A panel discussion entitled "Catfish to Manufacturing: The Evolution of Change," will open the 2010-2011 Medgar Evers/ Ella Baker Civil Rights Lecture Series at Delta State University at 6 p.m., Oct. 7, in the Seminar Room of the Capps Archives and Museum on the campus.
Panelists Charles Modley, chairperson, Sunflower County Voters League; Willie Spurlock, Hospice Administrator, Memorial Hospice; and James Coleman, former Union Officer, United Steel Workers, will discuss the 1990 Strike by North Mississippi catfish workers considered to be a landmark event in the history of the Southern labor movement. The strike was the largest by black workers in Mississippi. This strike garnered the attention of both civil rights and labor movements.
Twenty years later, this same community of workers, is fighting to sustain and improve impoverished working conditions in an economy of high unemployment and in a declining manufacturing sector of the state.
The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Agora Club and the Diversity Committee at Delta State University and the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizen and Democracy.
For more information, contact Arlene Sanders at 662-846-4095, or e-mail asanders@deltastate.edu, or The Hamer institute at 601-979-1562, or e-mail hamerinstitute@jsums.edu.
