Inez Jesse Baskin (June 18, 1916 – June 28, 2007) was an American journalist and civil rights supporter who covered the

Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...

and the Montgomery bus boycott for

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

readers and publications.

Biography

Baskin was born in Florala, Alabama, on June 18, 1916, to Cora Turner and Albert Lorenzo Turner. When Baskin was two years old, she and her parents moved to

Montgomery, Alabama Montgomery is the capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama and the county seat of Montgomery County. Named for the Irish soldier Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River, on the coastal Plain of the Gulf of Mexico. In the 202 ...

. Florala, Alabama became too unsafe to reside in because of the

Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...

. There, she attended Booker T. Washington High School. She married Wilbur Baskin in the Baptist Church. After positions as a teacher and a typist, she became a journalist and reporter for the "Negro News" section of the Montgomery Adviser newspaper. In 1955, following the arrest of Rosa Parks, Baskin was hired by Jet Magazine and the American Negro Press to cover the Montgomery bus boycott and other, lesser known events that occurred in the black community. Baskin was an active supporter of the bus boycott and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as a reporter of the event. She is most famous for riding one seat in front of Martin Luther King Jr. on a Montgomery bus during the boycott. Baskin was known to support suffrage, having been photographed in a convertible, with a sign that declared her support for Young Alabama Democrats, and said that she was a registered voter. Baskin graduated from what is now Alabama State University with an education degree. She received a degree in divinity from

Selma University Selma University is a Private historically black Baptist Bible college in Selma, Alabama. It is affiliated with the Alabama State Missionary Baptist Convention. History The institution was founded in 1878 as the Alabama Baptist Normal and The ...

, and taught classes to ministers in theological schools. She was a licensed social worker and a church pianist. She implemented Montgomery, Alabama's first Head Start program, as well as its first hot-lunch program for low-income children. Towards the end of her life, Baskin was passionate about teaching young children about racism, and influencing them to grow up without hatred. She believed that hatred was taught, and that no one was born with it. She spoke to groups of children across the country about her experience in the Civil Rights Movement. Baskin continued to write until her death, writing her own quarterly newspaper, "The Monitor." Baskin gave a keynote address at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, in 2007. The same year, the university established a scholarship in her name, called the "Willie Mae Goodwine and Inez J. Baskin Scholarship of Journalism". She died in

, of heart failure, on June 28, 2007.

References

External links

Four photographs of Inez Jesse Turner Baskin as a child in Florala, AlabamaInez Baskin Papers
Activists for African-American civil rights 1916 births 2007 deaths Writers from Montgomery, Alabama Journalists from Alabama 20th-century American journalists {{civil-rights-movement-stub

Biography

References

Further reading

External links