Irene A. Brown, 90, of Charles City, VA, departed this life on November 10, 2023. Irene was born on October 5, 1933, to the late George and Ashton Brown…
Background
In 1964, New Kent County, located just east of Richmond, remained a largely rural and undeveloped county. Many residents worked in the pulp wood industry while others found employment at the paper mill or outside the county. The racial makeup in the community was almost 50 percent black and 50 percent white. While there was very little interaction among the races, there was also little of the violence that marked the civil rights era in other southern locales. Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional in
Brown v. Board of Education, both public schools in New Kent County the George W. Watkins School for blacks and the New Kent School for whites remained completely segregated, a policy the county and its school board deliberately maintained. This began to change, however, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, in part, threatened to curtail federal funding to localities refusing to integrate their schools
From The Tribune staff reports
BRILLIANT, Ala. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency’s (ALEA) Highway Patrol Division is investigating a single-vehicle crash that claimed the life of a west Alabama man.
George W. Watkins, 71, was killed in the crash on Dec. 12, according to ALEA. Investigators believe the 1999 Chevrolet Silverado he was driving, left the roadway, went down an embankment and struck a tree.
Watkins was pronounced dead on the scene, which was off of Alabama 233, at the 8.8-mile marker, about five miles east of Brilliant.
Watkins has been identified as a missing person from the area since Dec. 13, according to a press release.