Bob Mants

Robert "Bob" Mants Jr. (April 25, 1943 – December 7, 2011) was an American civil rights activist, serving as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Mants moved to Lowndes County, working for civil rights for the remainder of his life. Lowndes County contained the majority of the distance covered by the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and was then notorious for its racist violence.

Early life Mants was born in Atlanta, Georgia. a segregated black high school. While he was attending high school, Mants was a member of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (which would later develop into the Atlanta Student Movement) and volunteering for administrative tasks at the headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, He would go on to attend Morehouse College with the intention of majoring in medicine,

Mants and Stokely Carmichael from the SNCC first arrived in Selma to participate in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march; earlier that morning, Mants had participated in a prayer at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the march originated, with John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and Andrew Young. During the violent suppression on Bloody Sunday, Mants saved a woman from a possible beating and took her away from the tear gas cloud. even though the county's population was predominantly black. The county was known as "Bloody Lowndes" or the rusty buckle of the Black Belt of Alabama because of its long, violent history of whites retaliating against blacks who tried to register to vote. When Mants and other SNCC officials began to register black voters, Mants served as a farm management specialist at Tuskegee University.

Bob Mants died after a heart attack on December 7, 2011, while visiting Atlanta. A memorial service was held in Lowndes County on December 17, 2011, where several speakers praised him and his three children (Kadejah, Kumasi, and Katanga) expressed their appreciation for the honors bestowed to him. In addition to his three children, Mants is survived his wife, Joann Christian (also a noted civil rights activist) and seven grandchildren. Mants is also survived by three sisters (Dorothy, Roberta, Otelia).