NORWAY – The civil rights movement is not and was not ever just about one man, activist Bob Brown told an audience of about 15 people Tuesday.

In a presentation at the Fare Share Commons, he said many people saw the civil rights movement as “one-man, top down show,” referring to the large role Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played.

Brown said King did not want to be a leader.

“I happen to know he was pushed every step of the way,” Brown said. “He could be pushed, because he had principles. The old preachers would fight among themselves. King was the new face. He was chosen to lead.”

In the 1960s, Brown organized for the Congress of Racial Equality, served as Midwest director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and founded the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party.

He also worked as an organizer for the political campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago, and U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun.

Last month, Brown, a co-director of Pan-African Roots, filed a class action lawsuit in Chicago on behalf of all descendants of enslaved Africans in Africa and elsewhere, whom he said were and are victims of slavery, colonialism, segregation and apartheid.

He told the audience Tuesday night that there were many unsung heroes of the movement and noted that today, as 50 years ago, youths and women are key elements to the movement on the grass-roots level.

He said many claim Rosa Parks was the mother of the movement, but those who got little to no publicity such as Ella Baker, Christine Johnson and Shelley Graham Dubois, were equally important.

Baker was an NAACP organizer whose efforts led to a nearly tripling in size of the organization at a time when it was outlawed in many states.

Brown said Johnson was a mentor to Malcolm X, who introduced him to Dubois, who later introduced him to African leaders.

“It is the masses of people who make history,” Brown said. “Whether they are recorded on TV or newspapers, or not.”

Brown said he particularly enjoyed talking to youth and said he had spoken at Gould Academy in Bethel, Bates College in Lewiston and had a speaking engagement for Wednesday at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in Paris.

“We have to transmit our visions, history to kids,” Brown said. “Because if we don’t, they’re doomed, doomed to make the same mistakes over again.”

Brown talked about the exploitation of labor, “They close a door to a factory in South Carolina and open one in India,” and politics, “. . . anybody is better than Bush.”

jsmedley@sunjournal.com

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