James Arthur Head Sr. remembers watching the Ku Klux Klan march down 20th Street in 1927 and hearing U.S. Sen. "Cotton Tom" Heflin a year later whip a packed auditorium into a frenzy as he bashed Catholics, Jews and immigrants.

"That kind of frightened me a little bit," said Head, 97, who attended Catholic school as a boy in Ohio and Indiana.

Soon afterward, Head and about 10 other people gathered in Mary Beard's tea room on 20th Street, where Avondale Mills President Donald Comer told them the fear and hatred had to be stopped.

That meeting launched a small group that in 1932 became the Alabama chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and it marked the beginning of Head's long history of public and behind-the-scenes work in civil rights.

Head will be honored for that work and other accomplishments at the Capitol on Monday, when he is inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, senior federal Judge John Godbold and retired Stillman College President Cordell Wynn. [...]

For decades, he chaired the state's chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. He remembers touring the state for the NCCJ in the 1930s through 1950s with his friends Will Engel, head of Engel Realty Company, William Pritchard, a lawyer, and Emil Hess, who later transformed his family's second-floor store into Parisian Inc.

They preached a social gospel of racial, ethnic and religious tolerance in meetings with community leaders, pastors, school superintendents, bankers, police chiefs and newspaper editors, and often struck out.

"A banker would say, `Keep my name out of it, because I'd lose half my customers immediately.' A lawyer would say, `Look, I'd lose half of my clients.' Believe it, that was a standard reaction," Head said.

He and others believed Alabamians could enrich their lives and pocketbooks, "if we could just eliminate the turmoil, the prejudice, the hatred, the animosity, and all of us work together." [...]

Lemarse Washington, executive director of the Alabama region of the NCCJ, now called The National Conference for Community and Justice, called Head "a jewel."

"I think he's had probably more influence than anyone else, as far as a white person in Birmingham over the years, for building community and seeking justice and equality for all of Birmingham's citizens," Washington said.

"Mr. Head was in the forefront of all of that. And not necessarily walking in the streets and marching, but getting things done where it's really getting done, behind the scenes, talking to the power brokers individually, saying, `This is what we need to do because it's the right thing to do.'"

Head, whose voice still booms when he wants it to, paused when asked how he felt about his election into the Academy of Honor.

"Humble," he said softly.