Leader in the civil rights movement, aide to King

The Rev. James Orange, who rose from foot soldier to leader in the civil rights movement and whose 1965 jailing set in motion events that ultimately led to the bloody Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama, died Saturday at Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta. He was 65.

Orange, who later became an organizer with the AFL-CIO and fought apartheid in South Africa, had gallbladder surgery last week, but the cause of his death was unknown, his daughter Jamida Orange said Sunday.

Orange, an amiable giant of a man at over 6 feet and 300 pounds, was one of the first full-time field organizers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was hired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to mobilize young people for the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

He became a top aide to King and was a student of his philosophy of nonviolence. He also organized the annual observance of the King holiday in Atlanta.

Orange was standing under the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., and had just spoken to the civil rights leader before King’s assassination April 4, 1968.

Orange was born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1942. He was the third of seven children. After high school, he was working as a chef when blacks began pushing for the right to vote and for an end to segregation in his hometown.

He joined the civil rights movement in 1962, largely by accident.

“I was a year out of high school,” he said in a 2000 interview with People’s Weekly World. “I had met a beautiful young woman who sang in the choir at the Monday night mass meetings in the 16th Street Baptist Church. We were to meet afterward and go have a soda and talk.”

Entering the crowded church, he walked up front, sat in one of the only empty pews and listened intently as the Rev. Ralph Abernathy spoke.

What he did not realize until later was that by sitting in the front row, he was volunteering, along with other high school and college students, to picket a local store.

Orange -- perhaps because of his size, he once said -- was made a student leader. The next morning, he and several other picketers were arrested at the store.

Scores of arrests followed as Orange helped organize nonviolent marches during some of the most volatile days of the civil rights movement.

“The children’s demonstrations in Birmingham had transformed James Orange from hulking high school drifter to precocious minister of nonviolence,” Taylor Branch noted in his 2006 book “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68.”

In 1965, as part of a voter-registration drive, Orange was organizing a boycott in three southwest Alabama counties when he was arrested and jailed in Perry County. He had been charged with disorderly conduct and inciting students to participate in voting-rights drives, as well as contributing to the delinquency of minors.

Residents in Marion, Ala., gathered for a march and prayer vigil at the jail for the young organizer with the baritone voice who was known for singing freedom songs.

“Rumors had gotten out that I was supposed to be lynched in jail,” Orange told the (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger last year. The protesters “didn’t get no more than out of the church, right in front of the courthouse and City Hall, and they were brutally beaten.”

During that Feb. 18, 1965, protest, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young man who was trying to get his grandfather and mother to safety, was shot in the stomach by an Alabama state trooper. He died several days later, and his death became a rallying point for civil rights activists.

In Alabama, King and other movement leaders organized the first Selma-to-Montgomery march, which came to be called “Bloody Sunday” after police pummeled demonstrators with batons. In March 1965, a third attempt by demonstrators to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge succeeded. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act extending the right to blacks in August.

Orange, who lived in Atlanta, remained with the SCLC until 1977, when he joined the AFL-CIO. He helped Cesar Chavez organize the farmworkers movement and was known as a bridge-builder between people of sometimes competing interests.

Survivors, in addition to his daughter Jamida, include his wife, Cleophas Orange; three children, Deirdre Orange, Tamara Orange and Cleon Orange, all of Atlanta; and two grandchildren.