WEC emerges out of the Little Rock desegregation crisis
Brewer describes the goal and inception of the Women's Emergency Committee (WEC). The group arose as a result of the Little Rock desegregation crisis.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Vivion Lenon Brewer, October 15, 1976. Interview G-0012. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ELIZABETH JACOWAY:
-
(Laughs)
You just didn't know it. Oh, heavens. Okay. So what, then, were
the origins of the Women's Emergency Committee?
- VIVION LENON BREWER:
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One person has never been given the credit she should have been given.
She is Velma Powell, who is the wife of J. O. Powell, who was the Dean
of Men at Central High School. She had lived for a year in the Terry
home. At the time all of this trouble arose, she was the secretary for
the Arkansas Council on Human Relations. The year 1957-58, when black
children were in Central for the first time, she, of course, had
firsthand knowledge of all the dreadful things that happened. And
finally she wrote Mrs. Terry a letter and said,
"You have always been in the forefront of all the crises that
we've ever had. Where are you now?" And Mrs. Terry thought
about this. She had been really ill with worrying about what was going
on; in fact, she said she went to bed and was ready to die, but she
didn't die.
(Laughs)
So she got up...
- ELIZABETH JACOWAY:
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(Laughs)
- VIVION LENON BREWER:
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...and decided she'd do something.
- ELIZABETH JACOWAY:
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She was so concerned about the community, the curfews...
- VIVION LENON BREWER:
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And about the blacks, you see, because her interest had always been in
racial problems. Everything else--all kinds of
problems--but very much so concerned in racial
problems. And so her first thought was that we might organize a group of
women such as the group that had fought lynching and finally brought the
antilynching laws into being.