This member of the group that was the subject of the 1970 book "Black Power and the American Myth" died on December 19, 2008.
James Bevel James Luther Bevel (October 19, 1936 – December 19, 2008) was a minister and leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As the Director of Direct Action and of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), he initiated, strategized, directed, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1965 Selma voting rights movement, and the 1966 Chicago open housing movement. He suggested that SCLC call for and join a March on Washington in 1963. Bevel later strategized the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, which contributed to Congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The Order of Myths The Order of Myths is a 2008 documentary film directed by Margaret Brown. It focuses on the Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama, the oldest in the United States. It reveals the separate mystic societies established and maintained by black and white groups, and acknowledges the complex racial history of a city with a slaveholding past. While showing the mystic societies' ties to economic, class and racial stratification, the film also showed the beginnings of interaction between the black and white courts. It also tells some of the history of Africatown, a community formed north of Mobile in 1860 by Africans from Ghana, transported illegally as slaves to Mobile decades after the end of the slave trade.