Ed King, 89, Scarred Veteran of Mississippi's Civil Rights Struggle, Dies

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Ed King, 89, Scarred Veteran of Mississippi’s Civil Rights Struggle, Dies

A minister disfigured in an attack on his life, he became what one historian called “the most visible white activist in the Mississippi movement.”


Ed King in 1970 speaking at a memorial service for James Earl Green, one of the two students killed during a shooting at Jackson State College that May. Jackson State University/Getty Images

By Adam Nossiter
July 13, 2026, 4:29 p.m. ET

The Rev. Ed King, a minister from Mississippi who was one of the few white people to play a leading role standing with Black leaders during the bloody civil rights struggle in his native state, died on July 4 in Ridgeland, Miss. He was 89. ... His death, in an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his daughter Margaret King.

The outspoken chaplain of Tougaloo College, a historically Black institution in Jackson, the state capital, Mr. King endured imprisonment, an attempt on his life that left him disfigured and rejection by other white people, all in service to a goal — integration — to which most Southerners of his middle-class background were hardly sympathetic.

In a state perhaps more determined than any other to preserve inequality, Mr. King took part in a daring sit-in at the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in May 1963. A violent mob attacked the protesters, and did not spare white allies. His sunken cheek and jaw, bashed in a car crash engineered by segregationists that same year, served as a chilling warning to civil-rights workers pouring into Mississippi.


Mr. King at the 1964 Democratic Convention with Annie Devine, left, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“He became the most visible white activist in the Mississippi movement, and he paid a heavy price for honoring his convictions,” the historian John Dittmer wrote in “Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi” (1994).

{snip}

“He pulled me into the civil rights movement,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said in a statement after Mr. King’s death. ... “He did it as a white man who was completely at ease in a sea of Black folks — something so rare during that time,” Mr. Thompson added. “A lot of lives changed because he chose to stand with Blacks when so many were against us.”

Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.

[Permanut]

1. RIP Reverend King..

A hero indeed.