A. Knighton Stanley, a civil rights leader who helped bring Jesse Jackson to prominence as an activist in the 1960s, died Sept. 21 at a hospital in Atlanta. He was 76.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Kathryn Stanley.

The son of a congregationalist minister, Stanley graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1962 and returned to his hometown of Greensboro, N.C., amid growing tensions over civil rights protests.

The city had drawn national attention in 1960 when students at the city’s historically black colleges led sit-ins at Woolworth’s because they had been denied service on the basis of their race. But when the community did nothing more to integrate many of its theaters, emporiums and other public accommodations, the pickets and protests continued afresh.

“Demonstrations in Greensboro were larger than anywhere else in the country except Birmingham, Ala.,” said Duke University history professor William Chafe, who wrote the book “Civilities and Civil Rights” about the Greensboro protests. “There were 1,400 people in jail in the spring of 1963.”

Stanley charged into this environment, serving as a respected adviser to the students who drove the civil rights movement in the city and proving instrumental in bringing the black establishment behind the demonstrations.

Stanley worked at Greensboro’s black schools, North Carolina A&T State University and the women’s Bennett College. He also became a local official with the Congress of Racial Equality and sat on Greensboro’s human rights commission.

Stanley knew that the civil rights efforts in Greensboro lacked someone to galvanize the struggle in a consistent way, and he helped identify the charismatic potential of Jesse Jackson, then a popular campus athlete and student body president at North Carolina A&T. In later years, he would become a minister, civil rights leader and presidential candidate.

“We needed Jesse as a football player the girls loved,” Stanley told Chafe. “We woke him up one day and he has been protesting ever since.”

In an interview Wednesday, Jackson called Stanley his “closest teacher” before he became involved in civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. “He was young enough for us to relate to but old enough to set parameters for us,” Jackson said. “He had the capacity to interpret our struggle bigger than just the daily march.”

The Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins were credited with sparking similar protests throughout the South and ushering in a new generation of civil rights leaders, including Jackson, Julian Bond and John Lewis. Three years after the first Woolworth’s sit-in, the Greensboro mayor issued a call for mass desegregation. The next year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public places.

Alfred Knighton Stanley, known as “Tony,” was born in Dudley, N.C., on July 15, 1937, and raised in Greensboro. He was a 1959 graduate of Talladega College in Alabama and received a doctorate in ministry from Howard University in 1974.

In 1966, he left Greensboro for a ministerial job in Detroit. Two years later, he arrived in Washington and became senior minister at Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ, a historic church whose late minister, Arthur Elmes, helped lead the push to integrate Washington restaurants in the 1950s.

“Our only power,” Stanley said of his preaching, “is to give the city a sense of moral meaning and when you lose touch with that which makes you powerful, it’s like pulling the cord.”

 

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