Jackson Free Press

JACKSON — On Saturday, May 28, Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement will pay tribute to Willie Wazir Peacock, a civil-rights veteran who died at the Creekside Health Care Center in San Pablo, Calif., on April 17, 2016. The ceremony will take place at Tabernacle of Praise Church (1917 Forest Ave.) in Jackson and will feature tributes from fellow civil-rights veterans and Peacock's surviving family members.

Peacock was born on Sept. 5, 1937, in Charleston, Miss. He ran away from home as a young boy after an incident in which police arrested his brother, James Arthur Peacock. A local plantation owner offered to get him released if Willie's father came to sharecrop for him. The family moved onto the plantation, but the owner did not keep his promise to get Arthur released.

At that time, Willie was learning about slavery in school and felt he was witnessing it firsthand on the plantation. He ran away from home and didn't see his family until a year later, when he reunited with them in Grenada after they left the plantation. Feeling motivated to do something about the conditions that African Americans faced in Mississippi, Peacock went back to finish high school and then attended Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss., on a four-year music scholarship. He became a member of the Rust College Male A'Cappella Choir and remained with the group throughout college.



"If there's one thing Rust College is known for, it's the a cappella choir, and Willie had a melodious singing voice for it," Leslie McLemore, a fellow civil-rights activist who attended Rust College with Peacock and worked alongside him, told the Jackson Free Press. "He was a lover of the arts, as well as a public speaker, and he put his singing to use in his civil-rights work, as well."



While still in college in 1960, Peacock organized a boycott of a segregated movie theater in Holly Springs, taking inspiration from sit-ins that African American college students in Raleigh, N.C., had orchestrated. That same year, Peacock became a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Rust College and started organizing voter-registration efforts in Holly Springs. He became a field secretary for the organization in 1961, also assisting with voter registration in Greenwood and other towns in north Mississippi.


"Willie was working on Greenwood voter registration at a time when it was extremely dangerous to be doing that kind of thing out in Greenwood," McLemore said. "He started up an SNCC project out there that led to widespread changes in Mississippi and was one of the first civil-rights workers working full time on voter registration in a dangerous area. He made a lot of sacrifices to allow all of us to be who we are today, and I have a lot of respect for him for that."


Peacock enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Ala., in the fall of 1964 and became active with the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League, a student civil-rights organization. He then worked with SNCC organizers in Noxubee, Montgomery and Lowndes counties in Mississippi and in Selma, Ala., during 1965. That same year, he founded the Mississippi Folk Festival, which promoted African American culture by highlighting music such as gospel and blues, and featuring crafts such as quilting, food preservation and food processing.

He worked in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, helping to build alliances between African Americans and Latinos. He served with organizations such as the Black Political Liberation Organization and the Neighborhood Adult Participation Project. He returned to Mississippi in 1970 and married Essie Broom. From 1970 to 1989, Peacock worked with several organizations in Jackson, including The Liberty House, Mississippi Community Documentation Committee, Hanging Moss East Cooperative Community and the Clinic of Herbal Medicine.


Peacock moved his family to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989 and began working with developmentally challenged children and adults as an independent living services instructor at the Stepping Stones Growth Center in San Leandro, Calif., until he retired. He was also a member of the Vukani Mawethu Choir, which sang freedom songs of South Africa and performed concerts to raise funds to support the African National Congress. They also performed for the late Nelson Mandela.


"(Peacock) was my poppy," Peacock's daughter, Della Hill, told the Jackson Free Press. "He has a great legacy from throughout the '60s, but to me, he was always just my dad, who loved to sing to me. My father was a phenomenal man and a phenomenal father. He knew how to find his center and live his life well, and he was open to the universe and to everything. He was a peaceful person who sought the things that brought him that peace, especially his family and bringing them together, no matter how extended the family was. He believed that family should take care of each other's problems and each other together."

Peacock's surviving family also includes sons Pallo Peacock and Bijon Bruce; and grandchildren Dwight Anthony Hill Jr., Dana DeVante Hill, Naia Rose Kramer and Nouri Rana Peacock.

For more information on the memorial service, contact Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement at 601-977-7914 or email [email protected]. Learn more about Willie Peacock at http://onevotesncc.org/profile/willie-peacock/ or http://www.crmvet.org/vet/wazir.htm.