The publication is reproduced in full below:
HONORING THE LIFE AND SERVICE OF CURTIS HAYES MUHAMMAD
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HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON
of mississippi
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and service of a remarkable individual, Curtis Hayes Muhammad.
Curtis Hayes Muhammad spent his entire life participating in various struggles for human rights and civil rights. His activism began in the fall of 1961. Only 18 years old, he was one of five young people from McComb, Mississippi, brave enough to respond to Bob Moses's call to begin direct action and community organizing there. He was a key member of SNCC's dangerous and groundbreaking efforts all over Mississippi throughout the sixties. Jailed many times for civil rights work, Curtis kept the principles of bottom up organizing learned from Moses and Ella Baker as the guiding foundation to subsequent efforts of union and community organizing and struggles for African Liberation. These beliefs in a cooperative society and bottom up organizing led by poor and dark-skinned people have been embraced by many contemporary movements for social justice today.
Curtis's early life experiences made him responsive to these movement ideals. He grew up in a family of sharecroppers in Chisolm Mission, Mississippi who had joined with 26 other sharecropping families and purchased a plot of land which they worked together. Raised by his grandmother, a midwife, he was taught principles of black independence and strength. Learning that his father had to flee Mississippi after killing several Ku Klux Klansmen in a gun fight, Curtis was determined to find ways to fight against Mississippi segregationists. He began preaching as a child and was encouraged by his grandmother that he had an important role to play in the liberation of black people.
Curtis's post-civil rights activism included helping to organize the 1963 Chicago School Boycott when 225,000 students walked out demanding an end to racial segregation and the disparate treatment of Black students. He was an organizer for the New Politics Convention that ran Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dick Gregory in the 1968 presidential election as third-party candidates. Curtis helped establish a radical Black bookstore in Washington, D.C. and helped create an early version of a Community Supported Agriculture project, bringing produce from Black farmers in the South to northern progressive communities in D.C. and NYC. He also worked on housing issues for poor people with the Harlem Reclamation Project which urged homeless people to take over abandoned brownstones and rehabilitate them, and thus extract ownership from the City. In Jersey City, NJ, following the same model, he assisted in the handing over of more than 60 brownstones to poor folks.
Later he worked as a union organizer for Unite in Monroe, LA. He successfully organized several dozen locals, mostly of Black women garment workers, using the Ella Baker model of organizing. As a result, the organized workers sometimes made decisions independent of and criticized by national union leaders such as calling for and enacting wildcat strikes. He went on with the now federated Unite-HERE to New Orleans organizing hotel and restaurant workers there and mentoring young folks in Union Summer. He also joined local New Orleans community members in Community Labor United, which worked on improving public education in New Orleans as the laboratory for a national Quality Education as a Civil Right Campaign.
Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring the life, legacy, and service of Mr. Curtis Hayes Muhammad.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 26
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