About
Remembered for her role in the Selma Voting Rights Movement of 1965, this Alabama-born activist hit Sheriff Jim Clark after he used a law enforcement club to try to force her out of a voting line at Alabama's Dallas County Courthouse.
Before Fame
She left school in the seventh grade and eventually found work as a nursing home caregiver. She was unjustly fired from this position as a result of her civil rights activism.
Trivia
She lived more than five months past her one hundredth birthday.
Family Life
The children of Charles Wilkerson and Lucy Jones, she and her nine siblings spent their early years in Selma, Alabama. She later lived and worked in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, before returning to her native Alabama in the early 1960s.
Associated With
In the 2014 movie Selma, talk show host and actress Oprah Winfrey portrays Annie Lee Cooper.
