Son Andrew Lockett, center, with Lee Rosner and Richard Furlow on Friday. A local civil rights hero and Freedom Rider, Winston Henry Lockett, had cigarette burns on his back — from doing voter registration in the early 1960s in Alabama. On Friday, his son Andrew remembered those burns — a nd the consequent high anxiety he had allowing his own daughter, Lockett’s grandchild, to go to school in the deep South, even 30 years later. It worked out fine for the granddaughter, but that memory of the price that principled young African Americans like Lockett paid for their activism in the 1960s was front and center in a moving funeral service at Beaverdale Memorial Park Friday morning. On a sunlit day, beneath pines and just blooming cherry trees, 40 family members and friends of the Hillhouse High grad, labor organizer, and local activist gathered beneath a green tent to lay Lockett’s cremains to rest nearby his parents. Lockett died late last year — on Dec. 16 — at the age of 84. The setting was a simple, emotional, and quietly historic ceremony near the campus of Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), where Lockett had trained as a teacher. “I’m named for Andrew Goodman,” said Andrew Lockett, referring to the trio of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Goodman, all of whom were murdered while working for an affiliate of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) registering African Americans to vote in 1964 in the South. After graduating from Hillhouse in 1959 and working for Olin-Mathieson Corporation as a chemistry technician, Lockett signed on with CORE early on. His aim: to train in non-violent protest and resistance tactics. He was already involved in sit-ins, voter registration and other perilous activities in 1962 in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Click here for an article in the New York Times dated July 7, 1963, on student activism in the South. In that article, Lockett is interviewed extensively, along with colleagues like future Civil Rights icon John Lewis. Here’s a brief excerpt: “I believe I accept nonviolence as a way of life,” he [Lockett] says. “We in the movement love life; that’s why we’re willing to give our lives for it. And as I work in the movement I’m beginning to love people more.” Mr. Lockett bridles at the possibility that, for some students at least, activism is excitement, or a way of getting one’s photograph in the papers. “Nobody likes to go to jail,” he says. “But if people think we’re doing it for the kicks, we’ll just have to let them think that.” Lee Rosner was married to Lockett’s sister Grace, herself a civil rights attorney at the beginning of her career and who organized the Friday service. He recalled that when Lockett came back to New Haven — where he did labor organizing and was a memorable educator full of “living history” for the kids in the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) system – he taught them how to conduct a picket line that would survive the batons and bulldogs of police departments in the deep South. “In the South, if you stopped, or stepped out, or gave any excuse,” Rosner remembered, that could lead to beating and arrest. “He had us make a circle and instructed us what to do.” Grace Lockett at Friday’s memorial service. Lockett went on to become a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War era, and, during his stints working in his hometown of New Haven, he worked on affordable housing. “He was responsible for New Haven’s creation of the city’s Equal Opportunity Commission,” said Richard Furlow, the majority leader of the Board of Alders, who was also in attendance. A first-cousin-once-removed from Lockett, Furlow presented Grace Lockett and the family with an aldermanic proclamation hailing Winston Lockett’s life and service. “I’m a Lockett and proud of it,” said Furlow, “and it’s wonderful to see, some for the first time, this beautiful family.” The family had gathered from as far away as New Mexico and Georgia (where Lockett died and was cremated before his remains were moved to New Haven) and the service also functioned as a kind of mini family reunion. “Where did the courage come from,” wondered Grace Lockett about her brother, in her moving remarks. “Having been beaten again and again, and to get up again?” If there were a mystery at the moving ceremony, it was close to that question. The Locketts were raised as “pew children,” Grace recalled, very much in the bosom of the Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church where they were indeed taught “to be our brother’s keeper,” she recalled. Yet to organize and to be arrested for a social cause no matter how important, recalled Rosner, that was looked down on at most of the African American churches like Beulah Heights in the very early 1960s. And then suddenly Winston, recalled, her brother would return from school with words the family had not heard of, including “atheism” and “cremation.” Where did that come from? That turn in biography? Acknowledging that her big brother was quirky, eccentric, unusual, and yet somehow deeply rooted in a local social justice ethic that drove him to give so much of his life to the civil rights movement, and on its front lines — and often at the expense of his family — was very much part of the emotional, living biography that comprises a funeral. See below for a writeup provided by Lockett’s family honoring his life and legacy. Winston Henry LockettDec. 13, 1941 — Dec. 16, 2025 The late Winston Lockett. For his extraordinary courage and sustained commitment to justice as a freedom fighter and field secretary of the New Haven chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) during the Civil Rights Movement. Beginning his work with CORE in New Haven as part of a national network of civil rights organizers, he contributed to local efforts addressing discrimination in housing, employment, and equal opportunity, helping to connect the Southern civil rights struggle with urban organizing in the North. He went on to serve on the front lines of a national movement to dismantle segregation, working across multiple regions to organize campaigns, support local leadership, and advance coordinated direct-action initiatives. Through his work on the ground in the Jim Crow South during the early 1960s, he was part of the wave of organizers and demonstrators whose efforts helped bring national attention to the struggle for equality and who worked alongside national civil rights leadership, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson. His participation included direct-action protests and sit-ins challenging segregation in public accommodations, including his arrest during a 1962 sit-in at a segregated Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he requested service, was refused, and was arrested after refusing to leave, later choosing imprisonment rather than paying a fine. He was a key participant in the 1963 Freedom Walk, a memorial march from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, organized to continue the journey of William Lewis Moore, a civil rights activist who was murdered while walking that same route alone. During this effort, he endured physical violence while maintaining a commitment to nonviolent protest, and became part of the visual historical record of the movement through widely recognized photographic documentation. His work was part of a coordinated national movement and was recognized in contemporaneous reporting. Records of his efforts are preserved within the archives of the United States Department of Justice and within the historical records of CORE during this critical period. Following his years of frontline activism, he dedicated himself to the New Haven community through a long career in the New Haven Public Schools as an educator, where he was regarded as a “living history” teacher, teaching students about civic responsibility, history, and the principles of justice shaped by his own experience in the Civil Rights Movement. In New Haven, he remained engaged in community efforts addressing the impacts of urban renewal and broader issues of equity, including advocacy that contributed to the establishment of the City’s Commission on Equal Opportunities in 1964. Beyond his public service, he was a Prince Hall Mason and a devoted family man. He is remembered by his sons, Andrew Lockett and Elliott Lockett; his sisters, Grace Lockett and Elaine Jones; his nephew, Arie Salazar Rosner; and other family and friends. The City of New Haven honors the legacy of Winston Lockett with deep respect and extends its heartfelt condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones. Cousin Winston’s graveside memorial service will be Friday, April 10, at Beaverdale, 11-noon with repast and visitation at African American Lodge, Manilla Street, Hamden from 1 to 3:30 pm. The post Local Civil Rights Icon Laid To Rest appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less