Sean's Blog

Mississippi Delta, pt. 5

Well, unfortunately Charles McLaurin had to reschedule on Tuesday but we’re planning to interview him tomorrow so it’s still good. It was exciting to teach about SNCC that morning thinking we were going to meet him that afternoon but I’m sure tomorrow will be worth the wait. So instead we got in the van to drive down to a former Freedom School location in Middleton. The building was pretty destroyed and had been completely encompassed by the vines and trees and such but it was cool to see. A White California carpenter had moved out to the location in 1964 as part of the Freedom Summer and headed up a team of volunteers who built the school. It was actuall quite large, I’d guess about 2-3,000 square feet. The location was pretty out of the way, but I read that the area had been federal land in the ‘40s that was sold to Black families so it was one of the few neighborhoods where Black people could organize without worrying about being economically attacked by the White Citizens Council (the group people out here call the “white collar Klan”). Of course they still had to worry about the white hooded Klan and I read they used to place armed guards around the school. After poking around the place and trying to have a quick conversation in the Mississippi heat with kids about the history of the location, we piled back in the vans and called it a day but had exciting plans for the next day: driving to Philidelphia, Mississippi for the Killen trial.

So, if you haven’t been following the news (and I saw it’s made the front page of the L.A. Times a couple of times in the last month) the new District Attorney in Mississippi has decided to finally try Edgar Ray Killen, the now-80-year-old Klansman behind the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers, one African-American and two Whites: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Next to Emmitt Till and maybe Megar Evars, it is probably the South’s most notorious murder of the period. That year, civil rights activists were preparing for what they were calling “Freedom Summer.” Activists, White and Black, from all over the country were going to converge in every part of Mississippi to register voters, build community centers, and start “Freedom Schools” for young people. According to the accepted story (now being tried), under the planning of Edgar Ray Killen, the KKK chapter in Neshoba County decided to kill the activists who were coming down to their county. They attacked and burned a church where they believed Chaney and Schwerner were, but the two of them were still in trainings out of the state. When Cheney and Schwerner found out about the attack they headed straight to the church to show support, picking up Goodman on the way. When they arrived at the church a few days later they were pulled over and arrested on bogus charges by local law enforcement. They were held in jail a few hours by a Klansman sherriff while his buddies could get organized and then the three activists were released. As soon as they were officially released from jail they were kidnapped and murdered by Killen and the waiting Klansmen. Killen was tried and acquitted at the time.

So seventeen teenagers and two modern day Freedom Riders all piled in two vans and headed out on the three hour drive to the Neshoba County courthouse to see if we could get in to watch the trial. We showed up around noon while court was in recess. We walked around the barricades they had set up around the courthouse and walked up to the entrance. A Lieutenant in a suit at the door asked if he could help me and I told him we were there to see the trial. He told us it was full and that we couldn’t go in. We thought that might happen so we stepped off to the side to talk about what to do next. Now, if you haven’t looked at the pictures, we all wear matching “Freedom Project” shirts when we’re a group. So as we’re standing there, we start getting approached by reporters and camera crews who wanted to know who we were and if we would do interviews. After a few moments, the Lieutenant waved me back inside and said he had talked to the judge and the judge said we couldn’t come in because of our t-shirts, that they might provide an excuse for a mistrial. He then became slightly intimidating and began demanding who I was, where I was from and how they could get in contact with me. I answered his questions, which I normally wouldn’t have done but thought it was best since I had the kids with me, and he then told me that not only were we not allowed inside but we had to leave the vicinity of the courthouse. I got the message loud and clear, “get out and don’t mess this up.” Of course, we all knew that the KKK had been showing up the last couple of days and were all wearing matching insignias on their suits, but I guess that’s less threatening than the word freedom. Or maybe I’m being hard on them since it’s unlikely that the D.A. is going to file for a mistrial because the accused has Klan buddies visibly showing up to the trial.

