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Vera Pigee Author

Vera Pigee (1924–2007)managed Pigee’s Beauty Salon in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and worked as a civil rights activist, serving as branch secretary to the Coahoma County chapter of the NAACP, a chapter she helped organize with Aaron Henry. She was an advisor to the Mississippi state NAACP Youth Council, taught citizenship classes, trained activists, and ran voter registration drives. She later became an ordained Baptist minister.

Françoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies and History at Brown University. She is author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II and coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship.