As remembered by Bob Moses
July 27, 2014
"They are falling all around us": Janet and I just returned from Denver saying good-by to Vincent [Hardung] with several hundred of his fellow journey-people.
I remember Owen when he first came to Mississippi with the Delta Ministry and began to hang with Amzie in Cleveland (they went at it non-stop) right after Freedom Summer. I saw him next not quite twenty years later when I, Janet, Maisha, Omo, Taba and Mailaika trecked by train to say good-by to Amzie, my first time back since 1966, Owen was a pall bearer for Amzie; we stayed with June who met us at the infamous Winona bus station, and met Amzie's brother and sister on the train down from Chicago.
Then in Greenville in the '90s when Dave and I began the Algebra Project in the Delta and Owen was working, I think, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in Greenville. Later in the first years of the 21st century I sent high school graduates from the AP at Lanier to Owen who was running a jobs opportunity program in Jackson. I never did get to sit down with him when he devoted so much time and intelligence to getting Mississippi Movement History from every kind of participant on video for the Vets. Owen put in a full half a century of dedicated devotion to this work of ours. God Bless Him.
Peace,
Bob
As remembered by Constance
Curry
July 29, 2014
Owen Brooks was such a wonderful support for me when I was working on school desegregation in Mississippi in the 60s. He was particularly helpful to the Carter family in Drew when their sharecropper house was shot into and many other reprisals came after they enrolled seven children in the white schools. We remained friends over the years and was always a listening ear for me, and I so much appreciated his sense of humor. I will miss him.
Connie Curry
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