So I go back outside and quickly round everyone up and pull them across the street. There we all do a bunch of interviews as some old activists come over to talk to us. One, who has become an attorney, starts giving us the lowdown. It’s nowhere near full capacity inside he says, so that was a bogus excuse from the beginning. We should have been able to just walk inside like everyone else. Beyond that, he said, t-shirts should not be an issue but if we really wanted to get in we should just turn them inside out and try again. So we circled up to have a quick meeting as my direct action training started kicking in. Now, normally when my training takes over it makes me focus on goals, objectives and strategies in a good way, but it also tends to make me more confrontational (which as most of you know has landed me in jail or on the receiving end of a police baton a few times). So, being the responsible one with a group of teenagers who are by now getting a little hot over having their rights violated I start thinking this is a time for serious caution, but at the same time, this is a great opportunity to make all this real to the kids. So I ask who wants to do it and see that a few students don’t. I give a quick talk on the imporance of respecting differences in people’s feelings about direct actions and offer that I will stay with them outside while Ms. Harris, my partner, takes the rest of the students to try again. I figured it was probably best to avoid a face-to-face challenge between me and that Lieutenant. Plus, I had already told them that excuses from law enforcement are just that: excuses. The t-shirts had nothing to do with it. They saw us as a threat and weren’t going to let us in. I reminded them of how many ridiculous excuses they had heard cops use during our research. I could tell, though, they weren’t sure if they should believe me and I started to think this would be a good time to earn some credibility with them, too.

So the rest of them walk up to the courthouse again. Also by this point, several reporters had gotten hip to what was going on and were filming the whole thing and paying serious attention, something that had not gone unnoticed by the Lieutenant, either. Some of these reporters had even been filming our quick meeting. So those of us who stayed behind did some more interviews, only this time the questions were all about us getting turned away and did we feel like our rights were violated. A minute later the other kids came back all telling me how right I am, because now the excuse was that they couldn’t go in wearing shorts. So we decided the people wearing shorts would stay with me while the rest tried to go in again. This time they were told to wait while the Lieutenant checked if it was okay but were just left standing there while the trial was about to begin. Finally they were told it was too late and that they had to leave. So by this time we figured we really had to be starting the three hour drive home anyways. But what happens as we are getting organized to leave, but I’m waved over to the side door of the court by the Lieutenant who is now joined by two women, also in nice business suits. At this point he says we can come in. I say I’ll see about getting everyone together but right afterwards he walks inside and locks the door, making it all a moot point.

So by now the kids are all pissed and start asking me about more confrontational tactics. I have to admit, it warmed my heart and I suddenly felt like a really good civil rights history teacher. But, being a good teacher (no matter what those chismosas at Div. 1 say) I start reality checking them. That would be a direct action that risks arrest, which is not something to be done lightly, even if we were all adults and documented, which we weren’t. Plus it would probably be counter to the real goals, which include putting this mother-f*@!*ing Klansman away for his last years and making the point that there is no longer a place for the KKK in Mississippi, or by that token, anywhere else in America. But I do tell them this would, in different circumstances, be a great time for a sit-in at the court entrance. Also, these kids have all learned a whole bunch of civil rights songs. We sing at the beginning of class everyday at the Freedom Project, but I had a suspicion that they had never thought of the direct action context of the lyrics. At our hypothetical sit-in, I tell them, we could sing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around.” Or if they tried to kick us out we could sing “We Shall not be Moved.” It was beautiful watching their faces as the implications of the lyrics to the songs they had been singing for years finally dawned on them. In the end I left it with the suggestion that we should leave and think about it on the drive home and talk about strategy with the Freedom Project’s director and their parents before doing anything radical. When we got back we decided we would try again tomorrow, but with different clothes and after a quick workshop on direct action that I would lead in the morning (where I would lay out the reasons not to do anything confrontational).

So this morning we had our quick training on direct actions and media/messaging (media frames, talking points, sound bites, etc.) and set out again, this time in pants and different shirts. This time when we got there they let us right in. Unfortunately, that morning Edgar Ray Killen had complained of difficulty breating or something and had been taken to the hospital. So all we got to see was the judge telling everyone the trial was being postponed. However, I did end up sitting next to some men from the Attorney General’s office who were really excited about the kids being there. They started pointing out different people in the crowd including one man from the KKK who was sitting directly in front of most of our students. He wasn’t wearing anything to show his affiliation but he was shaking with nervousness and was getting mad-dogged by all the sherriffs and troopers in the room. Some of the kids were really shaken when I told them afterwards that the guy in front of them was Klan. We also got to meet some investigators and the District Attorney, which was cool. We had hoped to get a photo with the Attorney General, but it didn’t happen. So after all this we headed back to the LEAD center and were then thrown a really nice goodbye party by one of the local churches and the host families. So tomorrow we meet Charles McLaurin, meet with some kids from an all White private school and we fly out on Saturday. So my next posting will probably be from home in Watts. ‘til then…

