By JON WILSON, Consulting Editor, TB Reporter

The Aug. 13 event is connected to the Florida Holocaust Museum’s Civil Rights initiative that runs through Dec. 1.

ST. PETERSBURG — The stories of people who helped shape our region’s Civil Rights struggle will be presented Aug. 13 at the Manhattan Casino, 642 22nd St. S. The event, free and open to the public, begins at 6:30 p.m.

Among speakers at “Civil Rights: A Local Perspective” are Abdul Karim Ali, son of Joseph Savage, who led the 1968 St. Petersburg sanitation strike; Leon Jackson, one of two remaining police officers of The Courageous 12, the St. Petersburg African-American officers who fought for departmental equality during the 1960s; Mamie Rogers, an NAACP activist who campaigned for Civil Rights as a teen and young woman; and Gregory Padgett, Eckerd College associate professor of history.

Sylvia’s Restaurant, which is at the Manhattan, has a special dinner offer for attendees who dine there before the program. Call 824-7221 for details and reservations.

The Holocaust Museum’s “This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is up and running through Dec. 1, in conjunction with the museum’s original exhibition,  “Beaches, Benches and Boycotts: The Civil Rights Movement in Tampa Bay.”

The photo exhibition, presented by Bank of America, comprises 157 black-and-white images. Most were taken in Mississippi and Alabama from 1963 to 1966. They are not the work of photojournalists. Most were taken by photographers connected to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; they concentrated on student activists and local people who fought for equality.

A Clearwater photographer, Bob Fletcher,  is of those whose work is featured. He documented Bloody Sunday in Selma and spent more than two decades capturing the Civil Rights Movement from Harlem to Mississippi. He now has a Tampa Bay-area law practice.

The Holocaust Museum is at 55 Fifth Street S.

For information, visit www.flholocaustmuseum.org/begin-here/.

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