Sanford R. Leigh
Sanford Rose Leigh (born 1934,
Early life
Leigh was born in 1934, in Bridgeport, Connecticut to
Leigh became the assistant to Bayard Rustin, when Rustin was organizing the 1963 March On Washington. After the March, Leigh joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta. In SNCC he worked at times with Communications Director, Julian Bond, and manned the WATS-line. WATS was SNCC's main means of communicating with the activists in the hamlets of the South. WATS saved money and had the advantage of avoiding putting calls through the local telephone operators, who could listen to the calls and were often very friendly with the constabulary and the Ku Klux Klan. Leigh could type 120 words a minute and his efficiency and competence made him invaluable to the organization.
The Hattiesburg Project
In January 1964, Leigh went to
Under Leigh, the Hattiesburg Project grew to be the largest and most diverse in Mississippi Freedom Summer. It had seven Freedom Schools, two community centers and three libraries (persons of color could not use the town library and had no borrowing privileges).[2] The Freedom Summer project provided legal services donated by lawyers from three organizations, medical services provided by specialists who rotated through, usually during their summer vacations, and teams of ministers who came to work on voter registration under the direction of Rev. Bob Beech of the National Council of Churches Ministry, which also sponsored a local Ministers' Union.[3]
Leigh also helped manage the
When the Department of Economic Opportunity launched
Later life
Leigh later worked as
In 1972 police found Leigh in a subway in Harlem, brutally beaten. He developed amnesia, and his friends searched in vain for six months, until he told Harlem Hospital social workers the name someone called him in a dream. When he began to regain his memory he was found beaten near his room in the YMCA in 1974. He sustained brain damage, never recovered his memory, and was placed in adult home care.[5]
References
- ^ Oral history with Sheila Michaels, Civil Rights in Mississippi digital archive, University of Southern Mississippi, June 5, 1999 (see http://www.usm.edu/crdp/index.html)
- ^ Oral History with Sandra Adickes, Civil Rights in Mississippi digital archive, University of Southern Mississippi, October 21, 1999
- ^ Bruce Hilton, Delta Ministry, (McMillan Publishing, New York, New York), 1969
- ^ Curry, Constance W. Silver Rights, Chapel Hill, (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Workman Publishing), 1995, pp. 154-57, 173-75
- ^ Tusa, Bobs M, and Randall, Herbert. Faces of Freedom Summer, (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press), 2001. pp. 26, 28.