The Doyles: A Selma Civil Rights Family

The Doyles: A Selma Civil Rights Family. . , Ernest Leon Doyle was born in 1918. He and Ruth Lee Willis were married in 1942. Ernest worked as a carpenter, decorator, and insurance agent. Ruth was a teacher and supplemented the family income as a beautician. The couple had three children: Gloria Jean, Carolyn Marie, and Ernest Wayne. Upon Ernest's return from service in the U.S. Army during World War II, the Doyles undertook the difficult work of helping African American residents of the county register to vote in an era before federal protections. They joined the Dallas County Voters League and the local NAACP, two groups that laid the foundation for the Selma demonstrations and marches that helped bring about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ernest Doyle and seven others who stood for equality became known as the Courageous Eight," the steering committee for the League's affairs. In the years leading up to pivotal national attention, the Doyles worked to quietly continue the group's efforts during Alabama's statewide ban of the NAACP from 1956 until 1964. When the organization officially returned to Selma, Ernest Doyle was its president, playing a key role in planning the Selma to Montgomery March and the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing that would become known as "Bloody Sunday." , Ernest Doyle was among a group of Black petitioners in 1955 who called for the desegregation of Selma's public schools. Faced with intimidation and threats of violence, many of the signatories left the city thereafter. The Doyles remained in Selma; each of them faced retaliation. Area schools refused to hire Ruth Doyle because of the family's activism, forcing her to seek work out of state. For a time, she taught at a school in Wadley, Georgia, some 300 miles from her home. In December 1966, while commuting from Selma, Ruth Doyle died in an automobile accident. Ernest Doyle and his children witnessed the fruits of the family's activism. Ernest Wayne Doyle graduated from the first integrated class of A. G. Parrish High School. In 1972, after the halls of government were opened to Black candidates following an NAACP lawsuit, Ernest Doyle won a Selma City Council election. He was among five African Americans elected that year, the first in the city since Reconstruction. He died in 2011. In 2015, the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March participants were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of their bravery and sacrifice. Those recipients included Ernest Doyle, posthumously, and his daughter, Carolyn Doyle Tharp King.