Oral history with Sheila Shiki y Kessler Michaels

              An Oral History with Sheila ( Kessler) Shiki- y- Michaels
This oral history is provided through a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage It is presented here for reference purposes only. Interviews in this collection are protected by copyright and PERMISSION TO PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED from the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. Please call ( 601) 266- 4574 for more information.
Biography
Sheila Michaels was born and reared in St. Louis, Missouri, but lived with her Grandparents Weil in the Bronx, New York, from her third to eighth years. She attended the College of William and Mary, but was suspended for her political and racial opinions while on the school's newspaper board. After working in publicity for a television station and hotel in St. Louis, she moved to New York at the age of twenty years, on October 3, 1959. She worked there as a ghostwriter, then as an editor. She went to Columbia University night school, where her self- designed field of study was mythology. Middle Eastern ( Persian) Studies and Biblical literature was her graduate field in the eighties. In 1961, Ms. Michaels joined the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE) in New York. In 1962, Dave Dennis, CORE's field secretary in Mississippi, hired her to work in Jackson, Mississippi, where, additionally, she found herself to be working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC). She was active in both groups until 1963, when she became a SNCC field secretary. She helped write John Lewis' " March on Washington" speech; then, she ran a newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee, The Knoxville Crusader, which was a two- person project, headed by Marion S. Barry Jr. In 1964, Sanford Leigh, the director of the Freedom Summer project in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, invited Ms. Michaels to be the project manager for the Council of Federated Organizations ( COFO) Hattiesburg project. Ms. Michaels [ was in the group which founded the modern Women's Movement and, in 1961, originated the title, " Ms." ( the honorific, the rationale, the pronunciation, and use). 2 Her] later career has been variously in public relations, journalism, criticism, editing, and for a decade in New York City, cab driving. She ran a Japanese restaurant during her marriage. She has worked in India, Singapore, Japan, and Laos. She now teaches Biblical Studies and writes. She is conducting an Oral History of the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE) for Columbia University as well as collecting the testimonies of peace activists and SNCC activists.
Topics Discussed
Early childhood Brown decision in 1954 William and Mary College
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