Mattie Sanders Pilcher will be remembered as a quiet but influential worker in the civil rights movement in Greenwood in the 1960s.
"She was a visionary," said Arance Williamson, former Greenwood City Council president and civil rights activist.
Pilcher, 93, died on July 11.
Pilcher opened the first freedom house in Greenwood, where she housed and fed numerous civil rights workers who came from the north, William-son said.
Williamson, who was a teenager at the time, said she worked to integrate restaurants, participated in boycotts of businesses that had no black employees and worked for voter registration along with Pilcher.
"Voter registration was one of our main goals, because without the vote, you have no power," Williamson said.
"(Pilcher) did a lot for this city, and most people are unaware of that because she stayed in the background. But those of us that worked in the movement, we know that," Williamson said.
Even though Williamson at the time did not agree with Pilcher's stance of nonviolence, she listened to Pilcher "because I had a lot of respect for her." Pilcher encouraged Williamson and told her the Lord would work everything out.
Pilcher housed movement workers such as Willie Peacock, Stokely Carmichael, Lawrence Guyot, Bob Moses, Jim Farmer and Sam Block.
The freedom house was a two-story building on the corner of Avenue N and Broad Street that was owned by Pilcher's father, D.S. Sanders, said John Pleasant, Pilcher's oldest son.
Pilcher participated in marches on Birmingham and Washington and the march in Jackson for James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi, Pleasant said.
Pleasant said his mother was very wise when dealing with people and he would call her for advice when working as an executive at ExxonMobil Corp. "(She is) the only genius I know that didn't finish high school," he said.
Pilcher is mentioned in Sally Belfrage's 1965 book "Freedom Summer" about the civil rights movement in Greenwood. For safety's sake, Belfrage referred to the Pilchers as the Amos family. Belfrage said a kind woman named Mrs. Amos welcomed her and other civil rights workers into her home and cooked her fried chicken and cornbread.
