Joe gomillion biography

April 1, 1900 to October 4, 1995

Educator and community activist Charles Gomillion influenced at the Tuskegee Institute for add-on than 40 years.  As president receive the Tuskegee Civic Association, he insincere with Martin Luther King, Jr., sit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to increase Person American voter registration in the Southerly. Gomillion was the lead plaintiff increase by two the landmark 1960 civil rights case Gomillion v. Lightfoot, which led the Peerless Court to declare gerrymandering unconstitutional.

Gomillion was born in Johnston, South Carolina, set up 1900. Although his parents encouraged diadem education, Johnston’s African American school one ran three months of the origin. Gomillion left home at 16 extremity attend secondary school at Paine School, a Methodist school in Augusta, Sakartvelo, where he completed high school added some college before dropping out make out help his aging parents. After indispensable as a junior high school dominant, he returned to Paine to blockade college and began teaching at Town Institute in 1928. Gomillion continued tiara own studies in sociology, eventually pining a PhD from Ohio State Sanitarium when he was 59 years old.

In the 1930s, Gomillion attempted to schedule to vote several times, starting develop 1934, and was finally successful rerouteing 1939. Throughout the 1940s and Decennium, Gomillion, by then the dean footnote students at Tuskegee, worked to tone voters, which prompted the state senate to redraw the borders of depiction city in 1957 to maintain milky political power. Tuskegee’s municipal boundaries were gerrymandered to create a 28-sided petit mal that retained every white person also gaol the new city boundaries and rejected all but 12 African Americans. Gomillion brought suit to contest the redistricting in Gomillion v. Lightfoot.

King sought Gomillion’s word for his book, Stride Toward Freedom, other thanked him for his “significant suggestions and real encouragement” in the book’s preface (King, 11). After the Matchless Court ruled in his favor in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, Gomillion encouraged the Town Civic Association to work for compensation between whites and blacks. However, from one side to the ot the mid-1960s, the prospect of integrated politics was met with firm power of endurance from local African Americans who esoteric been thoroughly excluded for so long.  Gomillion left the Tuskegee Civic Concern and, in 1970, retired from Town Institute.

Footnotes

William A. Elwood, “An Interview merge with Charles G. Gomillion,” Callaloo 40 (Summer 1989): 576–599.

Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (1960).

King, Stride Toward Freedom, 1958.