The LuLac Edition #4, 893, January 16th. #2023

LONG-TIME CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST SPEAKS AT KING'S COLLEGE

 Photo: Amanda Hyrcyna (Citizens' Voice

by Denise Allabaugh (Citizens' Voice) 

After a lifetime of civil rights activism starting in the 1950s, Offie C. Wortham told a group at King’s College on Sunday that he has seen a tremendous improvement in race relations.

Wortham, 85, has seen Barack Obama become the first Black U.S. president, Ketanji Brown Jackson become the first Black woman to serve as a justice of the U.S. and Claudine Gay named the first Black president of Harvard University as well as Malcolm X and other people of color on postage stamps.

“The progress is mind-boggling,” Wortham said.

Wortham, who is president of the TransCultural Awareness Institute and lives in Vermont, said it’s a far cry from when he was born in 1938 in Peekskill, New York, where he was called “colored” and sometimes “negro.” That changed over the years to Black, African American and a person of color, he said.

From 1954 to 1958, Wortham was the president of Peekskill NAACP Youth Council. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he became part of the civil rights movement and he marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and exchanged philosophies with Malcolm X.

Wortham was a member of a NAACP youth delegation headed by Harry Belafonte and selected by King, Jackie Robinson and others to meet President Dwight D. Einsenhower at the White House in 1958.

After describing his family as “upper lower class,” Wortham said he went on to become a research assistant at IBM Research and to major in physics at Antioch College in Ohio on a scholarship from the United Negro College Fund. At Antioch College, he said there were only eight Black students.

Wortham later became a pivotal figure in opposing discrimination in places like movie theaters and restaurants. At one point, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled against a barber who refused to cut his hair.

He went on to study psychology at Marist College, liberal arts at City College of San Francisco and international relations at San Francisco State University.

On Sunday, Wortham delivered the 2023 Barbara Sabol Memorial Lecture in the Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center at King’s College on what would have been Dr. King’s 94th birthday.

Three local organizations, the NAACP Wilkes-Barre branch, the Peace & Justice Center and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Wyoming Valley, joined forces to present the program to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-8, Moosic and Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown attended Wortham’s lecture called “My life outside the box: the journey of a civil rights activist.”

Cartwright said the event helped people come together and remember and celebrate Dr. King’s history and legacy, especially since they had someone there who marched with Dr. King and knew other civil rights leaders.

Bill Browne, the new president of the NAACP Wilkes-Barre branch and a member of the Peace & Justice Center’s steering committee, presented Wortham a Life Achievement Award after his lecture and told him, “I just met you today and I want to be like you.

“He stood up for a lot of things that are important,” Browne commented after Wortham’s lecture. “He’s 85 years old and he has told some fabulous stories. He is basically a walking history book. He tells stories to children that they don’t teach in school. I never learned Black history in school.”