by Nikole Hannah-Jones
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Dispatches from Freedom Summer
Ghosts of Greenwood
A reporter goes to Mississippi and encounters the echoes of family and the struggle for civil rights.
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
In 1947, my father, along with his mother and older brother, boarded a northbound
train in Greenwood, Miss. They carried with them nothing but a suitcase stuffed
with clothes, a bag of cold chicken, and my grandmother’s determination that
her children — my father was just 2 years old — would not be doomed
to a life of picking cotton in the feudal society that was the Mississippi
Delta.
Grandmama, as we called her,
settled in Waterloo, Iowa, a stop on the Illinois Central line,
and a place where thousands of black Mississippians would find work on the
railroad or at the Rath
meatpacking and John
Deere plants. Grandmama took a job familiar to
black women of her lot: Working for white families as a domestic.
Almost every black person I
knew growing up in Waterloo had roots in Mississippi. Mississippi flavored our
cuisine, inspired our worship and colored our language. Still, when speaking
about the land of their birth, my dad and grandmother talked about family and
loved ones, but seldom about the place.
Mississippi was at once my ancestral land, and the sinister setting in any number of Hollywood movies, a villain in our national narrative, the place where a black boy named Emmett
Till was tossed into the Tallahatchie River with
a cotton gin fan around his neck. The only image of Greenwood I got from my
family was of my great-grandparents’ farm, scenes of chickens and picking peas
in the morning sun and my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Paul, refusing to take
any mess. It was only when I got older that I learned my family did not in fact
own the farm. Depending on who told the story, my family either leased or
sharecropped the land that was, in fact, held by white plantation owners. In
reality, the difference mattered little.
And though my parents would
load us all in the car every summer to head to a different state for our family
vacations, my dad never once took us to the state of his birth. Not for family
reunions or funerals. Not for graduations or holidays. My father and
grandmother both passed away without ever taking me to see their home.
As the nation prepared to
mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer — that violent and heady 10
weeks during which Northern volunteers joined forces with Southern activists in
Mississippi, all working to meaningfully enfranchise black residents — I
felt pulled to finally visit this place that ran in my blood but that I had
never seen. Last month, at the age of 38, I visited Mississippi for the first
time.
My 87-year-old great-aunt,
Charlotte Frost, who had followed my grandma to Waterloo, happened to be visiting a granddaughter in Jackson at the same time I planned my trip. I picked up Aunt Charlotte and we headed north on U.S. Highway
49 toward Greenwood, into the heart of the Delta and Freedom Summer’s ground
zero.
The Mississippi Delta, named
after the river that gives it life, stretches 200 miles long and 60
miles wide, covering 19 counties in the Magnolia
State. The ebb and flow of the mighty river left behind some of
the richest soil on the face of the earth (topsoil
here can reach more than 60 feet deep). This
dark, fertile land, and the riches it could produce for the white people who
owned almost all of it, would also make Mississippi one of the most dangerous
places in the country to be black.
As we drove, I tried to get
my Aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like coming of age in a black
family in the Delta. It was here, after all, that life for black people was so
grim that it spawned the blues.
But Aunt Charlotte, peering
out at the road through round glasses perpetually clinging to the end of her
nose, said she never had any problems with white people, that they had
respected her family and hadn’t done much to bother them. And then Charlotte
went on to talk about the good school she went to in town and all the crops her
family grew.
It was a familiar take. She
and another great-aunt in Waterloo are the last of my Grandmama’s siblings, and I had tried before to get their stories, but had been met with a
resistance to talking about the ugliness of Jim Crow Mississippi. I never push
too hard at this gauzy version, because I know that women like my great-aunts
— they pride themselves in their durable dignity, dress to nines, don’t
use vulgar language and keep impeccable homes with plastic-wrapped sofas
— have no desire to speak of the daily degradations they’d faced at the
height of Jim Crow.
A wooden sign coated in
brown paint announced our arrival:
Welcome to Greenwood, Cotton
Capital of the World
But it was clear from the
rows of lanky corn stretched out before the sign — not exactly squat June
cotton — that the greeting’s boast was mere nostalgia.
