Our irregular news roundup of civil rights-related news items:
*The National Book Award goes to a Mainer who wrote a biography of Claudette Colvin, who in 1955, at age 15, refused to give up a seat on a bus (months before Rosa Parks’s storied stand). She remembered that she had a head full of history at the time. We’ll put that in the “pro” column for Maine.
*North Carolina’s own Virginia Foxx (the same Virginia Foxx who said that the murder of Matthew Shephard was a “hoax”) claims that Republicans passed the “civil rights bills of the 1960s without very much help from our friends across the aisle who love to engage in revisionist history.” Funny! In fact, careful Wikipedia research reveals that not a single southern Republican, like Foxx, voted for the Civil Rights Act.
*And finally, the FBI is asking for help finding the families of thirty-three people murdered during the civil rights era.