Ruth Perry

Ruth Perry

Ruth Perry is an American librarian, journalist, and activist. She has accomplished multiple achievement for civil rights work with the NAACP Miami's charter.

Early Life

Ruth Perry mainly grew up in two places; Ithaca, New York, and Williston, South Carolina ( a town named after her family).  She spent her summers in Williston but attended elementary through high school in Ithaca, where churches and schools were integrated. This led to her having a childhood filled with experience with divergent viewpoints and providing good training for a future activist. She graduated from Drexel University with a degree in library science, she also obtained another degree in English from Converse College in South Carolina. Her grandfather was a slaveholding Confederate officer, who was with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. Her father, Francis Morris Willis, was a successful dentist, who held an interest in politics. The Willises were among the few Democrats in republican Ithaca. He had a strong relationship with his daughter that helped her build a strong character and she admired him, later in her life he tells her “later in life you will learn that character is everything.” He encouraged her solid work ethic and perseverance. Her husband, Walter Dean Perry, was a soft-spoken liberal man who admired Eleanor Roosevelt as much as Perry did herself. He didn’t attend college, but he was a professional horticulturist, as well as an environmentalist long before the term became popular. They had one child together, a daughter named Caroline who was born in 1940. In 1945, they moved to Miami, where she worked in the Miami Beach Public Library as a cataloger.

Civil Rights Work

When she moved to Miami, she soon joined the local NAACP branch herself since she was interested in civil rights. Before being involved with the NAACP, she had already worked on certain civil rights movements. She was one of the local NAACP officials that were closely involved in the Miami chapter's fight against the committee as well as other chapter concerts and she served the organization during some of its most difficult years. At the time Miami supported an active Ku Klux Klan and the organization’s national Imperial Wizard had retired in the 1940s.

She had made the NAACP the focus of her activist energy for nearly 20 years. A detrimental event that made her even more active in the NAACP, was around September of 1951when the Klan escalated its activities. They had bombings destroyed a newly integrated apartment complex known as Carter Village. Three months later, 200 miles north, another bombing happened, this was under the bedroom of Harry T. Moore and his wife on Christmas night, which led to both of their deaths. During her time she worked alongside Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel and director of the national NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In 1963, with the ruling in favor of Gibson and the NAACP for Gibson v. The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, she was and saw pride and courage justified. This ruling helped prevent the Johns Committee from obtaining records of the Florida NAACP, while also allowing them to survive within the state. In October of 1954 she localized civil rights in a different method, she asked her daughter and three other teens to join the broadcast. She asked them questions about the recent political issues, how adults should prepare the schools for integration.

Threats

During her time working as a member of the NAACP,  she received multiple different threats. She had those that came from her radio broadcast, bomb threats were called to her home during the mid-1950s, and she had been marked for assassination. She had been threatened with economic reprisal. Rumors were being told that she would be losing her job as a librarian, that she held for 8 years, and even received an anonymous letter with similar threats. Officials of the NAACP made sure to make Perry aware that they would fight for her job if these threats did fall through, even if it meant taking a case to the Supreme Court, but did inform her that with this she may be jobless for the time being. Though nothing came to be from the threats made towards her, and she kept her job and was promoted as well until she retired. She faced the possibility of jail time when she didn’t want to hand over NAACP records. She continuously risked her life and her freedom during the Johns Committee witch-hunt because she believed in the constitution, mainly the 14th amendment, which guaranteed due process and freedom of association. The Johns Committee had plans to portray the NAACP as a communist-influenced by obtaining memberships lists and meeting minutes, but she worked on protecting them, and later on sending them to the New York charter. Through all of these threats, she never faltered from the goal she had set forth when she began. She always maintained her poise on the air, because she confidently knew she played an instrumental part in the growth of the membership and the influence the Miami chapter was getting. Even a few days after learning she was meant to be assassinated, she still took a stand since she knew the impact her testimony would hold.

Contribution

She helped the charter prevail by fulfilling her role as an officer. The foundation of this charter starting in 1935, and it being the last charter in Florida’s major cities, she helped with getting more recruits, as it was difficult for them before to get white members from the racial climate the city was facing in the 1940s and 1950s, as all the branches are needed to be bi-racial. Within her two roles, one of them she worked on being the spokesperson, where she publicized the lawsuits and reported the courageous stands and victories. The other role she held was more centered around her developing her voice as a civil rights journalist. She had reported on the Brown decision in 1962, which led her to report about the University of Mississippi riots in 1962. While commenting and reporting on each event, she developed more skills and awareness of what worked for her as a journalist. Her lack of experience was covered by speaking on national events, by using her skills as a librarian, and her earlier years of being on a broadcast. She wrote a column on the violence at Little Rock and throughout her career, that was the most passionate writing she had done. Slowly but surely, she learned how to write her column with a balance of emotions and intellect. January of 1962 was the day she published her last column on the Freedom Rides and focussed on Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr since he wasn’t a well-known civil rights ladder and wasn’t an elected official. Within all the work that she had accomplished, she was able to bring the activist and journalist into one, incredible woman who didn’t hesitate in raising her voice.

As she was involved with the NAACP, she held multiple positions within the charter. In the beginning, she played two roles during the 1950s and into the 1960s, she was an outspoken activist, which helped her chapter grow and survive. This was done with a radio show, which began in June 1953, which aired Sunday afternoon on Miami’s African-American station, WMBM. Her broadcast was used to call for an end to segregation and give full equity to African-Americansrightsdenounced Klan violence and other forms of terrorism. As the audience grew from her broadcast, she suddenly got anonymous calls and letters who described the show as “vilifying and malicious”. The many that disagreed with her broadcast, assumed she was African-American, one of these people wrote to her saying “All of you niggers better go back to Africa where you all belong” shortly after that she announced to her listeners that she was white, knowing it might anger certain listeners even more. As she gained more listeners, she also gained more threats, but to her, they were worth it since it meant that the broadcast was being effective for Miami's chapter of civil rights work. She predicted there would be more intimidation tactics and threats of violence would follow suit. She also used her broadcast to speak on major civil rights events happening. She reported on the Brown decision declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. She used all the information she had to help them receive an understanding of the complexity of the case and the approach the NAACP used to help them. She used an informational voice and appealed to her audience’s historical and global understanding. Her final the broadcast was in August of 1956 she spoke and said she had no respect for those who wore hoods or refused to provide their names when slandering others. She was also a developing journalist for the charter, which required her to pursue a mature voice while analyzing major events of the civil rights movement for her local audience. This is shown later within her work, in the fall of 1956 when she started writing a weekly column for the Miami Times (one of the oldest African-American newspapers in Florida); Along Freedom’s Road. This was her newest way of reaching out to more of an audience and leaving, an impression. Within this new platform, she used it to expose racism by analyzing current events from an NAACP perspective and would quote other officials, and called out racist organizations and politicians, whether local, state, or national. Another role she held within the Miami chapter is the Miami NAACP secretary, and the final position she held was the state officer for the NAACP of Florida.

Ruth Perry

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