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Marilyn Clement, Civil Rights Leader, RIP
I met Marilyn Clement, the national coordinator for Healthcare-NOW, in Atlanta several years ago as I hitched a ride to a stop the war march and rally in Atlanta.
As I got into the car, Marilyn introduced herself as working in the healthcare field.
We chatted generally as we drove into Atlanta and then got dropped off near Ebenezer Church to find our places in the march. As we slowly walked to the church through the Martin Luther King Memorial and Museum area, two young fellows emerging from the museum walked past and then turned and came back to us.
One said to Marilyn, "You look an awful lot like the woman in the pictures with Dr. King we saw in the museum. Is that you?"
Marilyn smiled and said, "Thanks for recognizing me. You guys have pretty sharp eyes to recognize me 40 years after those pictures were taken!"
Marilyn Clement met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s, while on the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
She later became director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and helped create the National Anti-Klan Network, now the Center for Democratic Renewal.
She helped build political power in the South through the Ministers Leadership Training Program, which opened the door for blacks to become elected officials.
The latter years of her life Marilyn devoted getting healthcare for all Americans.
Marilyn died today and we miss her already!
Ann Wright is a retired US Army Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in opposition to the war on Iraq.
5 Comments so far
Show AllMarilyn, we will continue the fight for economic and civil justice in your name.
And we will remember all the good you accomplished in your lifetime ! ! !
What a sterling life of integrity, dedication, and commitment and an exemplar to us all.
Its hard to write this in the face of the glowing obit and flying the face of all the adulation to come. But for the sake of others like me, AND I DO KNOW THERE ARE OTHERS - we are not crazy. Marilyn Clement was a very abusive person and she shredded the self-respect, and dignity of those she abused. It took me years to recover from the effect she had on me. I worked at one of those organizations where Marilyn was a director and she almost wrecked that organization. It wasn't till after the damage was done that folks in places she had harmed before were willing to talk with us about it.
If Marilyn wasn't some kind of FBI agent, she should have been. Maybe she did good in her work, I don't know, but she also did a LOT of harm. I wasn't going to write about this, what's to be gained by speaking ill of the dead? But as I found myself spiralling back down into the morass she left behind in my life, I thought it might help those others to know that they are STILL not alone.
Life is not simple. Good and evil don't always come in separate packages. We have to be grownups and handle it. But as they say "Speak truth to power." That's why I'm bothering with this post.
Your remarks are discomforting but need to be stated.
In the world of organizing on the left, there are often many forceful egos who destroy the very organizations they found rather than relinquish power to those who have even slightly different viewpoints or organizing styles. Sometimes it's simply ageism and a suspicion of young people.
It is happening in the peace and justice center in my home town. A handful of the old-guard with big egos have dismantled the center more effectviely than the FBI and police spies and agent-provocateurs could ever have done.
I don't know why this is - perhaps it is partly a reflection of the kind of burn-our resistant personality thet gets self selected in a movement where you will typically lose, then lose, then lose...then lose.
I rode in that long, long train called the Peace Train organized by the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, traveling from Finland to Beijing (several trains, in fact) in 1995, to the NGO Forum of the UN World Conference on Women, with Marilyn Clement. We were a few hundred women from everywhere, all ages, on one of the great journeys of our lives, making stops in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia, picking up passengers along the way, connecting with women's organizations and political groups, talking, arguing, singing, crying, laughing. Marilyn was fabulous at all of these, especially singing and laughing. So much of great movements for peace and justice come down to the same needs: to connect to each other, share stories, listen, speak, laugh, and sing. (And cry.) This morning when I heard about Marilyn's death, the first thing I heard in my head was her laugh, that generous sound that rang through our train car and down the corridors. Then I heard her singing, sweet and clear. I am glad I knew her. I am grateful for her gifts. I mourn her passing and pray for her spirit to chant in another choir now, in joyous peace.