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Winchester includes fewer than 3% of Blacks, but as local NAACP members point out, “The association is open to everyone, not just to Black folks.”
Patty Shepherd says the Mystic Valley branch of the National Association for Colored People “has been around since the 1940s — it’s one of the oldest in Massachusetts.
“It’s not that residents said we need the association, but the association reached out to the Network for Social Justice when a local resident couldn’t get served in a pizza shop,” Shepherd says. “We asked, ‘What can we do?’ and the answer was ‘Come to the shop with my son.’”
Both Shepherd and Claire McNeill joined about 10 years ago.
“We were members of the Unitarian Church’s Social Action and Outreach Committee right when Black Lives Matter got started,” says Shepherd. “We went to an association’s meeting and joined.”
Gloria Legvold heard about the group from a Network meeting, and signed up at the West Medford Community Center.
“I’ve always been involved in civil rights activities and I helped with fund-raising,” she says.
Member Dr. Harris Gibson was a youth member in his hometown of Mobile, Ala. and helped recruit members.
“I’d play alto sax at events and I was active until I went to medical school. I joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Nashville, along with John Lewis and others,” says Gibson. “When I came to Boston in 1962, I met Sen. Ed Brooke, the first Black elected to the U.S. Senate.
“Back in Montgomery, Rosa Parks was the youth director. By the way, she wasn’t the first woman to refuse to yield her seat to a white person. There were six women before her. I went to the Hope Street Baptist Church the first night of the bus boycott,” says Gibson.
McNeill was interested in integration starting in college.
“In 1961, I went to the south with an integrated group. We had to be careful we didn’t get attacked. Not only did I learn about the bus boycott, but that Blacks were discriminated against in marriage rights, jobs, and other areas,” she says.
A member of the Winchester Unitarian Church, McNeill and the committee were “looking for ways to implement our commitment. The NAACP chapter was the right fit.”
The chapter does fundraisers to help pay for national legal staff and voter registration activities all over the country, Harris says.
The group meets mostly on Zoom.
