Illustration by Chris Honeysuckle Ellis
Lois Freeman
In 2008, at the age of 87, longtime Memphis human rights activist Lois Freeman had a car wreck, went to a local emergency room, and was told she had a fracture of her spine. She was rushed into a room at the hospital but immediately became restless and, against all medical advice, checked herself out.
Prudence dictated that she at least tell someone close about her predicament, though, so she called a family friend, David Upton, who, with Freeman’s son, John, was then attending the Democratic convention in Denver. She extracted a pledge from Upton that he would keep the news of her accident to himself, promising that she would let him know if her condition worsened. Knowing the excitement that was kindling in Denver, where Barack Obama was about to become the first African-American to be nominated for president, she said she feared her son would insist on coming home if he knew her full circumstances and explained, “I don’t want John to miss any of that.”
That story is typical of who Lois Freeman was in several respects. Notably, she habitually thought of others before herself and identified profoundly with the political and social tides she favored. That same year, in an interview with students at Rhodes College who were preparing a documentary on local civil rights pioneers, she expounded on a lengthy chronicle of the causes she had been devoted to and still pursued, though she was at that point visibly frail. “It’s kind of hard to slow down,” she explained.
Nor did she, ever, this self-described baseball-playing “tomboy” of East Tennessee origins, until death overtook her, this year at the age of 96. But not until long after she had seen the establishment and flourishing of a broad human rights movement in her adopted hometown of Memphis. Both as a volunteer activist and during several years of employment with the federal government, she worked on behalf of the disabled, of work opportunities for minorities, of desegregation, of expanded voting rights, of women’s rights, and even of religious diversity, as a co-founder of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Memphis.
Nor did Lois Freeman work alone; she did what she did in tandem with numerous others (in the early years of the civil rights movement, for example, she aided such pathfinders as Maxine Smith, Russell Sugarmon, and A.W. Willis). Side by side with her were her late husband Max Freeman, a lawyer who was an important behind-the-scenes presence in public affairs for many years, and her only child, the aforementioned John Freeman, an indispensable aide to numerous well-known Democrats — U.S. Representatives Harold Ford and Harold Ford Jr., and former Mayor AC Wharton, in particular.
Lois Freeman first achieved special notice in 1964, that year of epic change in Memphis’ civil rights landscape, when she became an integral member of a biracial group of women who began, methodically and staunchly and effectively, the racial integration of the city’s restaurants, simply by eating together at a different establishment each Saturday.
She next turned her determination and skills to voter registration drives, locally and across the state line in Mississippi, focusing on minorities and women, often having to drive to potentially dangerous areas of voter suppression in Tennessee and the neighboring state in unmarked government cars. Decades later, she continued to be certified as an official election observer by the Department of Justice. As president of the Memphis Women’s Political Caucus, Freeman worked hard to get outstanding women to run for and serve in public office. The rolls of officialdom over the years, continuing to this day, contain a plethora of women, recruited by her, who have distinguished themselves in office. Besides the caucus, she was a mainstay of such organizations as the Women’s Leadership Forum, Women of Achievement, and the Shelby County Democratic Women.
Freeman co-founded the Equal Employment Opportunity Council of Greater Memphis and the Public Issues Forum. She was a member of the Governor’s Committee for the Handicapped, and she was well ahead of the curve in dealing with the issue of abused women, chairing the Abused Women’s Services Committee in the early 1990s.
Children, too, were a special concern of hers, and at the time of her passing, she was still an active member of the board of Tennessee Mentorship, a group that worked with at-risk children of pre-school ages. And she was prominent with EdPAC, an organization that does watchdog services for public education and evaluates and endorses school board candidates.
But, for all her administrative roles of consequence, Lois Freeman was best known and most beloved for her liberal use of elbow grease in lending assistance to others. She embodied poet Robert Bly’s dictum that “every situation needs you there.” She was always on call.