Mississippi Delta, pt. 4

It’s been an all right couple of days. I got to hold B.B. King’s guitar Lucille and shake hands with the 1960’s president of the local NAACP. Friday we watched the groundbreaking ceremony for the forthcoming B.B. King museum, saw him give a performance/talk at Mississippi Valey College, then went to the blues festival that night. We got VIP passes to the groundbreaking in exchange for helping take down the stage afterwards. Lucille had been in her guitar stand on the stage for the ceremony and when I saw someone go to put her away I asked if I could have the honor. The guitar was heavy with thick strings, not an old man’s guitar at all. I was impressed. The afternoon talk was great. He had the band play quietly behind him as he rambled for an hour about music and the perspective of a community elder. He has the exact mannerisms and personality of a Zulu poet I was mentored by at UCLA, Professor Mazisis Kunene. It was kind of haunting. The festival was a lot of fun. They ran out of fried twinkies before I could get one, though. And have I mentioned KoolAid Pickles? They’re really pickles that have been marinated in Kool Aid. They’re awful. Anyways, Saturday we did some painting on a Habitat for Humanity house and some Habitat people threw the kids a pool party. Sunday we relaxed. Today we interviewed Carver Randle and Reverend Lunsford, two leaders in the movement since back in the day. And I started reading J. Todd Moye’s Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Suflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986.

So as promised, my thoughts on politics and the blues. I think the key, as is the key to a lot around her, is cotton. Both the blues and the politics of the movement are rooted in the cotton fields. I think before I came out here that would have sounded like some romantic silliness, but I mean it. Just feeling the heat and humidity of the Delta and trying to imagine picking and chopping cotton while listening to people who did is pretty powerful. Both B.B. King and many of his generation that spoke at the groundbreaking all started their speeches by talking about picking and chopping cotton when they were young. All of our interview subjects have talked about working the cotton fields. Family, church, and cotton seem to be the keystones to the childhood memories of everyone who grew up before the mechanization of the plantations. And to everyone we’ve heard so far, these are memories filled with joy and pain and that joy and pain are the wellspring of the blues and the motivation for civil rights workers. To those my age and younger, who grew up without ever working in the fields, neither the blues or the movement seem nearly as relevant.

Today we interviewed two people, Carver Randle and Reverend Lunsford (who checked me on my gender stereotyping by turning out to be a woman – I thought of you, Q). Mr. Randle is an attorney and the former president of his local NAACP from ’67 to ’75. He once ran for State office on a ticket with Fannie Lou Hamer. Coincidentally, he’s also B.B. Kings lawyer. We met him at St. Benedict the Moor church in Indianola. St. Benedicts is a Black Catholic church that served as one of the main meeting places for the movement. He described packed meetings planning protests and a drive by shooting that had happened there. He described how after finishing college the movement was everywhere. He talked about the movement’s demands that centered around education and supporting the youth in a way that reminded me of my work in L.A.. He was inspired by Father Smeagil at St. Benedicts and the fact that the oppression of his people mad him “mad as hell.” He told stories of White resistance, FBI surveillance, the KKK. One story he told was of a meeting there at the church to plan a demonstration the next day that was interruped by the news that the local elementary school had been firebombed and that civil rights activists were going to be framed for it. They decided to cancel the demonstration, which turned out to be the right thing to do. When Mr. Randle went alone the next morning to send home anyone who hadn’t gotten the message, he found the police their waiting to attack. He was surrounded and threatened himself.

Reverend Lunsford, it turns out, was attending that very school as a third grader. She says for the next three years she went to school in various churches and buildings while they faught to get a new school built. Reverend Lunsford was a mentee of Fannie Lou Hamer who was forced to leave the Delta for thirty years by White resistance. She joined the movement young, but explained she never thought of it as “the movement” at the time, it was just being active. In writings by people a generation older than her, people speak of “waiting for the movement to arrive” like it was an army marching through that you could join up with. But for her it was the environment she grew up in. She told of a boycott of a record store when she was a teen, demanding that Black people be allowed to shop while White people were still in the store. She also talked a little about tactics and strategies. When asked what she did during the civil rights movement, she talked about political work, organization building, direct action, and creating programs. Specifically she talked about voter registration campaigns, the Council of Federated Organizations, lunch counter sit-ins, and Head Start. When none of the students batted an eye at the mention of voter registration she backed up to explain the reality of what that meant: constant threat, police beatings, murder. Still she only vaguely referred to having to escape the Delta herself, presumably under threat of death. She also spoke on how harrowing it was to go to the store and walk down the street every day with White people, some of whom you knew were Klansmen, but because of the hoods you never knew who exactly.

