A man of passion and style, Homer Favor saw himself as the embodiment of a truth voiced often by his friend and ally, the late Congressman Parren Mitchell:“Once you get on the civil rights train,” Mitchell said, “you never get off.” You stay on because you never quite reach your destination. You’re never sure of hanging on to the ground you’ve gained.
Mitchell made it to Congress on the strength of his own resolve. But he was the consensus candidate of Favor and other members of a group of men, ministers mostly, who formed a civil rights lobby they called the Goon Squad.
In an interview several months ago, Favor recalled the Goon Squad’s impact on the election of Mitchell and others:
“We electrified the community. We had rented street cars. We banged on doors. We had students from the
They said ‘here comes that damned Goon Squad again.’ So it was a pejorative statement, and then you adopted that as a badge of honor.” - Civil rights activist Homer Favor
high schools and from Coppin and from Morgan. You could just feel the, feel the electricity in the air. They said ‘here comes that damned Goon Squad again.’ So it was a pejorative statement, and then you adopted that as a badge of honor.”
Favor committed himself in his final days to remembering colleagues like the Reverend Vernon Dobson, who died recently, and the Reverend Marion Bascom, who died in 2012.
“A retrospective look at the Goon Squad era,” Favor wrote a few years ago, “quickens the spirit… Fresh new bursts of hope, promise and élan prove enchanting.” At the same time, he lamented the widening gap between rich and poor, the attacks on affirmative action and what he called the plundering of the economic system.
And yet he was proud of what he and his brothers had accomplished. They had planted themselves by the water. They had not been moved. The old willingness to accept the way things were had changed and they had helped to change it.
They had done it by faith in themselves and in the ideals of their country – even when the country failed them.