Nobel Peace Prize Recipients

DON NOBLE: Tome details civil rights planning

It’s a sentimental poem, but appropriate to this charming memoir.

Richie Jean Sherrod was the wife of Sullivan Jackson, a black dentist in Selma who trained at Meharry Dental School.

During the civil rights movement, their house on a quiet Selma street became a refuge, a hotel and headquarters for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, Andrew Young and others in the civil rights movement.

The big studies of the movement have mostly been written, but we can look forward, I think, to more and more of these small and personal accounts.

Mrs. Jackson remembers many of the events that happened in her home. One night, with Dr. King on the phone to the White House, the Voting Rights Bill was, basically, drafted in her living room, the participants working for hours to get the language right.

On another occasion, there were two Nobel Peace Prize winners sitting at her table, Dr. King and Ralph Bunche who had a long, distinguished career as diplomat and undersecretary at the United Nations.

On the morning of the march to Montgomery, Jackson recounts how Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary set up his prayer station on the coffee table and Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church set up his on the mantel. The Jacksons’ daughter, Jawana, saw Archbishop Iakovos and announced, “Mamma, Santa Claus is here.”

Many meetings were held, with debates and disagreements. Jackson notes how Dr. King heard all points of view but insisted that no matter how heated the opinions, they should all “leave the house united” and never allow a sense that “all was not calm and steady in the leadership.”

The Jacksons ran risks allowing their home to be known as King’s headquarters, but their determination was made of iron. Dr. Jackson, with his bachelor’s from the University of West Virginia, service in Europe in World War II and dental degree had been denied the right to vote in Dallas County.

The white leadership of Selma and Dallas County comes in for some criticism, but it’s not what the reader might expect. Of Sheriff Jim Clark, Jackson writes “bless his heart wherever he is. If his heart had not been filled with so much hate, the movement would have had some problems, but we could always count on him to give the correct amount of fuel to the fire when it was needed. He did not realize his contribution.

“Yard sign claims Barack Obama has fired more cruise missiles than ...

The decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama in 2009, the first year of his presidency, has long rankled his opponents, who felt he was inexperienced and hadn’t earned the prestigious award.

And even many of Obama’s supporters were disappointed by his decisions to continue the U.S. role in Iraq and send more troops to Afghanistan.

So when Obama in March 2011 decided to enforce a “no-fly zone” to prevent Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi from crushing rebel forces, criticism flared.

One of the most cutting lines, which ricocheted around blogs and even appeared on bumper stickers from a Libertarian website, stated: “Obama’s fired more cruise missiles than all other Nobel peace prize winners combined.

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