UTC’s Richard Brown is the recipient of the 2018 NAACP James R. Mapp Ruby Hurley Image Award.
The executive vice chancellor for finance and administration, Brown accepted the award at the NAACP’s 31st annual awards ceremony on Thursday, Oct. 18.
The awards ceremony’s theme this year was “Stay Woke,” derived from the phrase “stay awake” and referring to the need for awareness of an issue, particularly social and racial injustice.
Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave the keynote address at the awards ceremony. Young, 86, and former civil rights colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King, regaled the audience with stories from the past and then urged the audience to “move forward, never backward,” adding “today this world is so much better for all of us.”
Mapp, who died in 2015, joined the NAACP in the 1940s and was president of the Chattanooga branch for 16 years in the 1960s and ’70s, then again from 1987-95. He was state president for two-and-a-half years and chairman of the Southeast Region for two more. He was elected as the local NAACP president again in 2013.
UTC’s James. R. Mapp Building on East Eighth Street is named after him. In December 2017, the former University Street on the UTC campus, was officially renamed as James R. Mapp Street. His insurance/real estate office once sat at the corner of University Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
Hurley was a civil rights activist and longtime member of the NAACP. A native of Washington, D.C., she spent much of the 1950s and ’60s in the South, championing civil rights causes and taking part in such influential efforts as the investigation into the 1955 murders of minister George W. Lee and 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi and the integration of the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia.
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