Rev. Edwin “Ed” King, one of the last surviving founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and a longtime ally of Black Mississippians throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, died on Saturday, July 4, at age 89.

King was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and attended Carr Central High School. He regularly attended church youth meetings at Millsaps College in Jackson and enrolled at the college after his graduation. While raised with a more conservative upbringing, interacting with Black students enrolled at the nearby Tougaloo College influenced him and motivated King, who was white, to become more involved in local civil rights. The United States Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which desegregated schools and universities nationwide, took place during King’s time at Millsaps.

In the days after desegregation, King began attending interracial meetings at Tougaloo College in Jackson, where he met fellow civil rights leader Medgar Evers. King graduated from Millsaps in 1958 and enrolled at the Boston University School of Theology, where he continued to meet with activists for civil rights and pacifism. 

King also met civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1958 and worked with him and fellow civil-rights activist Rev. Jim Lawson to plan a series of civil-rights sit-ins in the early 1960s. 

On May 28, 1963, King and Tougaloo College students Anne Moody, Pearlena Lewis and Memphis Norman took part in a sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson, where a white mob dumped condiments on the gathered protesters before physically assaulting them.

On Wednesday, June 12, 1963, Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith assassinated Medgar Evers in the driveway of his home in Jackson. Six days later, King and Tougaloo professor John Salter were injured in a car crash believed to have been an attempt at assassinating other Mississippi leaders within the Civil Rights Movement. The crash shattered King’s jaw and severely damaged the right side of his face. King again suffered severe injuries in a second suspicious vehicular collision in Canton, Mississippi. 

Later in 1963 King and Aaron Henry, a Black pharmacist from Clarksdale, served as candidates for lieutenant governor and governor, respectively, in the Freedom Vote, a mock election intended to aid Black Mississippians learning to become registered voters. More than 83,000 Black Mississippians took part in the mock election.

In 1964, King became an organizer for Freedom Summer, a volunteer campaign to help Black Mississippians battle against Jim Crow voter registration laws designed to keep Black people across the southern United States from voting. King also joined Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party activists Henry and Fannie Lou Hamer in challenging Mississippi’s then all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

King also served as a plaintiff in a 1977 lawsuit that charged the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state-funded agency that operated from 1956 to 1977, with illegal surveillance of citizens. Members of the agency spied on civil-rights activists and turned over information on their activities to law-enforcement officers in an effort to quash the Civil Rights movement.

For a time, King worked as chaplain and dean of students at Tougaloo. After leaving Tougaloo, he founded the Delta Ministry, served with the Methodist Board of Missions and led the Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2011, the National Civil Rights Museum honored King during its 20th anniversary Freedom Award Ceremony, placing him alongside icons such as Leola Brown Montgomery, Samuel “Billy” Kyles, James Lawson, C.T. Vivian and John Seigenthaler. In 2014, the University Press of Mississippi published “Ed King’s Mississippi,” a collection of 40 photographs that he took during Freedom Summer in 1964.

“I’m saddened to share that our friend, Ed King, has transitioned,” the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation posted on Facebook. “He was a true champion of civil rights. … We will truly miss you Ed and are grateful for over 60 years of friendship and dedication. Take your rest and may the blessings of comfort and peace be upon your daughters, Lil and Meg.”

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Digital Editor Dustin Cardon is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi where he studied journalism. He started his journalism career years ago at the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi’s capital city as an intern and worked his way up to web editor, a role he now holds within the Mississippi Free Press. Dustin enjoys reading fantasy novels and wants to write them himself one day. Email him at dustin@mississippifreepress.org.