Resilience Comic Book Project
Storyboard Text
- Peggy Jean Conner
- SIenna Armani
- Initially, Conner was not going to get involved with Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, the organizers of SNCC when they came to Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1962, but when they set up Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office right across from “Jean’s Beauty Shop” (Conner's beauty shop) on Mobile Street, she became interested. Conner's father, John Henry Gould, was a registered voter in Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s and she wouldoccasionaly accompany her father to voter registration meetings, and at one of the meetings, Victoria Gray asked if she would be interested in becoming a citizenship teacher. She agreed and went to Dorchester Cooperative Community Center in McIntosh, Georgia for training. As a teacher, Conner worked through the process of registering to vote with her students and taught them how to understand, interpret, and apply the Constitution.
- In april 1964, Connor founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) , which was a parallel political party that would be open to all, regardless of race
- When the time came to register to vote, Black residents in Hattiesburg were faced with oddly specific questions to keep them off the rolls.
- In April 1964, Conner was arrested for voting rights at the Forrest County Courthouse.
- The orgnaization went door-to-door and began registering people and organizing meetings on the precinct, county, district, and state levels.
- Connor and others took matters into her own hands “We would go and try to register; couldn’t register. And then when we decided to go to the meetings, we couldn’t get in the meetings. And that just frustrated us really.”
- One of the MFDP’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 resulted in a refusal to accept the two-seat compromise offered by Democratic Party leaders. On the way home from Atlantic City, a group of angry whitesattempted to stop the MFDP’s bus. Connor left her seat and walked up to the bus driver, pulling out a large knife. “Now, if this bus stops, your head comes off.” SNCC project director Lawrence Guyot saw that she “understood that the right to vote was tied to the right to live and die.”
- In her sixties, her and other movement folk filed suit against Paul B. Johnson (the governor of Mississippi) protest the legality of multi-member districts.
- After years of waiting, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the “apportionment provisions in the Mississippi Constitution and statutes contradicted the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and were therefore unconstitutional.”
- 1962 and 1963 , Connor taught citizenship classes at True Light Baptist Church under the authority of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (SCLC)
- Connor proudly said, “I filed suit against the state of Mississippi, and won.”
- On February 25, 1979, Connor received the Carter G. Woodson Black History Award for Courage in Civil Rights
- In 2002, she was awarded a Lifetime Service Achievement Award from the Youth Action Council of Dream (Drug-Free Resources for Education and Alternatives in Mississippi) of Hattiesburg, Inc
- She suit filed in her favor against Owl Drug Store, who refused her service due to the color of her skin.
- She was presented an Appreciation of Service Award by EURO, an organization of Eureka, Rowan, and Royal Street High School alumni, for her service as secretary of the organization from 1977 to 2002.
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