Rev. Willie Blue
The Reverend Willie Blue is available for speaking engagements at schools, community events, churches and other platforms about his experiences in the civil rights movement.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (601) 503-5911
Rev. Willie Blue
“I love being around young people,” says the Rev. Blue, associate pastor of Shady Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss. “Old folks seem to have their minds already made up about things. Young people are so refreshing. They have open minds.”
After spending a lifetime fighting for civil rights in Mississippi and working in a Chicago nonprofit organization, Blue has returned to Mississippi to get his college degree in mass communications. His classmates have been very helpful, reviewing notes and assisting him any way they can. But it is the students that Blue is interested in helping.
Thumbing through history books “Pillars of Fire” and “Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” Blue recounts stories of the struggles of the past he says continues.
“When I was 17, I wanted to get away from the nonsense of Jim Crow. I joined the military. Then after I got out of the Navy, it was worse than when I left. I’d been around the world and back, and it seemed the nonsense had magnified. I had a real bad attitude then when I was about 21 or 22. A lady from the NAACP told me that the Freedom Riders were in Greenwood and said, ‘You ought to go join them.’ ”
Blue did, working alongside people such as Julian Bond, NAACP chairman; Stokely Carmichael, a former leader of SNCC who also was known as Kwame Ture; and Bob Moses, a civil rights leader and founder of the Algebra Project.
The Reverend Willie Blue believes there seems to be a pipeline from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse with so many of them going to jail. This has motivated him to return to school. He is now a student at Jackson State University in Jackson, MS.