Services for local civil rights icon Robert “Bobby” Howard will begin Thursday afternoon at Social Circle City Cemetery.
Howard died Thursday, days after Social Circle paid homage to him by naming the Robert “Bobby” Howard Bridge, a new span that carried traffic on South Cherokee Road over the CSX railroad near downtown.
The tour is on Wednesdays from 4pm to 8pm at the Young-Levett Funeral Home in Covington.
Moore’s Ford Movement honored Howard for Lifetime Achievement in 2019, although Howard was unable to enjoy some of the awards he has received in recent years due to Alzheimer’s disease.
“He has a desire to make justice and equality a reality,” Tyrone Brooks said at the time. Brooks, who led the Moore Ford movement – an attempt to find justice for the four people lynched here in 1946 – worked with Howard in the civil rights battle for decades.
Howard was involved in civil rights efforts as a teenager after seeing the books for Carver High, the black school in separate Walton County, roll into the back of a dump truck that was dumped in the school yard for students to search . was used by the white schools.
Howard worked for the desegregation, which finally took place in Walton County public schools in the late 1960s, more than a decade after the landmark Brown Supreme Court ruling against Board of Education that mandated it. In 1967 he founded a group called the Community Organization for Progress, which advocated full integration of local schools.
A judge ordered it in 1968.
Howard worked with local funeral director Dan Young to register voters and listened to Young talk about the 1946 lynchings of Ford Bridge in Moore across the Apalachee River.
Young and Howard would drive through the countryside registering African American voters and recruiting for the NAACP.
In later years, Howard helped found the Moore Ford Committee and attended the marches and reenactments regularly.
“We all – black, white, red, polka dots – have to do things right,” he once said.
He was also active in the fight against AIDS.
“If we are what we believe we have to do something,” he said after an AIDS awareness march in 2007.
“And if we don’t, we have to ask who we are?”
Councilor Tyson Jackson said at the inauguration of the bridge last weekend that Jackson had worked hard for civil rights in his life.
“He continued to fight for justice and equality for all,” said Jackson. “He was a foot soldier and fought for the same rights as MLK (Martin Luther King Jr.).
“It’s humble to me. Without Mr. Howard’s work, I probably wouldn’t be here in my position today. “
Due to the panic, guests are asked to wear a mask for both the tour and the funeral service.
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