photo of Bell Gale, Downtown CORE

belle chevigny.jpg

Dublin Core

Title

photo of Bell Gale, Downtown CORE

Subject

Downtown CORE members

Description

This is a still image of Downtown CORE member Bell Gale from the documentary 'Eyes on The Prize'. She is shown here in Mississippi working in the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office for the Freedom Summer Project of 1964.

An active member of Downtown CORE, she joined after news reports of the Birmingham bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. She demonstrated at the World's Fair and worked with Micky Schwerner in tenant organizing on the Lower East Side. She arrived in Mississippi a day before Chaney, Goodwin and Schwerner went missing.

She also worked with students in Queens College CORE while teaching there during the early-mid 1960's. Her brother, Larry Gale, was a member of Staten Island CORE.

Her husband, Paul Chevigny, a well known lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union at the time, also worked with her in Mississippi and briefly as a lawyer for CORE in New York City.

Now Prof. Bell Gale Chevigny, she has since become the professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY. She is also the editor of the 'Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing'.

The first articles she ever had published by the Village Voice about her time working in the south can be found here:
http://www.crmvet.org/info/ms64gale.htm
http://www.crmvet.org/info/al65bell.htm

Source

Eyes on the Prize

Publisher

Blackside, inc.

Date

1964

Coverage

Mississippi, 1964

Citation

“photo of Bell Gale, Downtown CORE,” corenyc.org, accessed December 9, 2024, http://www.corenyc.org/omeka/items/show/159.

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