We first headed to the
Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church just outside of town. The plain, white
structure was where our family worshipped. My great-grandmother and
great-grandfather, Mary Jane and Percy Paul, part of the first generation born
out of slavery, are buried in the overgrown cemetery, with its haphazardly
placed tombstones. It turns out that this church is the one featured in the
movie “The Help,” the place where the maids went to worship. I would come to
learn that though the movie is set in Jackson, it was mostly filmed in Greenwood because the town seemed largely frozen in time. Its
building and homes, and in some ways its culture, form a kind of time capsule
of the era when cotton was king.
According to Aunt Charlotte,
the church used to be a part of the Whittington
Plantation, the white landowners having built it
for the black sharecroppers. It’s still surrounded by crops, and Aunt
Charlotte, stooped over her cane, pointed to a distant spot in the fields,
saying their house, the house where my great-grandmother helped deliver my
father, once stood there on the Whittington lands. I soon learned that nearly
every black person here came from a family attached through labor (and
sometimes blood) to white families and to plantations with names like “Star of
the West.”
It was dusk and the Delta
heat settled about my shoulders like a wool blanket. Heavy and uncomfortable,
it made my notebook paper fall limp and my ink stop flowing. Gnats and
mosquitoes swarmed my legs. Aunt Charlotte, wrapped in a memory, paused to
listen to an owl hooting a melancholy warning.
“The old people would say
someone is going to die,” she said.
Located in Leflore County,
my dad’s hometown took its name from Greenwood LeFlore, the last Choctaw
Indian chief, who signed over much of the tribe’s
land for an
Oklahoma reservation while he himself lived
lavishly on 15,000 acres of Delta land that he worked with some 400
enslaved black laborers.
The Civil War, of course,
left much of the South crippled, but not long after Reconstruction, Greenwood
boomed. While white politicians in Jackson led the South in stripping black
residents of their elected offices and newly guaranteed
citizenship rights, white plantation owners rebuilt
the levees on the flood-prone and swampy Delta.
Cotton once again stretched as far as the eye could see, and Greenwood took its
place as one of the cotton capitals of the world.
But this boom was made
possible only by a reconstituted slavery, a system of coerced labor known as
sharecropping. Vagrancy laws were passed, making it illegal for black people to
stand around “idle.” Often the only defense was to prove one was in the employ
of a white person.
White Mississippians,
outnumbered by the African-Americans needed to work the land, implemented a
violent and absolute form of social control. The nation’s most heavily black
state, Mississippi lynched
more black people between 1882 and 1968 than any
state in the country.
Greenwood’s Yazoo River is
formed by the meeting of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers, and as we crossed
the Yazoo River and headed to the heart of Greenwood, the ghosts of Mississippi
grew close, and Aunt Charlotte finally loosened.
Aunt Charlotte told me that
she was baptized in the Tallahatchie. She went on to speak of another river
baptism, into the perils of the Delta’s color line.
She said her brother Milton
— my dad’s namesake — and a cousin had once committed the sin of
walking through a white neighborhood for a reason other than to simply go to
work. Two white teenagers in a car gave chase, trying to run them down. Her
brother and cousin were forced to jump into the murky river to escape. They
returned home, muddy and wet, chests heaving from panic and exertion. Her
mother, she said, was livid with fear.
“They got a hard scolding,”
Aunt Charlotte said. “She said, ‘You’re going to get yourself killed.’”
We drove past the regal white courthouse, with its requisite Confederate monument standing guard
out front. Aunt Charlotte told of another brother running home, chest heaving.
A cousin who leased farmland from a white plantation owner had the gall to
stand up to a white overseer who didn’t like him having taken a rest. Everyone
knew that simply asserting one’s manhood could get a man strung from a tree, so
her brother raced to get my great-grandfather to help guard his cousin against
the lynching mob.
A cousin had once committed the sin of walking through a white neighborhood for a reason other than to simply go to work.
“My daddy grabbed his
Winchester and rifle and his .38 long-nose pistol,” Aunt Charlotte said, and he
headed to the cousin’s house to keep vigil. This was a well-practiced event:
Family members often gathered arms to protect a loved one following a social
breach, usually keeping watch until the loved one could be whisked out of town,
almost always to the North.
