Sixty Years Ago Today

Here's one for Keith O tonight:::

Given that her civil disobedience began sixty years ago Monday, the fact that Edna Griffin was known as the 'Rosa Parks of Iowa' makes little sense.

Rosa Parks, who could be known as the 'Edna Griffin of Alabama,' would refuse to relinquish her bus seat seven years after Griffin -- with her infant daughter Phyllis and friends John Bibb and Leonard Hudson -- was refused service at the lunch counter at Katz Drug Store in Des Moines because she was black.

She launched one-woman picket campaign and court battle which proved to be a watershed event in the civil rights movement to desegregate a store and its lunch counter. It was the first successful enforcement of the 1884 Iowa Civil Rights Act.

Born in Kentucky, raised in New Hampshire and schooled at Fisk University in Tennessee, Griffin served in the Women's Army Corps in World War II before her famous activism, which included founding a chapter of the Iowa Congress of Racial Equality and organizing Iowans for the 1963 March on Washington.

Her civil and human rights' concerns were not limited. "She wasn't just concerned about the struggle of blacks," said Merle Hansen, a former field organizer fo the state's farmers union. "She even attended Iowa Farmers Union meetings with her husband."

At the age of 75 Griffin headed to Nebraska to sit in the middle of the highway to stop nuclear warheads from being delivered to an airbase.

Her activism also branched into politics as she served as co-chair of Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of her historic stand for equality, at the age of 89, she was on hand as the building that once housed Katz Drug Store was renamed the Edna Griffin Building.

She passed away two years later, but she will never be forgotten in Des Moines, where on Monday night (known locally as Edna Griffin Day), there will be a theatrical tribute to her at the Fort Des Moines Museum and Educational Center.

That tribute deserves a larger audience.