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“TRIBUTE TO J. WESLEY WATKINS III” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1038-E1039 on June 6, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TRIBUTE TO J. WESLEY WATKINS III
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HON. LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER
of new york
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, June 6, 2001
Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I would like the U.S. House of Representatives to mark the passing of a man who did everything he could to make America a better place for all of its citizens: J. Wesley Watkins III.
J. Wesley Watkins III, 65, Dies; Civil Liberties Lawyer, Activist
(By Bart Barnes)
J. Wesley Watkins III, 65, a Washington-based lawyer who specialized in civil rights and civil liberties issues in a career that spanned almost 40 years, died of pneumonia June 4 at George Washington University Hopsital. He had cancer.
At his death, Mr. Watkins was a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Alternatives and founding director of the Flemming Fellows Leadership Institute, a program that assists and trains state legislators on such issues as family and medical leave, community reinvestment and motor-voter registration.
He was a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area, a Washington-based southern regional manager of Common Cause and a management consultant to various nonprofit organizations.
In the later 1960s and the 1970s, he had a private law practice in Greenville, Miss. His cases included winning the right for African American leaders to speak to on-campus gatherings at previously all-white universities; the seating of a biracial Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and removal of various barriers and impediments to voting.
Mr. Watkins, a resident of Washington, was born in Greenville and grew up in Inverness, Miss. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, graduated from the University of Mississippi and served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor from 1957 to 1959. He graduated from the University of Mississippi Law School in 1962. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he was a Justice Department lawyer and tried cases throughout the South.
In 1967, he returned to Greenville as a partner in the law firm of Wynn and Watkins. Until 1975, he was the attorney for the Loyal Democrats, the movement to establish a biracial Democratic Party in a state where black residents had been effectively excluded from the political process for generations. The loyalists were seated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the official Democratic Party of Mississippi. In the years after 1968, Mr. Watkins held negotiations with Mississippi's Old Guard Democrats that led to a unified Democratic Party by the national convention of 1976.
Hodding Carter III, the former editor of Greenville's Delta Democrat Times newspaper and a Mississippi contemporary of Mr. Watkin's, described him as ``one of those southerners who loved this place so much that he had to change it. He had to do what he knew was the right and necessary thing in a very hard time. He had to break with so much that was basic to his past.'' Carter is president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami.
In 1975, Mr. Watkins returned to Washington and joined the Center for Policy Alternatives and helped found the Flemming Leadership Institute.
There, Linda Tarr-Whelan, the organization's board chairman, called him a ``larger-than-life figure with a thick Mississippi accent, a magnetic personality and a gift for telling stories.''
He habitually wore cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. When chemotherapy treatments for his cancer caused some of his hair to fall out, Mr. Watkins simply shaved his head and started wearing an earring.
In the 1980s, Mr. Watkins was task force director for the Commission on Administrative Review of the U.S. House of Representatives, which also was known as the Obey Commission. He was a former legislative assistant to Rep. Frank E. Smith
(D-Miss.).
He served on the boards of Common Cause, Americans for Democratic Action and Mid-Delta Head Start, and most recently he was a board member of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington.
He was a former vestryman and a teacher in the Christian education program of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington.
His marriage to Jane Magruder Watkins ended in divorce.
Survivors include his companion, Anita F. Gottlieb of Washington; two children, Gordon Watkins of Parthenon, Ark., and Laurin Wittig of Williamsburg, two sisters, Mollye Lester of Inverness and Ann Stevens of Newark; a brother, William S. Watkins of Alexandria; and four grandchildren.
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