When Petty Officer 2nd Class Nathaniel Hawthorne Jones returned to Claiborne County after his term of duty in the Pacific during World War II, he was not allowed to register to vote.

For years Jones paid a $3 annual poll tax, but didn’t win his right to vote until 1965, after he doggedly returned to the Circuit Clerk’s Office four times to pass a literacy test that required him to write an interpretation of eminent domain statutes.

“I had to take that test,” said Jones, now 97. “I never did get mad. I always believed I had that right and wouldn’t never give up.”

Jones was motivated, not defeated, by the challenge, and would study and return week after week until the circuit clerk said he passed.

“I always wanted to learn,” said Jones, whose schooling was cut to three to four months a year once he got old enough to work in the fields.

School went to eighth grade for him, and “that was it,” he said.

Jones became part of the civil rights movement in Port Gibson in the mid-1960s, years that reshaped life in Claiborne County and the state.

Forty-five years ago this month, civil rights pioneer James Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, began a “march against fear,” walking from Memphis to Jackson to urge black Mississippians to register to vote. Meredith was shot along the way and hospitalized for days, but others took up his path, and more than 15,000 marchers arrived in Jackson 45 years ago today.

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Claiborne County’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People began meeting in Port Gibson in January 1966, Jones said. Thousands of blacks attended meetings, a demonstration at Alcorn State College was met with force and tear gas, and by April, what became a landmark boycott of white merchants in the town had begun.

George Henry Walker, a Port Gibson native now living in Vicksburg, became president of Claiborne County’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1969, but had been active in the organization for years, he said.

Walker began attending registration drives led by civil rights icon Charles Evers in Natchez and Fayette — the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers — as early as 1964, he said, “so when they came to Claiborne County, I’d be ready.”

Like Jones, Walker was a veteran, having served three years of active duty in the U.S. Army in the 1950s, then five years in the Reserve as a medical corpsman. When he came home, he couldn’t get a job in the hospitals — “they weren’t hiring black men, except to scrub the floors or whatever,” he said — and became an embalmer.

“I was in the military when we was riding in the back of the bus,” said Walker, now 77. “I would always think about why I was riding in the back of the bus, but I would never ask because it was unthought of to even ask the question. It was sort of like being humble, what God has put into place to be humble. You don’t say what you really have in your heart to say because, if you would, you would probably have got killed for some of the things you would say at that time. So you would keep your mouth shut.”

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Largely for not keeping their mouths shut, Jones and Walker this month were each presented with the Civil Rights Connection Inspiration Award by former New York state Sen. Nancy Larraine Hoffman, Civil Rights Connection founder, at the fourth annual Medgar Evers Memorial Banquet in Jackson.

Jones and Walker have been generous in sharing both their time and wisdom to help young people develop a personal understanding not just for the experiences of civil rights workers but of the power of nonviolence, Hoffmann said.

The Inspiration Award recognizes “the transfer of values to another generation for a high purpose,” she said.

“When I gave the award it was not because of their activities during the boycott and voter registration drives, but for using what they went through to inspire young people over the last 15 years,” Hoffmann said. “They inspire kids.”

Hoffmann, who came to Mississippi in the late 1960s as a young graduate of Syracuse University to work for civil rights, believes the civil rights movement is not well understood by young people today. She founded the CRC to help pass that knowledge along.