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Mary McAnally organized the only Freedom Bus from Oklahoma during the Civil Rights Movement. She went with 40 University of Tulsa students and participated in sit-ins in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested alongside Dr. Martin Luther King for her civil disobedience. As King told her, “You might get arrested, but you’ll be in good company.”

Mary McAnally also led a poetry workshop for inmates at Stringtown Prison in Stringtown, Oklahoma. Hear McAnally and two prisoner poets, Milton Gracen and William “Indian Bill” Hogner, read and discuss the workshop.

Recommended reading – Powerful Words by Powerful People, article by David Todva