EDITOR’S NOTE: Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, Judy Tuggle sees the labor and civil rights movement as natural allies. Lewis was one of labor’s best friends in Washington. During his long tenure in the House of Representatives, Lewis supported union-backed legislation 99 percent of the time, according to the AFL-CIO.
Judy Tuggle put out her American flag Saturday in honor of Congressman John Lewis.
“I feel the weight of great grief at the passing of a moral giant,” said Tuggle, a Mayfield resident who will be 77 this week.
A longtime civil rights leader and 16-term Georgia Democrat, Lewis died Friday at age 80. He was dubbed “the conscience of Congress.”
Not many people in Mayfield know it, but Tuggle and her late husband, Jim Tuggle, were civil rights movement veterans, too. Still an activist, Tuggle helped reorganize the Mayfield-Graves County NAACP chapter.
“I never met John Lewis, but Jim might have,” said Tuggle.
They went to Georgia and Alabama in the early 1970s to help register African Americans to vote. Led by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas Democrat, Congress had passed sweeping civil rights laws in the ‘60s. But violent white resistance to black equality was still strong.
The Tuggles were evicted from a Georgia trailer park when the owner found out they were civil rights workers. A cross was burned one night in the yard of their Alabama home. “That was an experience,” she grinned.
(Read the rest at the Kentucky AFL-CIO web site.)