October 12, 2025
Douglas played a pivotal role in planning several civil rights marches, including the infamous Bloody Sunday March in Selma, Alabama.
Rev. Jesse L. Douglas, a close aide to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died in 2021 at age 90, though his passing has only recently come to light. According to his daughter, Adrienne Douglas Vaulx, he died in a nursing home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
As The New York Times reports, Douglas’ death was not widely known at the time, and the outlet only learned of it during the week of Oct. 10. Douglas played a pivotal role in planning several civil rights marches, including two in Selma, Alabama — one of which became known as the infamous Bloody Sunday March. He worked closely with King as part of the Montgomery Improvement Association, serving as the group’s president from 1963 to 1966.
That group, founded in 1955 in order to plan the response to the arrest of Rosa Parks for the “crime” of refusing to give up her seat and move to the Black section of a Montgomery city bus. The group helped promote a prolonged citywide bus boycott, led by Dr. King, which eventually resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that ended segregation of public transportation.
Douglas also sat on the national board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for over 30 years, the SCLC was a group dedicated to civil rights which King began in 1957 and Douglas was well respected in leadership circles for his ability to keep a cool head while organizing voting rights marches which were birthed in Selma.
According to the National Park Service, the marches in Selma were organized in response to the killing of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) youth leader Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, by police officers.
There were three marches in Selma, the first, the most well known of the three, Bloody Sunday, held on March 7, 1965, was ended after police officers brutally attacked protesters who attempted to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge after firing tear gas canisters and ordering the crowd to disperse.
The second, held two days later, was ended early by King, and the third, which successfully accomplished the goal of reaching the State Capitol in Montgomery, due in part to the accompaniment of 25,000 protestors by the Alabama National Guard, F.B.I. agents and federal marshals, stretched across four days, lasting from March 21-25.
Douglas, an albino, was sometimes referred to in newspapers of the day as an “unidentified white man,” an ironic development, because aside from a lack of melanin, Black albino people typically do not share the same facial features of white men.
Furthermore, Douglas enrolled in HBCUs, first attending his hometown New Orleans’ university, Dillard University, before eventually transferring to Jackson, Tennessee’s Lane College, which he graduated from in 1959.
Three years later, Douglas graduated from Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center, but before his graduation, in 1960, he met King in the school’s library, and the meeting propelled him to get involved in the civil rights movement. That same year, he joined a protest which aimed to desegregate the cafeteria of the Georgia State Capitol.
He played an integral part in the protest, placing a call to the Southern Christian Leadership Council’s legal affairs office, which led to a lawsuit and a ruling in the resulting case, Douglas and Reynolds v. Vandenberg that desegregated all facilities at the Capitol building in Atlanta.
In an interview with the New York Times in 2018, he referred to himself as a reverse Oreo cookie, “white on the outside, Black on the inside.”
The late Rep. John Lewis, who is also featured in arguably one of the most famous photographs of the civil rights era alongside King and Douglas, noted in a 2015 interview with The Charlotte Observer that King had a great deal of trust in Douglas’ ability to coordinate the needs of the movement’s logistics.
“Dr. King had a great deal of faith in him,” Lewis said. “He would say, ‘Jesse was taking care of this’ and ‘Jesse was taking care of that.’ And he could lead a song, creating a real sense of solidarity.”
His singing even earned him high praise. Charles Steele Jr., a longtime president and chief executive of the SCLC, indicated that he sometimes served the same role as Mahalia Jackson, another King confidant who often set the table for his sermons in Black churches.
“He really set the church on fire and got people motivated, pretty much like Mahalia Jackson,” Steele recalled.
He continued, noting, like the late Rep. Lewis, that the role Douglas occupied was a vital one. “He had a beautiful personality, was very outgoing, and everyone knew that if Dr. King or the national office needed something, he would do it. You needed people like that — part of the inner circle, but someone willing to do whatever was needed to support the movement.”
However, as Douglas told the New York Times, sometimes his pale skin was a Catch 22.
“They (white segregationists) always considered me a sympathizer with Black people, but not one of them. You know, that’s how I became ‘unidentified white man.’ They didn’t want to arouse friction from their own kind for killing another white man.”
He continued, “I had Black people make fun of me, call me ‘old white boy,’ ‘old albino.’ I never paid it any attention. I said, ‘If they’re dissatisfied with the way I look, go see God.’”
Douglas was preceded in death by his longtime wife, Blanche Gordon, in 2015. In addition to his daughter, he is also survived by two sons, Winston and Jesse Jr.; a brother, Collins; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
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