[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 77 (Wednesday, June 6, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1038-E1039]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    TRIBUTE TO J. WESLEY WATKINS III

                                 ______
                                 

                     HON. LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 6, 2001

  Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I would like the U.S. House of 
Representatives to mark the passing of a man who did everything he 
could to make America a better place for all of its citizens: J. Wesley 
Watkins III.

                [From the Washington Post, June 6, 2001]

   J. Wesley Watkins III, 65, Dies; Civil Liberties Lawyer, Activist

                            (By Bart Barnes)

       J. Wesley Watkins III, 65, a Washington-based lawyer who 
     specialized in civil rights and civil liberties issues in a 
     career that spanned almost 40 years, died of pneumonia June 4 
     at George Washington University Hopsital. He had cancer.
       At his death, Mr. Watkins was a senior fellow at the Center 
     for Policy Alternatives and founding director of the Flemming 
     Fellows Leadership Institute, a program that assists and 
     trains state legislators on such issues as family and medical 
     leave, community reinvestment and motor-voter registration.
       He was a former director of the American Civil Liberties 
     Union of the National Capital Area, a Washington-based 
     southern regional manager of Common Cause and a management 
     consultant to various nonprofit organizations.
       In the later 1960s and the 1970s, he had a private law 
     practice in Greenville, Miss. His cases included winning the 
     right for African American leaders to speak to on-campus 
     gatherings at previously all-white universities; the seating 
     of a biracial Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic 
     National Convention and removal of various barriers and 
     impediments to voting.
       Mr. Watkins, a resident of Washington, was born in 
     Greenville and grew up in Inverness, Miss. He attended the 
     U.S. Naval Academy, graduated from the University of 
     Mississippi and served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor from 1957 
     to 1959. He graduated from the University of Mississippi Law 
     School in 1962. During the Kennedy and Johnson 
     administrations, he was a Justice Department lawyer and tried 
     cases throughout the South.
       In 1967, he returned to Greenville as a partner in the law 
     firm of Wynn and Watkins. Until 1975, he was the attorney for 
     the Loyal Democrats, the movement to establish a biracial 
     Democratic Party in a state where black residents had been 
     effectively excluded from the political process for 
     generations. The loyalists were seated at the Democratic 
     National Convention in Chicago as the official Democratic 
     Party of Mississippi. In the years after 1968, Mr. Watkins 
     held negotiations with Mississippi's Old Guard Democrats that 
     led to a unified Democratic Party by the national convention 
     of 1976.

[[Page E1039]]

       Hodding Carter III, the former editor of Greenville's Delta 
     Democrat Times newspaper and a Mississippi contemporary of 
     Mr. Watkin's, described him as ``one of those southerners who 
     loved this place so much that he had to change it. He had to 
     do what he knew was the right and necessary thing in a very 
     hard time. He had to break with so much that was basic to his 
     past.'' Carter is president of the John S. and James L. 
     Knight Foundation in Miami.
       In 1975, Mr. Watkins returned to Washington and joined the 
     Center for Policy Alternatives and helped found the Flemming 
     Leadership Institute.
       There, Linda Tarr-Whelan, the organization's board 
     chairman, called him a ``larger-than-life figure with a thick 
     Mississippi accent, a magnetic personality and a gift for 
     telling stories.''
       He habitually wore cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. When 
     chemotherapy treatments for his cancer caused some of his 
     hair to fall out, Mr. Watkins simply shaved his head and 
     started wearing an earring.
       In the 1980s, Mr. Watkins was task force director for the 
     Commission on Administrative Review of the U.S. House of 
     Representatives, which also was known as the Obey Commission. 
     He was a former legislative assistant to Rep. Frank E. Smith 
     (D-Miss.).
       He served on the boards of Common Cause, Americans for 
     Democratic Action and Mid-Delta Head Start, and most recently 
     he was a board member of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan 
     Washington.
       He was a former vestryman and a teacher in the Christian 
     education program of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in 
     Washington.
       His marriage to Jane Magruder Watkins ended in divorce.
       Survivors include his companion, Anita F. Gottlieb of 
     Washington; two children, Gordon Watkins of Parthenon, Ark., 
     and Laurin Wittig of Williamsburg, two sisters, Mollye Lester 
     of Inverness and Ann Stevens of Newark; a brother, William S. 
     Watkins of Alexandria; and four grandchildren.

     

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