“They usually had to leave
before nightfall or the lynching mob would come,” Aunt Charlotte said quietly.
The lynching mob did not come that night, but Aunt Charlotte never forgot the
fear. That fright was as routine among black people in the Delta as heading to
church on Sunday.
It was just a few miles
outside of town, after all, where they
found the body of Emmett Till. The tossing of
black bodies into the muddy rivers for breaching the social order wasn’t
unusual. The only reason people across the nation knew Till’s name was that his
mother insisted on an open casket and allowed the ghastly photos of his bloated
and mutilated corpse to be published in the nation’s
leading black publications.
It was eerie being down here
where it happened, just a few miles from where my dad grew up, and realizing
how easily he could have been Till. We somehow convince ourselves that this is
ancient history. But I am not even 40, and my dad was but four years younger
than Emmett Till. Like my dad, Till’s mother had also left as one of hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians who fled their homeland during the Great Migration.
Mamie Till ended up in
Chicago, and like my Grandmama,
sent her son back down South during the summer months. My dad even shared
Emmett Till’s light eyes, as well as that bravado that came from living in the
North — that bravado that brought out the worst in white Southerners. One
of my Dad’s cousins told me that when he came back to Greenwood for the summers,
my dad liked “progueing,” a local word for strutting around and being seen. He
told me my great-grandparents kept Dad close.
Fear and economic
exploitation were the twin elements that defined the Delta. Both were made
possible by the complete disenfranchisement of the majority black population.
North Greenwood, with its wide, tree-lined avenues and “Gone with the Wind”
mansions, once prompted the U.S. Chambers of Commerce to name its main thoroughfare one of the nation’s most
beautiful streets. Divided from the rest of the town by the Yazoo River, it
showcased the vast material wealth under King Cotton. The shotgun shacks in
southeast Greenwood, with its unpaved roads and lightless blocks at the time,
revealed who paid the price for that wealth.
“You had to sharecrop, you
couldn’t sell your own cotton, you had to go to them,” the white people, “for
everything,” the Rev.
Willie Blue, a Mississippi native who took part
in Freedom Summer, told me. “You didn’t make anything, you were always in the
hole and at the end of the year there was never anything left. They controlled
your life. It was the same thing as being a slave.”
An entire family could work
all year — children as young as 2 had to go to the fields — and
walk away with $100. Even though other Southern states embraced mechanization,
Mississippi avoided it. As a local historian told me, it was cheaper to “pay”
sharecroppers.
White people in Greenwood made up 33 percent of the
population but owned 90 percent of the land. Just
2
percent of eligible black voters were registered.
Black residents held not a single elected office. In 1964, 10 years after the
Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi was the only
state in the country where not a single black child attended a school with a
white child.
Still, black Mississippians
weren’t just cowering in fear, awaiting saviors from the North.
In 1954, a young
man named Medgar Evers attempted, without success, to integrate the University
of Mississippi Law School. That same year, the NAACP named him Mississippi’s
first field officer and he spent the next decade
enduring death threats and violence as he tried to register black voters.
Black Mississippians
attempted to desegregate schools and lunch counters, movie theaters and
swimming pools. But sit-ins to eat at an integrated restaurant were one thing.
Pushing to access the vote in such a heavily black region was something else.
“If we get the right to
vote, we become captains of our own ship,” Blue told me. “I believed that then,
I believe that now.” He added: “You are not a first-class citizen if you are
not registered to vote. That’s the backbone of being American. The vote is the
perfect example of free speech.”
Hank Klibanoff, a journalist
and co-author of the book “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle,
and the Awakening of a Nation,” explained to me the promise and threat of black
enfranchisement. Not only did voter registration lead to political representation,
Klibanoff said, but it also determined who sat on juries. “You become
instrumental in ensuring criminal justice is effective and fair,” Klibanoff
said. Access to the vote “really made it possible for blacks to finally get
justice in the courts, not just criminal but civil as well.”
