Stories from the Voting Rights Fight with Maria Gitin

Join SCPL in commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day with Civil Rights veteran and author Maria Gitin. Gitin will share her experience in the Civil Rights Movement and suggest how its successful strategies might inform our current culture. Her one-hour presentation will include historic photographs and personal stories from Gitin’s friends and co-workers. Her memoir, “This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Movement” (University of Alabama Press, 2014 and 2023), will be available for purchase and signing.

Following “Bloody Sunday” and the promised passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Civil rights organizations launched an all-out effort to register thousands of new Black voters in the Deep South. Maria Gitin was an idealistic 19-year-old college freshman at San Francisco State College who responded to Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to join the Summer Community Organizing and Political Education project (SCOPE) of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). After intensive training in Atlanta, Maria was assigned to work with leaders and local youth in violently segregated rural Wilcox County, Alabama. She will read from her published memoir which is the only in-depth account of the Freedom Summer of 1965 from the perspective of a teenage participant.

Bettina Aptheker, Emeritus Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC says: “Maria Gitin’s book is a unique blend of her own story and those of the local community with whom she worked in Wilcox County in the exceptionally challenging struggle of the 1960s civil rights movement. These are powerful stories profoundly relevant for our own times.”

ABOUT MARIA GITIN

Since the first publication of “This Bright Light of Ours,” Maria Gitin has presented at numerous universities, civil rights and history museums, libraries and bookstores. She was the Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker for King County in Seattle; for the U.S. Army Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey and for the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.  She was curator of a voting rights art and history exhibit at Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery and the Santa Cruz County Government Center 2018-2020.

From 1993-1999, Gitin co-led public schools training with National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) Monterey County Chapter. In Santa Cruz County, she served as President of the Emergency Food and Shelter Board, Advisor to the NAACP Kwanzaa Collective, and to Girlz Space, a program of Santa Cruz County Probation Department for in-risk girls in Watsonville.  As co-founder and first co-chair of the Pajaro Valley Cesar Chavez Democratic Club, Gitin worked for many years supporting the voter registration, education, and canvassing efforts of Latino led political action in Watsonville.

For twenty-eight years she was principal of Maria Gitin & Associates, a national organizational development and diversity consulting group. She served on the Peter F. Drucker Foundation national training team, was a coach for CompassPoint’s Fundraising Academy for Communities of Color, and led training for the National Center for Nonprofit Boards, WK Kellogg, Tides and the Peter F. Drucker Foundation. She founded the Monterey Bay Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) and developed a Diversity Fundraising training presented at AFP international conferences.

Projects in the Monterey Bay region included leading the founding of the Monterey YWCA domestic violence emergency shelter, directing start-up of the Carmel Public Library Foundation, and directing capital campaigns for California community health clinics including the Santa Cruz Women’s Health Center. Gitin also developed strategic plans for the Pajaro Valley Health Trust, Santa Cruz Resource Conservation District, and Community Bridges, among others.

Gitin is the recipient of numerous racial justice awards in recognition for her lifetime commitment to civil rights. She is a member of the NAACP, Bay Area Civil Rights Veterans, J Street, and of Aptos Temple Beth El. She and her photographer husband, Samuel Torres Jr., live in Santa Cruz County.  For more on Maria Gitin:

Visit http://www.thisbrightlightofours.com

e-mail: msgitin@mariagitin.com