Abraham Woods, Civil Rights Pioneer, Dies at 80
The Rev. Abraham L. Woods Jr., a civil rights campaigner who in the days of crowd-throttling fire-hosings and snarling police dogs led the first lunch-counter sit-ins in Birmingham, Ala., and three decades later played a pivotal role confronting racial discrimination by country clubs, died last Friday in Birmingham, his hometown. He was 80.
The cause was cancer, his son Abraham Woods 3rd said.
Mr. Woods, a Baptist minister who had been friends with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. since their days together at Morehouse College in Atlanta, was one of the civil rights leaders standing behind him when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Less than a month later, on Sept. 15, Mr. Woods raced from his church in Birmingham, St. Joseph Baptist, to the 16th Street Baptist Church minutes after a dynamite explosion there had killed four young black girls.
“People were searching through the rubble,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “They found shoes. Finally they found bodies. You could smell the human flesh.”
“Even the Klan, as bad as they are,” he continued, “you didn’t think they would go as far as to bomb a church on Sunday with little children in Sunday school.”
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The cause was cancer, his son Abraham Woods 3rd said.
Mr. Woods, a Baptist minister who had been friends with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. since their days together at Morehouse College in Atlanta, was one of the civil rights leaders standing behind him when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Less than a month later, on Sept. 15, Mr. Woods raced from his church in Birmingham, St. Joseph Baptist, to the 16th Street Baptist Church minutes after a dynamite explosion there had killed four young black girls.
“People were searching through the rubble,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “They found shoes. Finally they found bodies. You could smell the human flesh.”
“Even the Klan, as bad as they are,” he continued, “you didn’t think they would go as far as to bomb a church on Sunday with little children in Sunday school.”