A group of women who were arrested in the 1960s for protesting segregation laws in Alabama recently received pardons nearly 50 years after the fact by the Birmingham City Council.
According to the Associated Press, the six protesters, Carolyn Louise King, Betty J. King, Gwendolyn L. King, Patricia Rose Wooding, Sandra R. Wooding and Mariea Wooding were issued pardons for their non-violent protests by Mayor William Bell during a city council meeting on July 5. The women were arrested in 1963 for parading without a permit. Patricia Wooding and Gwendolyn King were pardoned posthumously.
The city’s Board of Pardons and Paroles approved the pardons under a law known as the Rosa Parks Act, according to Birmingham News. The law, enacted in 2009, is named after the woman whose arrest for failure to comply with segregation laws on a Montgomery, Ala. bus is regarded as one of the triggers of the modern civil rights movement. The law was modeled after a 2006 state legislation was passed that issued pardons to those arrested and convicted for protesting segregation laws.
The group was active in the civil rights protests in Birmingham and all joined the landmark 1963 March on Washington.
Carolyn King, now known as C. Tasmiya King-Miller, integrated Birmingham’s Jones Valley High School in 1964 and a street located near the school was named after her in 2002.
Mariea Wooding participated in desegregation protests in Alabama and Tennessee, while Patricia Wooding Davis and Sandra Wooding Eastland were involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in the 1960s.