Both of them made some of the same points. Both spoke of how the civil rights movement is not over but how it has lost the numbers and depth of commitment it had forty years ago. Reverend Lunsford spoke of doing get-out-the-vote work a few years ago where a Black woman who they drove to the poll said she wouldn’t vote for a Black candidate because Black people had never done anything for her! Mr. Randle spoke of people being lulled into apathy by the end of fieldwork and by modern comforts even though the main goals of the movement still have not been reached. Reverend Lunsford described those goals as health, happiness, and prosperity for everyone. The movement won’t be over, she said, until everyone is free, not only in this country, but all over the world. Both of them continue their work, undaunted by the challenges.

They also both had similar advice for the kids. They both exhorted the students to work hard and know that there is no limit to the success that is possible for them. But they also both balanced that with the admonishment not to think those who don’t succeed are lazy or failures. Everyone who succeeds does so because they have had help and everyone of us has a responsibility to do all we can to help those that come after us. Mr. Randle quoted Father Smeagil that “anything less than your best is stealing.” That is, we belong to the community and not giving back everything we can is taking away from that community.

Tommorrow we interview Charles McLaurin, field supervisor for SNCC during the height movement. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about SNCC. I’ll post again soon.

Mississippi Delta, pt. 3

Today we studied the history of Emmit Till, a Black teenager in the ‘50s who supposedly flirted with a White woman, a crime serious enough at the time that he was murdered for it a few days later. We visited the store where the incident happened and saw the house one of the murderers lived in until recently. We also visited a 70 year old White plantation owner. We got to hear him speak on the farming industry, catfish, and the civil rights movement from his perspective.

For those of you who don’t know. Emmitt “Bobo” Till was a Black teenager from Chicago who was visiting family in Mississippi for the first time in 1955. The details of the incident are really only known to the participants, but the common story is that he was hanging out in front of the general store in Money, Mississippi with a group of a dozen or so other Black teenagers, bragging about having hooked up with some White girls back home in Chicago. His friends dared him to go try to hook up with the woman who ran the store. Not realizing the depth of racism in the Delta, Till took them up on the dare. When the story got back to the woman’s husband a few days later, he and his brother-in-law drove out to the house Till was staying at late at night, took him out to the river, beat him, shot him, and unsuccessfully tried to sink his body. A few days later his body was found. Returned to Chicago, Till’s mother put the body on display as a protest against lynching. Following the funeral, when the murderers were put on trial, it became a major national new story. Despite the media attention, the murderers were acquitted by an all White, male jury who were obviously sympathetic to the murderers. Following the acquittal, the murderers confessed everything in a paid interview. It became a catalysing moment for the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Still, the murderers never paid for their crime. People my age who grew up here, Black and White, remember going to the store run by one of the murderers for candy and ice cream. Though the murderers are both dead now, the wife of the brother-in-law still lives here. We drove by her house.

After studying this story with the kids, we drove out to visit a White plantation owner, Mr. Arant, who just happened to be about the same age as Emmitt Till’s murderers. The kids, however, showed virtually no prejudice against him and were truly earnest in wanting to understand how he saw things. To his credit, even though he was obviously loyal to the White race, he seemed to want to believe in equality and treated the students graciously. So here are my thoughts on him, an interesting balance to my notes on Mrs. Downey.

Race Loyalty – I think he might disagree with my calling it this, but he consistently framed history in terms of a good Christian people (the White community) trying to do right. He tried to portray everything in a balanced way, balanced between the Black perspective and the White perspective regardless that the White perspective was obviously racist. Sharecropping, for example, was “tenant farming” and was described by him as an example of how landowners tried to help people. He acknowledged he oppression of Black people, but only in terms of a mistreatment that was beyond the power of anyone to stop. He never placed any responsibility on the White community or the plantation establishment of which he was a part.

Blinders – He never acknowledged the role of Black people in making changes. When asked why the White community’s attitude towards Black people had changed, his answer was that White people interacted so much with Black people that they came to see their humanity. When asked about Fannie Lou Hamer, he seemed to avoid the question saying only that she was a woman who had been mistreated but was tough enough to do something about it. As he tells it, the end of segregation came from good White people, through their Christian values, coming to see the truth about equality before the Lord.

