Biography
The Rev. Frank Dukes was a Birmingham civil-rights organizer and Miles College student leader who helped lay the groundwork for the 1963 Birmingham Campaign. As president of the Miles College Student Government Association he drafted the December 1961 statement "This We Believe" and led the 1962 Selective Buying Campaign, urging Black Birmingham residents to stop shopping at downtown businesses that kept segregated facilities or refused to hire Black workers in meaningful jobs; the resulting economic pressure desegregated some stores before Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC launched their better-known campaign. A co-leader of the 1963 Easter Sunday March — for which he was jailed — Dukes was active in the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, the SCLC and the NAACP, and volunteered as one of Dr. King's Birmingham bodyguards. An Army veteran of the Korean War, he later became a minister, a vocational-rehabilitation counselor and a Miles College administrator. He died in Birmingham on November 11, 2023, aged 92.
