60 years later, ‘An Appeal for Human Rights’ still resonates

In this March 4, 2020 photo, Roslyn Pope shows her Spelman College yearbook at her home in Atlanta. As a 21-year-old Spelman senior in March 1960, Pope wrote "An Appeal for Human Rights," a document that made the case for the Atlanta Student Movement, a nonviolent campaign of boycotts and sit-ins by black college students that protested racial segregation in education, jobs, housing, voting, hospitals, movies, concerts, restaurants and law enforcement. (AP Photo/Michael Warren) In this March 4, 2020 photo, Roslyn Pope shows her Spelman College yearbook at her home in Atlanta. As a 21-year-old Spelman senior in March 1960, Pope wrote "An Appeal for Human Rights," a document that made the case for the Atlanta Student Movement, a nonviolent campaign of boycotts and sit-ins by black college students that protested racial segregation in education, jobs, housing, voting, hospitals, movies, concerts, restaurants and law enforcement. (AP Photo/Michael Warren)

By MICHAEL WARREN / Associated Press March 8, 2020 5 min read

ATLANTA (AP) – Sixty years have passed since Roslyn Pope came home from Europe to a segregated South and channeled her frustrations into writing “An Appeal for Human Rights.”

The document published on March 9, 1960, announced the formation of the Atlanta Student Movement, whose campaign of civil disobedience broke a suffocating stalemate over civil rights in Atlanta and hastened the end of racist Jim Crow laws and policies across the region.

After all this time, Pope is deeply concerned that their hard-won achievements are slipping away.

“We have to be careful. It’s not as if we can rest and think that all is well,” Pope told The Associated Press in an interview last week.

The “Appeal” quickly became a civil rights manifesto after it appeared as a full-page advertisement in Atlanta’s newspapers. It was denounced by Georgia’s segregationist Gov. Ernest Vandiver but celebrated around the country, reprinted for free in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and entered into the Congressional Record.