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John Salter, also known by his Native American name Hunter Gray, was a Civil Rights Activist. He is known for a famous picture taken at Woolworth's lunch counter during a sit in in Jackson, Mississippi on May 28, 1963. During this event Mr. Salter earned the nickname “Mustard Man”  (based on the variety of condiments being dumped on his head by the people assaulting him and other protestors during a sit in) during the Civil Rights era.

Biographical Information - Early Life
John Randall Salter Jr. was born in Chicago on February 14, 1934. He later changed his name to John Hunter Gray in order to honor his paternal Native American heritage. However, he was known as Mr. Salter throughout his career, so that is how he will be referenced in this article. He was raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. His father was an artist and a college professor and his mother was a teacher. Mr. Salter’s father was concerned with the social issues facing Native Americans, he had been adopted as a child and his adopted parents had tried to force him to assimilate to white culture. Mr. Salter’s mother has a family history of activism, with many people in her family being abolitionist, populist, and socialist.

Biographical Information - Later Life
Mr. Salter married Eldri Johanson in 1961. She was an activist alongside him throughout the various movements and struggles he was involved in. The couple was married for 54 years when she passed away in 2015. The couple had four children; Maria, Josephine, John Salter III and Peter. They also have twelve grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. The Salters settled in Idaho in 1997 and Mr. Salter died at his home in Pocatello, Idaho on January 7, 2019. He lived to be 84 years old.

Educational and Occupational Background
Mr. Salter began working as a teenager, during this time he worked in the field of fire fighting, agriculture, and mining. After this, he served in the Army. His career in activism began by organizing labor unions in mining camps. He then went on to receive a Bachelor's Degree from Arizona State university in 1958 and a Masters Degree in Sociology from the same institution in 1960. Mr. Salter went on to teach Sociology, or related fields, at a number of colleges and universities throughout his career, including: Wisconsin State, Tougaloo Southern Christian College, Goddard College, Coe College, University of Iowa, Navajo Community College (renamed Diné College), and University of North Dakota. Mr. Salter’s career consisted of a mixture of teaching and activism. During his career he would often do both jobs part time, other times he did both full time, and sometimes he was a full time activist.

Getting Involved in the Civil Rights Movement
Mr. Salter saw getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement as the obvious next step in his career of activism. He is quoted saying that “We decided to go south because things were happening.” By the time Mr. Salter arrived in Mississippi in 1961, he had a variety of experiences under his belt that prepared him to be a leader in the Jackson Movement (a branch of the Civil Rights Movement taking place in Jackson Mississippi). Mr. Salter was only 27, but he had already been a labor organizer in Arizona and obtained a Masters Degree in Sociology. He had previously taught at a college in Wisconsin and he moved to Jackson to teach at Tougaloo College, a historically black college. Once he began teaching at Tougaloo he met the Mississippi NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers. He worked with Mr. Evers to organize the Jackson Movement.

Organizational Involvement
Mr. Salter was involved with a variety of organizations and movements before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. One organization that he was involved in was the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), which used education as its main tool in fighting racial segregation. Additionally, while teaching at Tougaloo Mr. Salter organized an NAACP youth council. As the organizer of this youth council, he taught students means of nonviolent protest and published a newspaper entitled “North Jackson Action.” His work with NAACP did not end there, he also conducted an NAACP study on poverty in Mississippi and testified for the NAACP before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Mr. Salters is best known for his work with the Jackson Movement. He was the Chairman of the strategy committee for the Jackson Movement and was particularly involved in the sit ins that took place in Jackson in 1963. These sit ins were part of the larger Jackson movement, which consisted of a series of direct action demonstrations. Mr. Salter was a key strategist for the larger movement.

Opinions about the success of the Jackson Movement are mixed. On one hand, two weeks after the sit ins President Kennedy called for a national Civil Rights bill. Additionally, the victories of the movement inspired and were intertwined with other parts of the Civil Rights Movement. However, the ultimate defeat of the movement also served to discourage people. The night that President Kennedy called for the Civil Rights Act, the leader of the Jackson Movement, Medgar Evers, was assasinated. There were negotiations between Washington and Jackson regarding Civil Rights issues, but the discussions, or strategy meetings, were held in a secret meeting between Washington and Washington approved black leadership in Jackson. Mr. Salter and his associate R. Edwin King Jr. were severely injured in a car crash, which they suspect was intentional, and were not able to attend these strategy meetings. SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) workers and Tougaloo college students, who were central to the Jackson Movement protests, were also not invited to be in attendance at these meetings. There were a few small victories in the Jackson Movement, but ultimately authorities were successful at oppressing the voices of the people involved in the Movement, and there was no real substantive change made. Authorities were successful at smashing the Jackson Movement in isolation, but this does not mean that the struggles that took place in Jackson were not vitally important to the success of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. John Salter was one of the key links between the Jackson movement and the Civil Rights Movement in the rest of Mississippi and the south generally. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964 by President Johnson.

Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on John Salter
Mr. Salter was deeply entrenched in involvement in social change far before the Civil Rights Movement. However, the Movement did influence his perspectives on what he thought made a successful movement. He writes about this extensively in his book entitled “Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism”. He also continued to work in other areas of the Civil Rights Movement after he had finished his work in Jackson. Mr. Salter’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was merely one step in his career as an academic and an activist. He has fought for social change before the Movement, he fought for it during the movement, and he continued to fight for it after. He remained a political activist for the rest of his life. Mr. Salter is quoted saying  “I've been a social justice agitator all my life and I always will be one: a radical.”