Feb 17, 20232 min read

So Long, Bobby Release Week: Newsworthy- She's Leaving Home

Good morning readers! We are closing out release with for Lillah Lawson's So Long, Bobby with some newsroom flare.

So Long, Bobby Release Week: She's Leaving Home Newspaper Article

Article Text:

She’s Leaving Home

Sister of local lawyer heads off to join anti-war, Civil Rights Campaign

Recent Clarke Central High School graduate and one-time Homecoming Queen Barbara Lynn “Bobbi” Newton, 18, has moved out of the Boulevard home she shared with her brother, local lawyer Edward Newton, esquire, and his wife Grace, and left town to join up with a notorious anti-war Civil Rights group in Washington, D.C.

“She’s always been politically-minded,” said friend and former classmate Amelia Shelton. “She’s always wanted to help people, to make a difference, like her hero Bobby Kennedy.”

Whether the young Miss Newton will make a difference remains to be seen. Athens residents who have long known the respected Newton family, whose patriarch, Keith Newton, passed away last year, joining his wife Annie, who passed in 1961, might be surprised that their youngest child and only daughter has left the family home, and for such an excursion. However, Bobbi’s brother and University of Georgia Law School alumni Edward Newton says it isn’t all that far-fetched: “Bobbi has wanted to be a lawyer – like me – since she was young,” Mr. Newton told the Red & Black. In fact, Mr. Newton brought his younger sister along with him to hear Senator Robert F. Kennedy speak at UGA Law School back in 1961. “With our brother Pete being drafted, and Bobbi’s beau Landrum being drafted only a couple of months after that, I think she felt a little restless. She wanted to do something. So many of us want to make a difference, and with her being just out of high school…unencumbered, not yet having started college…well, she had some free time. And I have no doubt she’ll be contributing her many talents to some wonderful organization that will be lucky to have her, before coming on home to enroll at UGA Law School.” When asked if he was nervous about his young, unmarried sister traipsing around Washington with anti-war Civil Rights protestors and “hippies”, Mr. Newton laughed. “Bobbi has a good head on her shoulders,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t meet up with Richard B. Russell and solve the whole thing. She’s a Newton, after all.”

Peter Newton and Landrum Walton are only two of tens of thousands of young Georgia men who have been called to the draft. Turn to politics page for an update on Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s recent wartime meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson. As for Bobbi Newton’s hero, Robert F. Kennedy, his supporters still hope he’ll pull out a last-minute bid for the Presidency, though the senator is remaining close-lipped about a potential run.