Island to Honor Unlikely Ladies’ Fight for Rights Originally published in The Vineyard Gazette By JULIA RAPPAPORT Sept 21, 2007 It was the spring of 1964. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and the tension of tumult in the deep South was slowly seeping into the far reaches of the country. Here on Martha’s Vineyard, people had reached their breaking point. On Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot, a group of Vineyarders established a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Membership did not know boundaries. Blacks joined whites, men joined women, summer residents joined members of the year-round community. Among the founders were three women from West Tisbury: Nancy Hodgson Whiting, the West Tisbury librarian and tax collector, her best friend, television writer Virginia Mazar, and Polly Murphy, a housewife. “It’s almost like a saturated solution,” Mrs. Whiting told oral historian Linsey Lee in 1993. “You know that process in chemistry? You use a vehicle of liquid and you begin to drop a substance in drop by drop, and when it holds all it can, one more drop and the whole thing crystallizes. It was like that . . . It was the gathering sense that we could be of influence.” Among its early initiatives, the association began a drive to collect food and clothing for the people of Williamston, North Carolina. A few Vineyarders, including Rector Henry Bird of the Grace Church, had established a connection to the town and its community of black people. Come spring, the donations had to be delivered to the South. The three West Tisbury ladies, joined by Mrs. Murphy’s sister, Nancy Smith, a writer, and Margaret (Peg) Lillienthal, volunteered to load up their cars and make the drive. They traded in their up-Island jeans and donned white gloves and skirts. They figured should they find themselves in trouble, Southern men would have a harder time arresting ladies in gloves. The women decided that while in the South, they would register voters. “We knew it was dangerous,” Mrs. Whiting told Ms. Lee. “We didn’t know if we would come back alive. I thought it through very carefully before leaving. But quietly — I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I wound up thinking that I wouldn’t want my grandchildren to know I’d had a chance to influence people in this way and turned it down.” Children and friends of the Vineyard Five welcome them home after their night in a North Carolina jail. The women arrived in Williamston successfully, but were unable to register a single voter. Blacks answering their doors were wary of properly dressed white women with Northern accents. Determined to show their opposition to segregation and racial inequality, the women joined a protest outside of Sears, Roebuck. The protest lasted five minutes before the ladies found themselves in handcuffs. They spent one night in jail and, after receiving bail from the Vineyard, drove home. They declared the mission successful and so does Dr. Elaine Cawley Weintraub, a history teacher at the high school and co-founder of the African American Heritage Trail of … Continue reading The Vineyard Civil Rights Five