Alabama voting rights activist dies

Teresa Burroughs
APR's Pat Duggins

The civil rights activist at the heart of Alabama Public Radio’s award-winning documentary “The King of Alabama” has died. Theresa Burroughs, of Greensboro, died at the age of eighty nine this week. She hid Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior in her civil rights “safe house” from a KKK assassination squad two weeks before the civil rights icon was killed in Memphis. APR’s interview of Burroughs was featured in two segments of “The King of Alabama,” about how Alabama was one of the key battlegrounds for Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior’s crusade for civil rights. The civil rights activist is photographed here with her Congressional gold medal for being one of the voting rights marchers attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

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Pat Duggins is news director for Alabama Public Radio.