White Mississippians
understood this as clearly as anyone. The toll on black bodies during the
effort to ensure voting rights is, for people of my generation, inconceivable.
In the years leading up to Freedom Summer, black
Mississippians agitating for civil rights were beaten by mobs, castrated,
dragged behind cars with ropes, bombed, jailed, beaten with belts and whips by
their jailers, shot at, and strung with 100 pounds of rocks and sunk to the
bottom of the river. None of this was done in
secret: Among the murderers was a state legislator and a county sheriff.
“We have unintentionally
reduced racial discrimination to images of white and colored water fountains.
And in that context, what passes for violence is somebody pouring mustard on
top of a civil rights demonstrator at a lunch counter, when in fact it was open
season on blacks,” Klibanoff said. “They could be killed just indiscriminately
and with impunity. And I don’t mean, now and then, but I mean fairly
regularly.”
And this is where it’s easy
to cast Mississippi as a grotesque outlier, and to feel a certain smugness
about how, as the civil rights veterans put it at the time, Freedom Summer was
about making Mississippi part of the rest of America. But the rest of America
— exemplified by the federal government — knew what was happening
in Mississippi. We knew that Mississippi was
nearly half black but had no black
representatives in Congress or anywhere, from state government on down. We knew
black Mississippians were being denied their citizenship rights and being
murdered for having the audacity to demand them. Despite obvious voter
intimidation and political assassinations, the FBI operated
no field office there. We knew, and we looked
away.
Every day, ordinary Mississippians
battled on.
Rev. Blue joined the
Mississippi civil rights movement in 1963. Blue, who returned home to
Tallahatchie County after a stint in the Navy, had been getting pressure from
whites to find work on a plantation or to get out of town. Blue instead headed
to Greenwood, where he hooked up with Bob Moses.
Moses, a Harvard-educated
New Yorker, had come to Mississippi in 1961 to work on voter registration for
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC. Greenwood was,
according to SNCC documents, a “hard core resistance area.” Moses set up SNCC’s
headquarters in Greenwood — those headquarters would be bombed, burned
down and shot up — and Blue’s first task was to pick up Harry Belafonte
and Sidney Poitier, who were coming to Greenwood to offer their support.
Blue, still green as an
activist, arrived at the airport only to encounter a cadre of armed Klan
members. The two-car delegation picked up their Hollywood guests, and Blue, who
was driving the second car, soon found himself in a high-speed chase with the
Klan. The Klan backed off once the party made it to the black part of
Greenwood. Laughing ruefully today, Blue said he didn’t find out until later
that Poitier and Belafonte had been carrying tens of thousands of dollars in cash
to help the voting rights effort.
They controlled your life. It was the same thing as being a slave.
Rev. Willie Blue
Outside of town, on a
car-strewn lot tucked between cotton fields, I met with Silas McGhee, whose
family, led by his mother, Laura, began fighting Jim Crow long before Freedom
Summer. They paid a heavy price. McGhee doesn’t much like to talk about those
times. I couldn’t get him to sit for an interview. All he would say was that he
was no hero, that he had just done what he was supposed to do. McGhee had been
jailed and beaten more times than he could count for trying to desegregate
downtown businesses and help register black voters.
But the sunken set of his
jaw told the story he would not. At the height of the Mississippi civil rights
struggle, a white man pulled up in a car and shot McGhee in his face when
McGhee was sitting outside of a Greenwood restaurant. The bullet barreled
through his mouth, taking his front teeth with it. Blue, who was with McGhee at
the time, told me, and McGhee confirmed, that the shooter was Myron De La
Beckwith — the Klansman who killed Medgar Evers. I could find no record
to prove or disprove it.
As I left McGhee working on
a tractor in his yard, I thought of how all but one of
Grandmama’s
seven siblings who
survived into adulthood left Mississippi in their youth. They sacrificed a
great deal in seeking a better life for their families. But it was in talking
to people like Blue and McGhee that I realized what an act of defiance it was
to have been a black Mississippian and to have simply stayed put. Staying to
change this state might well have been the greatest sacrifice.
