Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
- Committee for Freedom Now
- Committee on Appeal for Human Rights
- Council for United Civil Rights Leadership
- Council of Federated Organizations
- Dallas County Voters League
- Deacons for Defense and Justice
- Georgia Council on Human Relations
- Highlander Folk School
- Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
- Lowndes County Freedom Organization
- Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
- Montgomery Improvement Association
- NAACP
- Nashville Student Movement
- Nation of Islam
- Northern Student Movement
- National Council of Negro Women
- National Urban League
- Operation Breadbasket
- Regional Council of Negro Leadership
- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
- Southern Regional Council
- Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
- The Freedom Singers
- United Auto Workers (UAW)
- Wednesdays in Mississippi
- Women's Political Council
- Ralph Abernathy
- Victoria Gray Adams
- Zev Aelony
- Mathew Ahmann
- Muhammad Ali
- William G. Anderson
- Gwendolyn Armstrong
- Arnold Aronson
- Ella Baker
- James Baldwin
- Marion Barry
- Daisy Bates
- Harry Belafonte
- James Bevel
- Claude Black
- Gloria Blackwell
- Randolph Blackwell
- Unita Blackwell
- Ezell Blair Jr.
- Joanne Bland
- Julian Bond
- Joseph E. Boone
- William Holmes Borders
- Amelia Boynton
- Bruce Boynton
- Raylawni Branch
- Stanley Branche
- Ruby Bridges
- Aurelia Browder
- H. Rap Brown
- Ralph Bunche
- Guy Carawan
- Stokely Carmichael
- Johnnie Carr
- James Chaney
- J. L. Chestnut
- Shirley Chisholm
- Colia Lafayette Clark
- Ramsey Clark
- Septima Clark
- Xernona Clayton
- Eldridge Cleaver
- Kathleen Cleaver
- Charles E. Cobb Jr.
- Annie Lee Cooper
- Dorothy Cotton
- Claudette Colvin
- Vernon Dahmer
- Jonathan Daniels
- Abraham Lincoln Davis
- Angela Davis
- Joseph DeLaine
- Dave Dennis
- Annie Devine
- Patricia Stephens Due
- Joseph Ellwanger
- Charles Evers
- Medgar Evers
- Myrlie Evers-Williams
- Chuck Fager
- James Farmer
- Walter Fauntroy
- James Forman
- Marie Foster
- Golden Frinks
- Andrew Goodman
- Robert Graetz
- Fred Gray
- Jack Greenberg
- Dick Gregory
- Lawrence Guyot
- Prathia Hall
- Fannie Lou Hamer
- Fred Hampton
- William E. Harbour
- Vincent Harding
- Dorothy Height
- Audrey Faye Hendricks
- Lola Hendricks
- Aaron Henry
- Oliver Hill
- Donald L. Hollowell
- James Hood
- Myles Horton
- Zilphia Horton
- T. R. M. Howard
- Ruby Hurley
- Cecil Ivory
- Jesse Jackson
- Jimmie Lee Jackson
- Richie Jean Jackson
- T. J. Jemison
- Esau Jenkins
- Barbara Rose Johns
- Vernon Johns
- Frank Minis Johnson
- Clarence Jones
- J. Charles Jones
- Matthew Jones
- Vernon Jordan
- Tom Kahn
- Clyde Kennard
- A. D. King
- C.B. King
- Coretta Scott King
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Martin Luther King Sr.
- Bernard Lafayette
- James Lawson
- Bernard Lee
- Sanford R. Leigh
- Jim Letherer
- Stanley Levison
- John Lewis
- Viola Liuzzo
- Z. Alexander Looby
- Joseph Lowery
- Clara Luper
- Danny Lyon
- Malcolm X
- Mae Mallory
- Vivian Malone
- Bob Mants
- Thurgood Marshall
- Benjamin Mays
- Franklin McCain
- Charles McDew
- Ralph McGill
- Floyd McKissick
- Joseph McNeil
- James Meredith
- William Ming
- Jack Minnis
- Amzie Moore
- Cecil B. Moore
- Douglas E. Moore
- Harriette Moore
- Harry T. Moore
- Queen Mother Moore
- William Lewis Moore
- Irene Morgan
- Bob Moses
- William Moyer
- Elijah Muhammad
- Diane Nash
- Charles Neblett
- Huey P. Newton
- Edgar Nixon
- Jack O'Dell
- James Orange
- Rosa Parks
- James Peck
- Charles Person
- Homer Plessy
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
- Fay Bellamy Powell
- Rodney N. Powell
- Al Raby
- Lincoln Ragsdale
- A. Philip Randolph
- George Raymond
- George Raymond Jr.
- Bernice Johnson Reagon
- Cordell Reagon
- James Reeb
- Frederick D. Reese
- Walter Reuther
- Gloria Richardson
- David Richmond
- Bernice Robinson
- Jo Ann Robinson
- Angela Russell
- Bayard Rustin
- Bernie Sanders
- Michael Schwerner
- Bobby Seale
- Cleveland Sellers
- Charles Sherrod
- Alexander D. Shimkin
- Fred Shuttlesworth
- Modjeska Monteith Simkins
- Glenn E. Smiley
- A. Maceo Smith
- Kelly Miller Smith
- Mary Louise Smith
- Maxine Smith
- Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson
- Charles Kenzie Steele
- Hank Thomas
- Dorothy Tillman
- A. P. Tureaud
- Hartman Turnbow
- Albert Turner
- C. T. Vivian
- Wyatt Tee Walker
- Hollis Watkins
- Walter Francis White
- Roy Wilkins
- Hosea Williams
- Kale Williams
- Robert F. Williams
- Andrew Young
- Whitney Young
- Sammy Younge Jr.
- Bob Zellner
- James Zwerg
songs
- "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round"
- "If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus"
- "Kumbaya"
- "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize"
- "Oh, Freedom"
- "This Little Light of Mine"
- "We Shall Not Be Moved"
- "We Shall Overcome"
- "Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed On Freedom)"
- Jim Crow laws
- Lynching in the United States
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- Buchanan v. Warley
- Hocutt v. Wilson
- Sweatt v. Painter
- Hernandez v. Texas
- Loving v. Virginia
- African-American women in the movement
- Jews in the civil rights movement
- Fifth Circuit Four
- 16th Street Baptist Church
- Kelly Ingram Park
- A.G. Gaston Motel
- Bethel Baptist Church
- Brown Chapel
- Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
- Holt Street Baptist Church
- Edmund Pettus Bridge
- March on Washington Movement
- African-American churches attacked
- List of lynching victims in the United States
- Freedom Schools
- Freedom songs
- Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam
- "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence"
- Voter Education Project
- 1960s counterculture
- African American founding fathers of the United States
- Eyes on the Prize
- In popular culture
- Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
- Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument
- Civil Rights Memorial
- Civil Rights Movement Archive
- Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument
- Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
- Freedom Rides Museum
- Freedom Riders National Monument
- King Center for Nonviolent Social Change
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
- Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
- National Civil Rights Museum
- National Voting Rights Museum
- St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument
historians