Vera Pigee
*Vera Pigee was born on this date in 1924. She was a Black businesswoman and civil rights worker.
Vera Mae Berry was born to sharecropper Wilder Berry and his wife, Lucy Wright Berry, near Glendora in Leflore County, Mississippi. When she was fourteen, she married Paul Pigee Jr., who was four years older, and their daughter, Mary Jane, was born the day before Pigee's sixteenth birthday. After studying cosmetology in Chicago, Pigee moved back South and opened Pigee's Beauty Salon in Clarksdale, MS.
Pigee served as branch secretary to the Coahoma County chapter of the NAACP, a chapter she helped organize with activist Aaron Henry. She owned a beauty shop, and her income didn't depend on the white community, so her activism didn't cause her to lose her job. In addition, in 1963, she got harassed because of using the "white-only bathroom." She was an advisor to the Mississippi State NAACP Youth Council. She also supervised her region's Citizenship Schools, which held classes on voter registration for Blacks. Pigee was a fierce integrationist.
She was pivotal with fellow NAACP members in desegregating the Clarksdale Bus Terminal 1961. Ben C. Collins, the Clarksdale police chief, called her "the most aggressive leader of the NAACP in Clarksdale." Pigee left Clarksdale in the early 1970s to study sociology and journalism, earning a doctorate from Wayne State University in Detroit. After movement history in Mississippi rendered Pigee and her loyalty to the NAACP invisible, she wrote and published a two-part autobiography, Struggle of Struggles, during the 1970s. She continued her activism with the NAACP in Michigan and became an ordained Baptist minister in Detroit. Vera Pigee died on September 18, 2007. A street in Clarksdale bears her name.