So, no, black Mississippians
hadn’t been waiting for saviors — white or otherwise — from
outside. But they certainly welcomed them for the national attention they would
bring.
Moses — who civil
rights veteran say was blessed with the right name — is largely
considered the mastermind behind Freedom Summer. When I spoke with him over the
phone, he brushed off the credit.
Moses had been tested in
Mississippi’s fire. He’d been beaten in the back of the head with the butt of a
knife by the cousin of a local sheriff, he’d been shot at, he’d been jailed and
beaten some more. Speaking to me from Jackson, where he’d traveled for a
Freedom Summer commemoration, Moses called what they were doing back in the
1960s “guerrilla warfare.” They were sniping at the system while being housed
and protected by the local community.
“It was the only time in my
life where I could any time of night go and knock on a door, and they were
going to provide a bed for me to sleep in, food to eat and watch my back,” he
said of the network of local black Mississippians who sheltered civil rights
workers. “You had in that community people who were willing to take a stand
even though they knew what they were doing would enrage white folks.”
In 1963, Medgar Evers joined
the long list of racial assassination victims. De La Beckwith followed Evers
home and shot Evers through the heart with a rifle. Evers was carrying
a box of T-shirts proclaiming “Jim Crow Must Go.”
Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett visited De La Beckwith during his trial. Two
all-white juries deadlocked and Evers’s killer would live free and in the open until
1994, when he was finally brought to justice.
Moses said the killing of
Evers was the turning point.
Two years of voter efforts
in Greenwood had led to fewer than 30 black registrations but plenty of
shootings, beatings, bombings and arrests.
A 1963 memo written by Bob Moses stated:
We have learned the following:
1. It is not possible to for us to
register Negroes in Mississippi …
2. All direct action campaigns for
integration have had their backs broken …
He went on: “The Mississippi
monolith has successfully survived the Freedom Rides, James Meredith at Ole
Miss, and the assassination of Medgar Evers, without substantive change. … The
only attack worth making is an attack aimed at the overthrow of the existing
political structure of the state.”
It was time to up the ante.
Reporters for the mainstream press had largely bought white Mississippians’
protestations that black Mississippians just didn’t care to vote. The idea was
somehow to provoke the federal government to act.
So the notion was hatched to
recruit college students from across the country who would converge on the
state for 10 weeks, setting up Freedom Schools and registering black voters.
The goal: To register enough disenfranchised black voters to challenge the
all-white Democratic delegation at the national convention in Atlantic City, N.J.,
and instead seat the biracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party.
To work, the organizers
calculated, a significant number of the student volunteers needed to be white.
“We know what they bring
with them are the eyes of the country,” Moses told me. “The country is able to
see through their eyes what they weren’t able to see through ours.”
We both grew silent on the
line, for just a moment, letting those words sink in.
Of course, most everyone
knows what happened next. As Freedom Summer began, three civil rights workers
— Michael
Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white Northerners; and James Earl Chaney, a
black Mississippian — disappeared in
Mississippi. Black Mississippians immediately understood what that meant.
“There is no kidnapping in
Mississippi,” Rev. Blue reminded me. “We knew they were dead.”
But the murders of those two
white men changed everything. “These were not just white folks,” they were
“America’s finest, America’s futures,” Rev. Blue said. “Goodman’s richer than
whipped cream. He wasn’t supposed to die in Vietnam, he sure wasn’t supposed to
die in Mississippi. When America’s brightest are murdered for doing something
fundamentally American, suddenly, the world knows about Mississippi. It was
another nail in the segregated coffin.”
The federal government
swarmed Mississippi. The FBI opened an office
there for the first time in two decades. The
nation’s eyes wound up riveted on a place that many felt had existed outside
the laws of the land. And as law enforcement dragged rivers searching for the
missing civil rights workers, they found at least nine bodies of black men
who’d disappeared well before. The beatings, bombings and jailings of Freedom
Summer volunteers and local Mississippians determined to exercise democracy
continued all summer.
