Rev. Abraham Woods Jr.; MLK-Era Rights Leader - washingtonpost.com: The Rev. Abraham Woods Jr., 80, a civil rights leader in Birmingham, Ala., who stood behind the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during his 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech at the Lincoln Memorial, died of complications from cancer Nov. 7 at Princeton Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham.
Rev. Woods, a founder and longtime president of the Birmingham chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, began his civil rights work in the mid-1950s, working with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as well as with King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. After Alabama outlawed the NAACP, Rev. Woods and his brother, the Rev. Calvin Woods, along with Shuttlesworth, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.
