ODE TO A TRUE FREEDOM FIGHTER
by Cash Michaels
No, this isn’t what I planned to write about at all this week. But when I saw this August 3rd Facebook post from my friend, Victor McSurely, “With typical resolve Margaret wasted little time and left her body peacefully a little before 4am. Those who pray and send felt wishes perhaps may wish to add grace and strength to her flight,” I knew I had to say something, write something, in tribute to one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever met in my life. I pray I do her legacy justice.
Her name was Margaret Herring. I didn’t know her well, though many veterans of the old civil rights movement community did. I came to meet and know this unbelievably great woman of history several years ago when I was producing a film I’m very proud of, “AL: MY BROTHER,” about amazing civil rights attorney and anti-racism activist Alan McSurely.
Al, who has just turned an incredible 90 years-old last month, once worked closely with Bishop William Barber during the old “Moral Mondays” period of the NC NAACP when Barber served as president. Several years before that, Al was a noteworthy civil rights attorney in Chapel Hill who successfully litigated racial discrimination cases against UNC-Chapel Hill, state government, and other entities who needed their butts kicked in court.
And long before any of that, even before he became a civil rights attorney, Al was once married to Margaret Herring. They were both radical white anti-racism activists in the movement, who dedicated their lives together fighting discrimination, poverty and for those who needed champions.
Now I’m a storyteller at heart, and one of the great joys of my life was to tell the jaw dropping story of Margaret Herring and Al McSurely in “AL: MY BROTHER,” because in my book, their story mattered, and still does.
They met during the 1960s at the height of the civil rights movement. Al found himself so deeply committed to the cause, especially after meeting and working with leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Attorney Floyd McKissick and Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael through C.O.R.E. (Congress of Racial Equality), it painfully cost him his first marriage and family.
It was during Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” that Al began working in Washington, D.C. at the United Planning Organization (UPO), which was devoted to helping poor people in downtrodden communities across the country overcome poverty. That’s where he met a young, bright, extremely beautiful yet committed activist named Margaret, a mother of two who was also deeply involved in the movement.
How deeply involved?
Margaret was so committed to the cause, this Winston-Salem native and daughter of a white minister would routinely sneak into Ku Klux Klan meetings on behalf of the Black-led SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), gather intelligence on the Klan’s planned activities, and report back directly to SNCC leaders Julian Bond and James Forman.
Talk about dangerous work!
Yes, on the outside, Margaret was an extraordinarily beautiful white Southern belle, that few would guess on the inside was actually a committed revolutionary leftist who devoutly believed in Black Power and preached about the fraught relationship in the 1960s between racism and capitalism.
That may turn some folks off today, but she was just one of the many committed white '60s activists like Bob Zellner (who helped to found SNCC at Shaw University in 1961 and whose father was a klansman); Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman (two volunteers from the North who went to the Deep South to register Black people to vote, and were kidnapped and murdered by the Klan along with Black activist James Chaney in Mississippi), and Ms. Viola Liuzzo, a young white woman fatally shot by the Klan. Her “crime”? Ms. Liuzzo faithfully transported participants in the Montgomery, Alabama march for voting rights in her car.
These, along with other anti-racist activists like Al and Margaret, literally risked their lives to bring about freedom, justice and equality for Americans that did not look like them, displaying the kind of courage and yes, patriotism you just don’t see today.
Indeed, as soldiers of the movement, they were taught to expect to die for the cause. In doing research for “AL: MY BROTHER,” I realized that as a society, we don’t give these brave and committed white activists enough credit for their sacrifices.
Many of these people rode on interstate buses traveling through the South, and got their brains beaten in and bloodied at local bus stations, all because they wanted their fellow American citizens to able to ride too regardless of the color of their skin. These were allies for equality, and I for one, appreciate their commitment and sacrifices.
“Young [white] students identified with the struggle," Georgia Congressman and movement veteran John Lewis once told me when he visited North Carolina in 2018. “Thousands of young white men and women left their homes in the North, and even some in the heart of the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement to work on voter registration in North Carolina and South Carolina, in Georgia and Alabama.”
“Those whites who broke with their culture to work with us were of great value,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me the last time I saw him in Raleigh before he passed.
This was the great cloth of courage Margaret Herring was cut from.
In the late '60s, while coming back from a trip out west, Al and Margaret stopped in Louisville, Kentucky to visit Carl and Anne Braden of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). The Bradens were working with poor, mostly white Kentucky coal miners in the Appalachian mountains of Pike County. These people were being paid pennies to risk their lives in those dangerous coal mines for the rich fat cat coal mine owners, but it was the only way of life they knew. The Bradens, who were deeply respected for their work in the movement, hired Al and Margaret to move to Pike County for the purpose of starting an anti-poverty program and teaching those people how to organize their political power for change.
