The one parade thing made me think it was Ovide who started the MLK parade, and years later, another person decided to take over, so Houston wound up with two MLK parades. Some do; others come in behind and want to take the credit or make money, if that were the case, for what others fought hard for.
We need people like Ovide Duncantall and Ray Hill who never gave up fighting for what was right, or at least what they believed was right. In the early 1970s, I was very active in the civil rights movement. I recall the police killed members of the black panthers party. I had met several of the members and had visited them at the location where the shootout took place. I also met Ovide Dunctall and Ray Hill during those times. I used to visit Ray every now and then, and sometimes our paths would cross. Ovide I met because he was a leader of the Black community who was fighting for the same rights I believed in. I recall that he was sentenced to prison for one seed of marijuana.
It would be an exercise in understatement to say that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a tense time between HPD and the black community. In 1967, Police Chief Herman Short’s officers pumped 3,000 rounds of shotgun and carbine ammo into a men’s dorm at Texas Southern University, the year after that outspoken black activist Lee Otis Johnson received a 30-year prison sentence for giving an undercover cop a joint.
Some of you should know that many of the rights you have now were not given to you; people had to fight, and in some cases give up their freedom and their lives, so that future generations would not have to. Rights are not handed over.
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Click on the name for information on Ovide and Ray.
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