Site last updated: Thursday, June 5, 2025
Welcome, GuestSign In

Log In

Reset Password
MENU
Butler County's great daily newspaper

Hollis Watkins, who was jailed multiple times for challenging segregation in Mississippi, dies at 82

Hollis Watkins, national chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary conference, speaks at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, June 25, 2014. Watkins was a longtime civil rights activist who was 82 when he died Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, at his home in Clinton, Miss. AP File Photo

JACKSON, Miss. — Hollis Watkins, who started challenging segregation and racial oppression in his native Mississippi when he was a teenager and toiled alongside civil rights icons including Medgar Evers and Bob Moses, has died. He was 82.

Watkins — who also sometimes went by Hollis Watkins Muhammad — died Wednesday at his home in the Jackson suburb of Clinton, Mississippi, according to the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, a group for which he was chairman.

“I’m just extremely heartbroken over his passing,” Cynthia Goodloe Palmer, the group's executive director, said Friday. “He was a tremendous friend, leader, co-worker and someone that everyone looked up to, someone who sacrificed tremendously.”

Michael Morris, director of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, said Watkins “dedicated his entire life to improving the lives of Black Mississippians.”

More in National News

Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter

* indicates required
TODAY'S PHOTOS