[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 26 (Wednesday, February 9, 2022)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E131-E132]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         HONORING THE LIFE AND SERVICE OF CURTIS HAYES MUHAMMAD

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, February 9, 2022

  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the 
life and service of a remarkable individual, Curtis Hayes Muhammad.
  Curtis Hayes Muhammad spent his entire life participating in various 
struggles for human rights and civil rights. His activism began in the 
fall of 1961. Only 18 years old, he was one of five young people from 
McComb, Mississippi, brave enough to respond to Bob Moses's call to 
begin direct action and community organizing there. He was a key member 
of SNCC's dangerous and groundbreaking efforts all over Mississippi 
throughout the sixties. Jailed many times for civil rights work, Curtis 
kept the principles of bottom up organizing learned from Moses and Ella 
Baker as the guiding foundation to subsequent efforts of union and 
community organizing and struggles for African Liberation. These 
beliefs in a cooperative society and bottom up organizing led by poor 
and dark-skinned people have been embraced by many contemporary 
movements for social justice today.
  Curtis's early life experiences made him responsive to these movement 
ideals. He grew up in a family of sharecroppers in Chisolm Mission, 
Mississippi who had joined with 26 other sharecropping families and 
purchased a plot of land which they worked together. Raised by his 
grandmother, a midwife, he was taught principles of black independence 
and strength. Learning that his father had to flee Mississippi after 
killing several Ku Klux Klansmen in a gun fight, Curtis was determined 
to find ways to fight against Mississippi segregationists. He began 
preaching as a child and was encouraged by his grandmother that he had 
an important role to play in the liberation of black people.
  Curtis's post-civil rights activism included helping to organize the 
1963 Chicago School Boycott when 225,000 students walked out demanding 
an end to racial segregation and the disparate treatment of Black 
students. He was an organizer for the New Politics Convention that ran 
Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dick Gregory in the 1968 presidential election 
as third-party candidates. Curtis helped establish a radical Black 
bookstore in Washington, D.C. and helped create an early version of a 
Community Supported Agriculture project, bringing produce from Black 
farmers in the South to northern progressive communities in D.C. and 
NYC. He also worked on housing issues for poor people with the Harlem 
Reclamation Project which urged homeless people to take over abandoned 
brownstones and rehabilitate them, and thus extract ownership from the 
City. In Jersey City, NJ, following the same model, he assisted in the 
handing over of more than 60 brownstones to poor folks.
  Later he worked as a union organizer for Unite in Monroe, LA. He 
successfully organized several dozen locals, mostly of Black women 
garment workers, using the Ella Baker model of organizing. As a result, 
the organized workers sometimes made decisions independent of and 
criticized by national union leaders such as calling for and enacting 
wildcat strikes. He went on with the now federated Unite-HERE to New 
Orleans organizing hotel and restaurant workers there and mentoring 
young folks in Union Summer. He also joined local New Orleans community 
members in Community Labor United, which worked on improving public 
education in New Orleans as the laboratory for a national Quality 
Education as a Civil Right Campaign.

[[Page E132]]

  Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring the life, 
legacy, and service of Mr. Curtis Hayes Muhammad.

                          ____________________