In the end, despite all the
attention to the three slain civil rights workers, and the gathering of tens of
thousands of signatures of black Mississippians who wanted to vote but
couldn’t, the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party did not unseat Mississippi’s
all-white delegation. Their efforts were squashed by the very man who would
pass the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, President
Lyndon Baines Johnson. Freedom Summer volunteers and organizers left Atlantic
City dejected.
So, what then, was Freedom
Summer’s legacy — not just in some grand national narrative, but right
here in the Delta, as well?
I picked my Aunt Charlotte
up from the Hampton Inn on the edge of town and we headed to Mississippi
Avenue, where my cousin Lawrence Paul lives. I’d never met Lawrence, but when I
had called a few days earlier and introduced myself as a relative from up North
and told him of my visit, he’d asked, “Whose daughter are you again?” When I
told him Milton, he let out a hearty laugh.
“Ol’ cat-eyed Milton?” he
asked. “We used to be real close. Call me when you get here and come on by.”
Lawrence lives in a
neighborhood of stately brick homes and bungalows. Greenwood is marked
by severe residential segregation and Lawrence
explained that the neighborhood used to be all white. But once the first black
people moved in, every last one of the white residents moved out. Now it is
home to Greenwood’s small black middle class, a collection of civil servants,
educators and entrepreneurs.
Lawrence is the grandson of
my Grandmama’s
brother, the only sibling who hadn’t gone North. Lawrence was 14 when Freedom
Summer happened. Sitting in front of the air conditioner and sweating under a
blue baseball cap, he smiled at the memory.
“To me, I am not going to
use the word revolutionary — but it felt good knowing we were part of
something,” Lawrence said. “It was a hurting thing to be a youngster. Seeing
the way the police did our parents, it was brutality. You had a law for white
and a law for black. You see an all-white government, all-white police force,
all-white everything.”
Lawrence repeated the
stories of daily fear, of not stepping off a sidewalk fast enough, or appearing
too smart or too proud, and the instant wrath it could bring. As a young boy,
he said, he’d learned to differentiate a police car without even having to turn
around. Just the sound it made gave it away.
“I can still hear it,” he
said. “They’d pull alongside us and we’d say, ‘Yes, sir, yes sir.’ We’d fake
it.”
Fake what, I asked.
“Deference.”
Aunt Charlotte, who’d been
sitting in the chair listening, spoke up. “My dad would always say, ‘I’m a man.
How old do I have to be to be a man?’”
Outside of the watchful eyes
of his parents, Lawrence went to organizing meetings held at the Elks Lodge; he
marched to the courthouse and picketed for voting rights that he was too young
to exercise. “Our people were too afraid to march, so we did it for them,” he
said proudly.
Lawrence didn’t mind at all
the white Northerners who had often been portrayed in news media as the face of
the movement that summer.
“White people were the key
to it,” he said. “They were a major part of the change.”
It reminded me of something
Rev. Blue had said: “This movement belonged to all of us.”
At the end of Freedom
Summer, most of the volunteers left. And they took with them the nation’s
attention. Life remained hard for those left behind. Churches and homes
continued to be bombed. Despite the passage a year later of the Voting Rights
Act, white Mississippians continued to violently
fight efforts to register black voters and gain black political power.
In fact, two years after
Freedom Summer, in 1966, James Meredith, the man who integrated Ole Miss, was
shot in Mississippi as he tried to complete a “March Against Fear.” Stokely
Carmichael, a SNCC veteran, tried to complete Meredith’s march but wound up
jailed in Greenwood, marking his 27th arrest in the fight
for civil rights. The lack of progress had taken a physical and emotional toll
on Carmichael and others who’d spent years in the trenches. It was in Greenwood
that a fiery Carmichael gave his first “Black Power” speech, fracturing the movement into those who wanted to continue with
a nonviolent agenda, and those who decided that if someone hit at them, they
were going to hit back.
Despite the passion of
Freedom Summer, Lawrence explained, it seemed that little had changed when it
was over. “After Freedom Summer, for me, it was still the same,” he said,
wiping at his brow with a white washrag. “It was something forced upon them. It
didn’t happen fast.”
