Unita Blackwell 1933-

Unita Blackwell was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta. She completed the eighth grade and worked as a sharecropper. In 1964, Blackwell was married, had a child and taught Sunday School when Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members came to town. Blackwell became a prominent participant in "Freedom Summer." (Interview with Unita Blackwell) Blackwell later received a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and served as a community development specialist for the National Council of Negro Women. Blackwell became the mayor of Mayersville, MS, her home, in 1976. She was the first black, female mayor in Mississippi (McCrank, 2004). In 1992, she was named as a recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" awards, largely because of her work as mayor (Kilborn, 1992). She is currently finishing her memoir, tentatively titled Barefootin': Lessons learned on the road to freedom.

Civil Rights Era

Blackwell joined SNCC during the 1964 "Freedom Summer" and began recruiting people to register to vote. She was a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation that went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ in 1964. This delegation attempted to become the official Mississippi delegates in place of the segregationist delegates from Mississippi's official democratic party.

Bibliography

Information for this biography was gathered from the following sources:

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