As you can imagine, this was extremely dangerous work, and Al and Margaret instantly became targets of the power structure there as troublemaking outsiders.
For the record, they were also labeled “communists” for teaching poor Whites that poor Blacks were not their enemy, and that they should all unite to start their own political fusion movement to take over Pike County. “I later heard that leaders of the local chamber of commerce didn’t like us outside agitators coming there stirring up their poor people,” Margaret recalled in the film.
“Their poor people!” she sarcastically repeated.
What happened next to Al and Margaret during their time in Pike County, Kty. could fill a novel. On August 11th, 1967, exactly 59 years ago this week, sheriff’s deputies raided their rented mountain cabin while Margaret was five months pregnant, confiscated all of their left-wing reading materials and personal papers as evidence they were plotting to "overthrow the state of Kentucky." Authorities charged and arrested them for sedition, and threw the couple in jail. They were branded “communists” and “enemies of the state.”
Renowned liberal defense attorney William Kunsler and his team answered Margaret’s call, and immediately challenged the constitutionality of Kentucky’s sedition law in federal court. If Kunsler lost, Margaret and Al each faced twenty years in prison.
The case made national news, especially when a federal three-judge panel in September 1967 ruled 2-1 that the law was unconstitutional and in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Al and Margaret then returned to Pike County to continue their work, but had to go to the US Supreme Court to get their personal papers and reading materials back. Before those materials were returned, a powerful segregationist Democratic senator, John McClellan (Ark) chair of a congressional investigations subcommittee, decided Al and Margaret were indeed dangerous people, and had their materials secretly copied as evidence to implicate them in urban riots occurring across the country.
Months later after Margaret gave birth to her son, Victor, someone threw eight sticks of lit dynamite at their home late at night while they were asleep, damaging the room Margaret, baby Victor and Al all slept in. They escaped injury, but decided to flee Kentucky for their lives. It wasn’t long before they found themselves in a prolonged legal battle with that congressional subcommittee which charged them with contempt for not returning their confiscated materials. Margaret and Al lost that case in 1970, then appealed to the Supreme Court to have their convictions overturned.
The prolonged appeals battle took years to resolve, and in 1972, Al and Margaret eventually won. But it wasn’t over. Now the couple decided to sue Sen. McClellan and several Kentucky officials for violating their rights with their false contempt convictions, and invading Margaret’s privacy by showing Al her love letters to a Washington Post columnist she liked before they were married. Al and Margaret ultimately won their case ten years later, and were awarded $1.6 million in damages, but the tremendous pressure on their marriage finally reached the breaking point after 17 long years of court cases, and the pair divorced in 1980 and went their separate ways.
“We both grew, but in different directions,” Margaret recalled. “I have great respect for the work[Al has] done with the NC NAACP.”
Al used part of his share of the award to go to law school, later graduating NCCU Law.
Margaret left the spotlight to raise Victor, and become a nurse, still supporting the movement and causes she deeply believed in. She and Al remained close friends and political comrades until her death earlier this month.
She had a stroke in 2021, and moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts to be closer to her son, Victor.
Margaret Herring, at least the one I met while producing my film, was a true fighter for freedom in my book who held political beliefs maybe a little too radical for me, but she had the right to do so. This woman spent the balance of her young life fighting for a righteous cause, and did so with unmatched courage and dignity.
It’s a shame that not only is she not remembered in our history books as someone who made a difference in the cause for freedom, justice and equality, but that she lived out the rest of her days in virtual obscurity, instead of being touted as the truly inspirational figure that she was for young people to learn about.
It is absolutely refreshing to write this week about a courageous American heroine who made a difference, instead of you-know-who doing you-know-what.
I think if she were still here, Margaret Herring would agree with me, that if we want to truly take this country back, we need to commit ourselves individually and collectively to ignore the games that are being played, hunker down, and get ready to fight for our country back by voting this fall.
Only then will each one of us be worthy of the kind of courage and leadership Margaret Herring displayed during her time here on Earth.
Thank you, Ms. Herring. Thank you Margaret, and may GOD Bless you!
[Special note from Victor - An in-person memorial for Margaret Herring will be held on Wednesday August 26th at the Gathering Room of the Community Church of Chapel Hill (Unitarian) 106 Purefoy Rd, Chapel Hill NC 27514. The doors will open at 5 with a formal beginning of 5:30 (late arrival is fine). There will be light food and refreshments. Again, should people have photos or anecdotes, do send them to me. And where possible let me know if you might be coming. For the many who cannot make it, I will be creating a different online moment perhaps via zoom, regardless of how well we succeed in the virtual side of this in-person event. Much love to all.
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