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Martha Prescod Norman Noonan

Martha Prescod Norman Noonan is one of the “Duchesse” of the Civil Right Movement. She was a pioneer with the “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ", an organization that was part of the major American Civil Rights Movement in 1960s. She referred to herself as a member of the Rosa Parks generation.

Early Life
Martha Prescod Norman Noonan was born 1946 in Providence, Rhode Island from a West Indian father (Saint Vincent) and an African American mother who was from Arbor, Michigan. Her dad immigrated to Brooklyn, New York in the early 1920s where he met her mother in one the FDR’s Alphabet Agencies. Activism wasn’t something new to her. Her passion for activism came from watching her parents who were both activists. Her father was involved with the Pan-West Indian Unity and also with the Progressive Party Progressive Party (United States, 1924–34) where he was a chairman. Her mother was active in the Progressive Party as well. At a very young age, she was already brushing off her parents’ energy. Her parents were taking her to different types of activisms. At the age of three, she had her picture taken with Henry Wallace who was running for president. She has also witnessed her father being threatened by the FBI to be deported because he was an activist. At that young age, her father brought home news of his best friend committed suicide because he was on the verge of losing his business for being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her father’s best friend was being accused of being unpatriotic.

When she was around five-year-old, Martha Prescod’s father was diagnosed with glaucoma and started losing his sights. He then sold his business and the family moved to a predominately white neighborhood. She recalled in her oral history interview conducted by John Dittmer in Cockeysville, Maryland in 2013 that people threw stones at their windows and she was beaten up because they weren’t happy that black folks moved into the neighborhood. While there, she was called all sort of names and when she told her mother about the racial slurs she was receiving on a daily basis, her mother told her to reply back to these people by just saying: “I am black and I am proud”. And that’s exactly what she did over the course of years she lived in the neighborhood. She also carried that message everywhere else that she went. These uneventful activities made her fearless and faithful to the cause.

In Norma Prescod’s 2013 oral interview, she recalled her difficult times being one of the two black people that went to Lexington Avenue Elementary School in Province, Rhode Island and also being one of five black students at Gilbert Stuart Junior High School. Her mother managed to get her to Quaker prep school, Lincoln School for Girls, a private school.

She recalled Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist by Earl Conrad, being the first book that she received from her mother when she started reading. She also never forgot the story her mother told about the time she was in college. She said in her 2013 oral interview that her mother was among a group of five African Americans that were admitted to the Law School of Michigan State University because the admission office mistakenly took them for White students because since they were all attending a predominantly white school. After they checked in to the university, the school realized the mistake they made, and within a year, the school found a way to flunk them out. Watch the oral interview for the full story.

Involvement with the Civil Right
When Martha Prescod Norman Noonan was junior in high school, she left Rhode Islands and moved to Detroit Michigan so she can finish up high school in the state and be able to qualify for in-state college tuition. At seventeen years old, she wanted to join the civil right movement but her parents were strongly against it. She waited until she turned 18 years old and started to volunteer for the civil rights movements. After graduation, she attended Michigan State University where she met Curtis Hayes, who is now Curtis Hayes Muhammad.

Her interests in the SNCC came when she was in college. While a sophomore at the University of Michigan in 1961, she met Curtis Hayes who was a spoke person for the SNCC. They both joined hands and work for SNCC Projects in McComb, Mississippi (snccdigital.org/events/young-people-sit-in-in-mccomb/ . In her involvement with the movement, she was assigned to work on SNCC projects for voter registration in Albany, Georgia / and Greenwood, Mississippi in the summer of 1963. Also, one of her tasks with the SNCC was to raise money for various events. She was very successful doing it by selling copies of the Albany Movement documentary record, Freedom in the Air . While she was in Albany, Georgia working on a project headed by Charles Sherrod, she heard news of a young black girl being raped by thirteen white men in Sumter County. The rape victim ended up dying of infections and it took a toll on Martha Prescod’s life because she felt like this could have been her.

After her collaboration with Curtis Hayes, she started her own section of SNCC called “Friends of SNCC” at her university in the fall of 1962. With this group, they collected foods and medicine for the Mississippi residents. She was also a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

When Martha’s mother found out through her church members that her daughter was very active in the civil right movements, she was very upset. She feared for her daughter’s life and pleaded for her to retrieve from the movement but Martha refused. Thru contacts, her mother got in touch with Robert Kennedy and the first thing she told Mr. Kennedy was to assure her that her daughter Mrs. Prescod was not going to be harm.

Martha was so worried of the extent her mother would take her worrisome that she kept her activities secret from her while actively serving different parts of the movement. From fundraising, voter registration, marches, and nation sit-ins, she was present!

Right after completing her bachelor in 1964, she moved to Selma, Alabama to work for the Selma Voting Rights Campaign/. In 1965, she met Dr. King who came to Selma for the Selma March. While in Alabama, she met her husband Silas Norman who was an officer in the US Army. In the fall of 1967, they married.

Life After SNCC
Her life after SNCC was also impressive. She has done numerous community projects like an anti-hunger project, a program for children, a tutorial program for children with sickle cell anemia, helping to organize some retrospective conferences about SNCC and helping Curtis Hayes getting out of jail in Liberia. She is also teaching history at Trinity College. She had three sons and one is a lawyer, and the three others are physicians (M.D.). Her story with other women of the SNCC was published in a book called “Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Account by Women in SNCC “which was published in 2010 by the University of Illinois.

As an activist, she met and work beside some of the greatest civil right leaders known to humankind. Her great contribution to the great cause earned her the utmost respect among other activists and the rest of the world. In a SNCC conference in 1988, she quoted: ''“I'm going to talk about historiography. I've worked with it a little bit over the past 10 years as I've been teaching and trying to think how to present the Movement to my students, as I've been a perennial graduate student and tried to keep up with some of the literature on the Movement. I want to talk about some of the problems and oversights that I see in the work that's been done. I hope this approach will provide a discussion framework for reading and learning and teaching about the Movement. Before I go any further, I want to stress that my connection with this history is, obviously, deeply personal. I was 16 when I first became involved in Movement support activities in the North. I was 21 when I left Selma to return to Detroit. During those years’ movement activities either of a supportive nature or working in the South took up most of my time. Like other people here, I can't think of any job or any activity that I've been involved with before or since that has played such an important role in shaping my life, both political1y and personally. I grew up in the Movement, it shaped my views, I married in the Movement, and now 25 years later, many of the people that I still feel closest to are Movement people. This is a group of people that I know that when I've asked anybody for anything, a room, a place to stay, a meal, support, comfort — that I've always gotten back what I asked for and much more. And I have always found it difficult to put into words the bond of comradely love that I feel here. Beyond this, I feel another kind of personal interest in how this history is written; I have three children. And I have read interpretations that have made me cry, to think that my boys would be left with such ridiculous explanations of what it was that their mother and their father were doing in those days, and why it was that their parents decided to put their lives on the line in the early sixties”'' .The transcript for her conference can read at https://www.crmvet.org/comm/prescodm.htm or the video can be viewed at https://snccdigital.org/people/martha-prescod-norman/.