OHD-012 Lorena Weeks interviewed by Kathleen Clark, 2009 November 9
- Extent:
- 1 moving_image(s) 73 minutes
- Biographical / historical:
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Lorena Weeks was born in 1929 in Columbia, South Carolina. Shortly afterward her family moved to Augusta, Georgia, and, when Lorena was nine, to Louisville, Georgia, where her father was killed in a sawmill accident. Lorena's mother died nine years later, leaving Lorena to care for her younger siblings. In 1947 she went to work for Southern Bell Telephone Company as an operator. In 1965, following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Weeks sued the company after being barred from employment as a switchman (a higher paying job) on the basis of her sex. Although she initially lost the case, she appealed, and with the help of National Organization of Women (NOW) attorney Sylvia Roberts, had her case heard in front of Griffin Bell in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1969 Weeks won her case and went to work at Southern Bell as a switchman, retiring in 1983.
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