Changes did come, of course,
but achingly slowly. Shortly after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, David
Jordan, the son of a sharecropper on the same Whittington Plantation where my
family worked, who’d earned degrees from Mississippi
Valley State and the University of Wyoming and
become a science teacher, established the Greenwood Voters League to register
black voters and help them wield the political power their numbers should have
brought. But
by 1977, a full decade after Freedom Summer, Greenwood’s governance remained
lily white. That year, Jordan sued the city under
the Voting Rights Act and won the suit eight years later. While the lawsuit
against Greenwood worked its way through the courts, Jordan sued again,
this time to change the way the state drew legislative districts, which had continued to ensure the election of white
candidates. Jordan won there as well, leading to the 1984 election of
Mississippi’s first black congressman since Reconstruction.
“Our people were still
suffering and we wanted a piece of the pie,” Jordan said. “The only way to get
it was to fight.”
The following year, in 1985,
Jordan ran for the newly formed City Council and became Greenwood’s first black
city councilman.
For his efforts, Jordan’s
had his life threatened, his property vandalized and, in 2011, his house
shot.Today, Greenwood’s City Council has a black majority. It has a black fire
chief. It has had a black
mayor and chief of police. Jordan himself holds
two elected positions; he’s a city councilman and a state senator. Sitting in
the City Council chambers, he noted that Mississippi can now boast the most
black elected officials of any state in the Union. Through the window at his
back, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, enshrined on the Mississippi state
flag, fluttered in the wind.
“Freedom Summer
baptized Mississippi as part of the nation,” Moses said. “It was no longer a
rule unto itself.”
Still, the limitations of
Freedom Summer and the Mississippi civil rights movement stand in stark relief.
Mississippi remains the nation’s
most heavily black state, and also its
poorest. Political power has not brought economic
power.
Greenwood, the town that bet
everything on King Cotton, has suffered from cotton’s demise. But the suffering
has not been borne evenly. Entire sections of the once-thriving city center are
pocked with vacant storefronts and empty streets. And yet a few blocks over, a
bustling collection of shops cater to the tourists and other well-off
vacationers and locals drawn to the luxury Alluvian hotel and spa.
In the past, seeking to
hoard all the cheap black labor for their cotton fields, the city’s white elite
fought to keep other industries away. Today, then, the town struggles to draw
any industry whatsoever.
Meanwhile, cotton fields
have been converted to much less labor-intensive corn and soybean crops. Those
crops have kept many white families well off, comfortable in their sprawling
mansions. North
Greenwood, where nearly all the city’s white residents live, has almost no poverty to speak of.
But today, well
over a third of Greenwood’s black residents live below the poverty line. The
lack of industry and loss of agricultural work have left many simply jobless.
Across the tracks, the historic all-black Baptist Town is a collection of
dilapidated shotgun homes. Those battered and leaning homes, first constructed
to house sharecroppers, cannot possibly look any better now than they did
during Jim Crow. In significant parts of this community, the median family
income falls below $10,000 a year. Its residents are so generationally
impoverished that the community
is anxiously awaiting two dozen tiny cottages
left over from Hurricane Katrina.
But today, well over a third of Greenwood’s black residents live below the poverty line.
Both Moses and Blue said
that while a small number of black Mississippians have been able to gain wealth
and power, distressingly high numbers still remain mired in grinding poverty.
“Those that gained the most from the movement don’t want to trouble the water,”
Blue told me. “They are doing so good while most of us are doing so much worse.
Integration comes with finance. I can’t go to the country club — not
because I am black, but because I don’t have money. I think that’s the failure.
The lack of financial power.”
Many who risked their lives
for the struggle faced retribution once the cameras went away and the
volunteers went home. They talked of being blackballed from jobs, loans,
opportunity. Many of them live on Social Security and scrape by.
The younger generation,
those for whom Freedom Summer is their inheritance, are in obvious ways better
off than those before them. Yet they still can feel trapped. I met 23-year-old
Evonna Lucas at the city’s convention and visitors bureau. An outspoken
bookworm fascinated by history, she reminded me of myself when I was her age.
Evonna remembers clearly
when she first confronted Greenwood’s invisible color line. She was in fourth
grade and her mother had sent her to the
only Greenwood public school that is majority white.
