The Rev. Willie Barrow died Thursday in Chicago.
The 4-foot-11-inch “Little Warrior” worked for civil rights starting in 1936 at age 12, when she demanded to be allowed in an all-white school bus in her home state of Texas. After that she never stopped.
She worked as a field organizer for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., co-founded the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, sewed one of the first squares on the AIDS quilt, and more recently focused concern on Chicago’s gun violence and changes to the Voting Rights Act.
Barrow embodied the principal of generativity, a term Eric Erickson coined to describe concern for establishing and guiding the next generation. She became a wise elder, and she embraced scores of godchildren.
She lived to see President Barack Obama give a speech at the 50th anniversary of the March 7 Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala. She organized and marched in the Selma and Washington marches of the 1960s.
