"For all the stacks of material that 79-year-old Maria Gitin has in her archives, there are just a couple grainy photos from the summer of 1965-right before her sophomore year at San Francisco State-which she spent in Wilcox County, Alabama, sleeping on church pews, ducking gunfire, getting arrested, and helping Black residents exercise their long-standing 15th Amendment right to vote."
"Gitin was assigned to the very small, very segregated town of Camden, Alabama, where peaceful protests turned to smoke-bombed mayhem, along with marches, cross burnings, mass arrests, gunfire, and rallies, and multiple visits from Dr. King himself, who sometimes spoke from inside a bulletproof trailer locals had constructed for him. Movement leaders thought the presence of white youth would mean media coverage. But even the local paper, The Wilcox County Progressive Era -where a vehement segregationist led the newsroom-never ran a story."
Maria Gitin, now 79, has extensive archives but only a couple grainy photos from the summer of 1965. At 19 she saw footage of violent attacks on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge and felt called to join civil rights activism by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeals and liberation theology. She obtained parental permission, raised travel funds, trained in Atlanta, and joined hundreds of college students to support voter registration across the South. Assigned to Wilcox County and Camden, Alabama, she slept on church pews, faced gunfire, smoke bombs, cross burnings, mass arrests, and helped Black residents exercise 15th Amendment voting rights. Movement leaders sought media coverage, but local newspapers often ignored events.
Read at The Nation
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