William Worthy - Civil Rights Activist

Civil Rights Activist

During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Worthy was a civil rights activist, and in the early 1960s he was an outspoken critic of the civil rights movement for not going far enough to achieve civil rights in housing and all areas of American life. William Worthy, along with actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, writers James Baldwin, Julian Mayfield and John Killens, poets Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez and Leroi Jones, historian John Henrik Clarke, and photojournalist Gordon Parks was one of the most important political allies of Malcolm X. In the late 1960s, Worthy organized a rent strike against a Catholic hospital in New York City that attempted to tear down Worthy's apartment building and turn it into a parking lot. Worthy later wrote about those experiences in a critically acclaimed book, The Rape of Our Neighborhoods, published in 1976.

The late psychologist, Kenneth B. Clark, said of Worthy: "The Bill Worthys of our society provide the moral fuel necessary to prevent the flickering conscience of our society from going out."