Mississippi Delta--the most Southern place on Earth--visits hitting me hardest

          Last week, I traveled to Cleveland, Mississippi for a teacher development program called The Most Southern Place on Earth at Delta State University. The purpose of the program is to explore the history, landscape and music of the Delta, a place where the rich alluvial soil resulting from a constantly flooding river led to a wealth in cotton, and in the frantic grasping that followed, a
barbarism that would define race relations ever after.
          We learned a lot about the origins and generative power of the blues, and were immersed in the music and place of it; I'll devote another blog post to that.
          For me, the most powerful aspect of the program had to do with ways it touched events sparking and pursuing civil rights work. I was most moved by the heroism and stark contrast between a pursuit of basics--like clean water, education, a voice, recognition that one is a human being--and the violent, screaming outrage at the effrontery of such pursuits.
          Three events in particular hit me hardest:

1. Charles McLaurin's visit to our classroom,
2. The Founders' Day celebration at Delta Health Center, and
3. The journey to the store and courthouse that betrayed Emmett Till's life and then his death.

1.

          Charles McLaurin affected me a great deal. He is a gifted speaker with a treasure of experiences both with the Civil Rights era and its heroes, including Medgar Evers, Stokely Charmichael, and most especially, Fannie Lou Hamer. He speaks with passion and love, confidence and wisdom and practical understanding, and the moments with him were worth as much to me as everything else together.

          For one thing, McLaurin helped me fall in love with Fannie Lou Hamer. I knew her--knew that she was a mover in the Freedom Summers and voter registration drives, knew the Sweet Honey and the Rock song devoted to her; but McLaurin's story, which my notes capture in the last blog post, is so full of admiration and surprise and adoring feeling that I was transported, by her courage, her heart, and her clarity.

          This was reinforced when we were on the bus with Dr. Edgar Smith and Ms. Inez Smith. They

were Mississippi transplants who'd followed an academic career of Biochemistry and administration (provost, president) to Massachusetts for forty years; at some point, Mrs. Smith was fundraising to send books and supplies to Fannie Lou Hamer, who wrote them a thank you that they read and showed to us on the bus, both of them tearful for what it meant.

          McLaurin twice said that Hamer made people feel good. I'll say it twice, too. She was an indefatigable fighter, but what McLaurin also said was that she made people feel good. She had a beautiful voice. She had strength and hope. This seems like such an important aspect of activism in our current climate of outrage activism that is more likely to judge than organize and hearten. And everyone should see the clip and hear the entirety of her speaking to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, where she sought to replace the official Mississippi delegation with the necessarily unofficial Freedom Democratic Party delegates.

          As Charles McLaurin was talking, I felt a swelling of energy and duty and possibility. We need heroes like McLaurin and Fannie Lou Hamer to guide our values and our actions, and to fill our hearts with love and possibility. And McLaurin's approach was also so clearly not one of passion alone. He spoke on a very practical level, too. He said that people like Amzie Moore and Medgar Evers felt the sting of returning from WWII to a brutal negation of citizenship, yes, but they also returned with operational organizational abilities. McLaurin said he felt he could work a crowd into a lather at any time, yes, but he also spoke of the small pieces, gathering around a single thing, educating, discussing, motivating, getting out of the way.

          I have felt my students vibrating with goodness and hope, ready to act. In the thrum of all that, I have pressed them only to listen, think and be kind. But I have not stepped to the singular object goal that would make something move. I haven't decided if that's enough.

2.

          The Founders' Day event in Mound Bayou the night before coincided with the unveiling of an exhibit about its Delta Health Center. It wasn't originally on the agenda, but the exhibit was spearheaded by the director of our program, Rolando Herts, who also secured them funding through his role with Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area management. It was an exceptionally meaningful event for me. 

          Founders' Day is special in Mound Bayou because, 132 years ago, it was established by former slaves, and that remains a mark of great pride for its citizens. And Delta Health Center is special to them because of all the struggles and victories it represents in their community: they claim it, along with Boston, as one of the first two community health care ventures in the country, and its existence was fought by the governor and Mississippi's senators, and, when in their beginnings they sought to provide care to the violently beaten Freedom Riders, fought by the newspapers and neighboring whites. At the time, whites were saying Bolivar County already had two hospitals, but one would not serve Blacks and the other was prohibitively expensive. The community health model was especially useful in the little town of Mound Bayou, helping its citizens fight for clean water and sanitation and educating them against some of the toxic home remedies, going after environmental hazards and government neglect the way no hospital would have done.

          I was honored to be there, an event that had nothing to do with my program or the teachers it serves, but a community wine-and-dine for the local dignitaries and involved citizens that recognized their history steeped in trials and triumph and the heroes that reflected their ongoing struggles and values of dignity and wellness and Blacks and whites coming together to make that happen.

          I was talking to the CEO, John Fairman, about why it was meaningful for me to be there, and

what it was as a white northerner and the way I view racism to be framed in progressive Seattle (with our segregationist history and restrictive covenants and less visible but systemically demonstrable racism) to encounter the naked racism of the South. My father described the contrast this way: "For me, the South was a dark, hateful, frightening place; but it was clean in the naked honesty of its racism. No precious discussions of micro-aggressions there, but many courageous souls who put themselves on the line fighting cruel injustices." There is systemic racism both North and South; but the battle for something like hooking up a school to water and a sewer system is the tourniquet that makes the vein stand out.

          One 95 year old man at the event in the clinic was describing his work with the brick factory. The African Americans had to make their own, and then none of the major contractors would buy their bricks. I later heard from his son, a former mayor of Mound Bayou we ran into again last night; he said his father was the guy who took over Medgar Evers' job at the life insurance company when Evers went to fight segregation full time as NAACP's field secretary.

          The welcome we felt in Mound Bayou's triumph and honest eye toward the past was entire.

3.

          We took a bus to Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till whistled to Carolyn Bryant. The store is almost impossible to see through all the vines and no trespassing signs left by the those ready for history to swallow the story gone.

          We heard from Reverend Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till's cousin, who, as in that summer of '55, traveled down to Mississippi from Chicago, and who was at the store that day with the whistling, and in the house that night when Roy Bryant and JW Milam abducted Till from their grandfather's house at gunpoint.

          We heard from Devery Anderson, who wrote a book with exhaustive knowledge about the events following from Emmett Till's death, and he said the Bryants embraced a denial as encompassing as those kudzu vines, and they were isolated and broken by their own cage of silence. 

          We sat in the Tallahatchie County courthouse, where Bryant and Milam were exonerated of murder, and where an Emmett Till memorial now stands opposite a monument to the Confederacy.

          We saw the footage of Till's crushed and mangled face and body, which Mamie Till demanded the world see.

          And we heard this is the spark to light the march towards human rights.

          See the three minute clip the media team prepared about this experience.

          I am grateful for the reminder in these events and heroes of our shared humanity and for the clarity of our struggle.

          Yesterday, Sophie, Amelia and Maisie joined Dad and Wendy in a Lights for Liberty vigil standing against the merciless and actively dehumanizing treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants in the detention camps at our borders.

          I'm going to let it shine.

Here, too, is a video reflection to which I contributed prepared by the media team.