Biography
Rev. Charles Billups was a Civil Rights leader who along with 11 other pastors founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights after Alabama Attorney General John Patterson banned the NAACP from conducting activities in the state. During the Civil Rights Movement he was jailed numerous times for organizing marches and sit-ins to protest segregation. In 1968 he was assassinated in Chicago by an unknown gunman, police refused to investigate his murder.
Birmingham citizenship organizing after the mass jailings
The SCLC newsletter names Rev. Charles Billups of the Alabama Christian Movement as coordinator of the Birmingham voter-registration drive under SCLC advisorship. It describes a student force of about seventy-five drawn from the roughly two thousand jailed that May, helping bring more than 3,650 new voters onto the rolls over two months. Those are group figures; neither Billups’s own May admission nor a release date is supplied, so this report does not imply he was continuously confined from his older case through the voter drive.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter, volume 1 no.11, August 1963, original pages 3.
