As remembered by John Obee
July 2, 2026
A Tribute
Margaret Kibbee &
Brenda Travis.
Two good friends and stalwarts of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Margaret Kibbee and Brenda Travis, passed within two months of each other with Margaret passing in March and Brenda dying in May.
Margaret Kibbee left California in 1965 at the age of 19 to join the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. She never left. She worked tirelessly in Washington County, Indianola and Sunflower to help register voters and continued her Civil Rights activities even after much of the Movement activity began to focus elsewhere. When Legal Aide first opened an office in Mississippi, she joined as a paralegal, where she began a lifetime career of assisting some of the poorest of the poor to obtain Social Security Disability benefits, when it was so easy for the government to deny Black applicants those benefits. She was still handling cases right up to the time that her cancer returned leading to her death. Tributes poured out to her and her funeral took place at the B.B. King Museum in Indianola where over 400 people attended, many of them the people she helped in her lifetime.
I first met Margaret when I was in Mississippi in 1967 and we did not reconnect until 2012 at a Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement conference. It was there that she introduced me to her friend Brenda Travis, which would lead to a lifetime collaboration. Brenda's name appeared in many of the Civil Rights Movement stories, how at 16 she and Bobby Talbert and Ike Lewis went to buy bus tickets in August 1961 in the whites-only section of the McComb Mississippi bus station. All three were arrested and spent 30 days in jail.
Upon her release, Brenda returned to go back to high school where the principal of the all-Black Burglund High School barred her entry, bowing to the white power structure that controlled the school system. This led to the first, spontaneous walk-out of over 100 of Brenda's fellow students who were outraged by Brenda's expulsion from school and these 100, along with Brenda, marched on City Hall. Many were arrested but Brenda received the maximum penalty, being sent to a girls reform school for six months, all because she exercised her right to freedom in the most repressive state in the country.
She was eventually released from her second imprisonment by then Governor Ross Barnett on the condition that she leave Mississippi and never return. But return she did, because anyone who had the privilege to be in Brenda's presence knew that she was a force, a force that all of the powerful people in Mississippi could not stop.
It was an honor to work with Brenda to help tell her story in Mississippi's Exiled Daughter, a title that was given to the book by none other than Margaret Kibbee. When we rolled out the book in 2018 Brenda talked to many groups but one group in particular stood out, which was young people. Brenda had a way of connecting with young people, she could inspire and motivate them and she set up an Educational Foundation to continue the work that she started at age 16 in her hometown, where a street is named after her.
Rest well my friends, Margaret and Brenda, as your work is done, but your inspiration, your fire and persistence will live long after you in the hearts of those who you touched.
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