60 Years Later, ‘An Appeal for Human Rights,’ Written By A Spelman Student, Still Resonates

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March 9th, 2020

In this photo last month, Roslyn Pope, who wrote “An Appeal for Human Rights” as a Spelman College student in March 1960, and Charles Black, who co-founded the Atlanta Student Movement as a Morehouse College student that year, pose outside Decatur High School. For the movement’s 60th anniversary, Pope and Black spoke at the high school about their efforts to hasten the end of racial segregation in the South.

Michael Warren / Associated Press

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.

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