Her best friend was a little white girl named Sarah, and Sarah was having a
birthday party. “We were so excited. Then she came one day and said, ‘My momma
said I can’t invite black kids to my birthday,’” Evonna told me. “I still
remember her head hanging down. She was in fourth grade and couldn’t look me in
the eye. That’s when I realized I was different.”
I grew up in Iowa, yet have
a story like that of my own. The only difference is I was welcomed at my white
friends’ homes; it’s just that their parents didn’t want them coming to mine. I
guess Moses was right when he told me that the success of Freedom Summer was it
“made Mississippi, for better or for worse, the same as the rest of the
country.”
Evonna graduated from historically black Mississippi Valley
State University last year with a degree in
communications. She returned home, and finding she couldn’t get a job in her
field, took what she could get, making minimum wage before landing the job at
the visitors bureau. She likes it, but she wants more. She worries that can’t
happen unless she leaves. What’s possible when you live in the Delta, she told
me, can seem so small.
“I won’t say Freedom Summer
didn’t achieve anything, because look at me, I am sitting here in an office
that never had a black person,” she said. “We had a black mayor, my doctors are
black. But our kids still don’t get the best education and the system is
handicapping them. What’s it all for?”
And later that night, I saw
the old Mississippi peeking through the veneer.
When I drove my great-aunt
back to Jackson, she had rather casually pointed at a restaurant named Lusco’s
that had been in that exact location when she was a child. Of course, as a
child she’d been barred from eating there. I immediately decided that I would
eat there that night upon my return.
Lusco’s
was founded in 1921 by Italian immigrants who solidified their assimilation
process by banning
black diners. Five generations later, the
restaurant is still owned by the same family. And its inside looks much as it
did during Freedom Summer. The same linoleum, though faded and peeling. The
same soda fountain stools, though the soda fountain is long
gone.
The clientele is nearly all
white, and since Lusco’s is but a few blocks from Baptist Town, a black
security guard stands outside, opening the door for every patron coming in and
out, and walking them the few feet to their car.
I stood outside and talked
to the hostess who’d stepped outside for a smoke. She was part of that Lusco
fifth generation. “Our customers don’t like change,” she told me, complaining
about the restaurant’s dated interior.
As I talked to her, a
boisterous older white couple, probably in their 70s, came out. The woman was
charming and seemed used to attention. I was told that everyone simply refers
to her as “Mrs. Greenwood.” She was carrying a bottle of wine under her arm,
and casually declared that she’d already finished one. Mrs. Greenwood asked me
and the photographer with me where we were from.
Just then, two young black
men walked by. Quietly, eyes down, they headed to the store at the corner. It
was steamy out, and one was shirtless. Mrs. Greenwood’s eyes followed them, and
a sneer curled her lips.
“That’s what you call our
‘local color,’” she said. The last word, which she pronounced CAH-la, sounded
mean and hard in my ears. The photographer and I exchanged looks but said
nothing. Perhaps I blanched, because Mrs. Greenwood tried to recover.
“I’m not being ugly,” she
said. “It’s not safe here.” She scurried to the beige town car where her
husband was waiting and they drove off, I imagined to their home across the
Yazoo River.
I went back to my hotel room
and wrote in my notes, “The Delta can be devastating.”
Still, I couldn’t help but recall
that same morning when a young white man saw Aunt Charlotte trying to get into
her car and rushed over to her, opened the door and then solicitously held her
purse while she pulled her arthritic legs into the car. He had called her
“ma’am” and wished her a nice day.
I left Greenwood a few days
later. At the Jackson Airport, which is now called Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, sits a little portico right at
the check-in counters. It’s dedicated to Evers and traces some of the key
moments in Mississippi’s struggle for civil rights. At the center in the back
stands a bronze statue of a little white girl with her arm thrown around the
shoulder of a little black girl.
On
the inscription it said: Reconciliation:
a work in progress.
ProPublica’s Nikole Hannah-Jones has spent the last two years exploring race in America. Read her investigation on the resegregation of schools or join her on Facebook for an ongoing conversation on race and civil rights.
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