Brighten Corners and Widen Circles: College Student Advocacy in the Sixties through the 3T’s Movement (Tentative title)
Author, “Dean” Bert Phillips, Co-Author Judith Phillips
To Be Published soon.
The 3T’s Movement was sparked by a call to action in a student assembly on the Tuskegee Institute campus in the winter of 1963. In the summer of 1965, Tuskegee Institute college students, joined by St. Olaf College students and students from 29 other colleges and universities across the United States participated in the 3T’s Movement. These college students shared their knowledge, and talents tutoring in homes, schools, church halls, and under shade trees in the communities they served. They created a transportation system with more than eighty-five cars and four ten-passenger vans daily crisscrossing hundreds of miles through 12 Black Belt counties and Jefferson county in Alabama.
“Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.”
The 1960’s in the United States of America was a stirring and challenging time. “Fairness and Equality Now,” “Black is Beautiful” and “Black Power,” were confronting “Whiteness is Rightness,” “White Supremacy,” and “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever.”
Sit-ins and Freedom Rides helped to ensure Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws. The 3T’s Movement’s imprint remains in 12 Black Belt Counties in the State of Alabama. There are many stories of college students and secondary and elementary school children, and community members who stood up against suppression of their inalienable rights and freedoms as American citizens. These students practiced non-violence even as they were threatened and harassed by the Ku Klux Klan and white vigilantes.
The college students of the 3T’s Movement were fighting for poverty eradication, quality education and human dignity and equal rights.
The stories shared in Brighten Corners and Widen Circles, the Oral History and this 3T’s Movement website will encourage you to intensify your battle for equity, fairness, and justice for all Americans.
“How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!”
Maya AngelouInformal List of Contributors to “Brighten Corners and Widen Circles” – To Date
- Billy Abrams
- Calvin R. Austin
- Paul Benson
- Wilson Blount
- Walter Bowers, II
- Reginald (Reggie) Braddock
- Florida Ingram Brown
- Joan Hamby Burroughs
- Janice Renae Green Crump
- Milton C. Davis
- Lucenia Williams Dunn
- Diane Eickhoff
- David Fuller for Steve Fuller
- Floyd Griffin
- Charles H. Griner
- Chester Higgins
- Gail Jothen
- Michael Jothen
- Sharlene Krantz
- Charles Larson
- Roosevelt Lewis
- James McJunkins
- Roscoe Moore
- Lee Norrgard
- Wendell Howton Paris
- Reynauld L. Smith
- Patti Grace Smith
- Susan Jahnke Snookal
- Bessie McDowell Stevens
- John Stevens
- Jeff Strate
- Shirley Taylor Streeter
- Palmer Sullins
- Barbara Sullivan
- Lucy Thilquist Thomas
- David Wren
Supporters
- Richard Allen
- Bruce King
- JoAnn Mantz
- Guy Trammel
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