Leslie F. (Skip) Griffin, Jr. Oral History

Leslie Francis Griffin, Jr., colloquially known as “Skip,” is the son of Reverend L. Francis Griffin, who coordinated with Dr. Rachel Weddington to have Queens College students tutor children in Prince Edward County during the summer of 1963 as part of the Student Help Project. The public schools of Prince Edward County were closed for five years starting in 1959 in massive resistance to integration, denying many of the local young black students access to education, including Skip Griffin and his siblings. In this interview, Skip Griffin recalls his father’s prominent position as the reverend of Farmville’s First Baptist Church, president of the Prince Edward County Christian Association, and the county coordinator of the NAACP. Although his father was a renowned advocate for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, Griffin remarks on the influence his father’s activism had on their family, as well as the community as a whole. Skip Griffin himself was not a student of the Student Help Project during the pivotal summer of 1963, but he explains his own involvement in civil rights activism as a teenager that subsequently led him to continue his work while attending Harvard University.