Unita Blackwell, born U. Z. Brown in a sharecropper's shack in Lula, Mississippi, on March 18, 1933, became a SNCC activist in 1964 and represented the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. After moving with her mother from Lula to Memphis and then to West Helena, Arkansas, she was encouraged by a teacher to speak in school assembly, and together they chose the name Unita Zelma. She married Jeremiah Blackwell of Mayersville, and they had one child, Jeremiah Blackwell, Jr. In 1964, when she tried to register to vote, she was turned away from the courthouse, threatened by armed white men in trucks, and fired from her job. Stokely Carmichael asked her to be a SNCC field representative, and she organized meetings in her county and surrounding ones, found preachers willing to host meetings in their churches, and learned civil disobedience techniques to remain calm during verbal or physical abuse. The local Klan threw homemade bombs into her yard, and in early 1965 she testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission about her difficulties in registering to vote. In June of that year she was one of 482 arrested during a march protesting a special session of the Mississippi legislature aimed at avoiding the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, and protesters were jailed in livestock barns at the state fairgrounds, where many were beaten and otherwise abused. She was instrumental in creating Mississippi Action for Community Education and the Head Start program, traveled the state and nation as a National Council of Negro Women community organizer from 1967 to 1975, and in 1976 became the first black female mayor in Mississippi, serving as mayor of Mayersville until 1993. She was also appointed in 1976 to President Jimmy Carter's Presidential Advisory Committee, worked to mobilize the Delta behind Governor William Winter's education bill, ran for Congress in 1993 and lost to Bennie Thompson, and that year received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, four honorary doctorates, and many other awards for her contributions to human rights.