Color Blind – And his idea of equality is colorblindness. At one point as we were leaving, he put his hands on the shoulders of a young Black woman and told her he cared as much for her as any White child. But at the same time, he also told a story about going to Jamaica and being the only White person not afraid to go out and talk to the “natives.” He said this was because he was the only White tourist used to being around “your people,” as if all Black people were the same. He seemed to earnestly want to live in a world without racism but at the same time obviously pretended to be color blind to avoid looking critically at his role in a racist society.

Devout Christian – His color blindness was intimately attached to his Christianity. Several times he repeated that “we are all equal before the Lord.” He also rationalized his own success not as the result of slavery and segregation, but as a blessing from God that resulted from his piety. He repeatedly advised students that if they “put God first, family second, and business third,” they would be as successful as he is. He also related a story about when he drove down to the maximum security prison to try to save the soul of Byron De La Beckwith (the man who killed Medgar Evers) and the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Unfortunately, he said they were too spiritually and mentally twisted for him to help. Oh, and he also lamented the lack of prayer in school.

Law – He placed a lot of value in the rule of law. When desegregation became the law, it was the duty of all people to accept it. This actually seems to have been a popular opinion in Mississippi. They absolutely did not want federal troops sent in like happened in Arkansas. He told a story about how even Senator Jim Eastland, a notorious segregationist legislator, worked with the FBI to keep out the KKK so as to maintain the rule of law.

Overall, Mr. Arant struck me as being a lot like the older men in my family. He seemed like a Southern combination of my cop grandfather and my cattle ranching granduncle. I imagine he was one of the more progressive voices in the White establisment during the ‘60s, particularly since desegregation did not threaten him economically. Which incidentally brings up some points from my last posting. He says the market price of crops has stayed more or less steady for decades, even though inflation and the cost of business have hugely increased expenses. They have to keep prices low to compete with overseas farmers. Whatever increase in wealth that has occured, at least according to Mr. Arant, is not in the Delta at all, but in the companies who manage international food distribution. I also got the feeling that he was open to the idea of racial equality because it was not an economic threat to him, not, as he said, because he played with Black boys when he was a child. He referred ambiguosly to how minimum wage laws put an end to tenant farming as if that law ended the old plantation system and the new mechanized system that arose at the same time needed so few people as to make the old degree of labor exploitation unneccesary. That’s just a hunch, though.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to meet B.B. King. I love the blues but have honestly never thought about the politics of it beyond its obvious comtemporary race politics. At least I’ve never thought about it’s relation to the civil rights movement. I can’t wait to see what I’m going to learn tomorrow.

Mississippi Delta, pt. 2

Yesterday and today were peeks into the land of the Delta. Yesterday we visited a cotton farm and today, the Levee Museum on the bank of the Mississippi. We also had a day of class for the kids and I got to read a piece by Fannie Lou Hamer that was pretty remarkable; she was a revolutionary, no two ways about it.

What struck me most about the cotton farm was how mechanized it was. The farm was about 9,000 acres and would have been worked by thousands of people back in the day. Nowadays there is a staff of only 20 people. When it comes time to harvest the cotton in the Fall, they spray chemicals over the farm from a plane that cause the leaves to fall off. Then a tractor that uses spinning blades and giant vacuums pulls the cotton from the plants. The tractor is programmed using a GPS system to robotically steer itself through the farm. If I’m not mistaken, at no time before arriving at the cotton gin for processing is the cotton ever touched by human hands. It’s a whole different industry than it was during the slave plantation days or even two generations ago.

So the visit to the farm put two things on my mind. First, how does this effect the current employment situation in the Delta and second, what was the relationship between the mechanization of the cotton industry and the civil rights movement? The way I do the math, and based on some questions I asked, the Delta is producing roughly twice as much wealth as it was fifty years ago and has half the population. It seems like if there was even the slightest truth to trickle-down-economics, this would be a case study in rising living standards for those who stayed. In fact, that’s true for Whites in the Delta, but there has been virtually no increase in the living standards of Blacks (except for cars and slightly out-dated comsumer technology). Visiting houses in the Black communities here I find many families are living in the same houses they were in fifty years ago, but now these houses are now in desperate need of renovation. To be sure, as Mrs. Downey said, there is more opportunity and some African Americans are benefitting from it. But it is obvious that the Black community as a whole is not being given access to the phenomenal increase in wealth that must have taken place over the last several decades. Now, to be fair to Whites in the delta, I can’t say that the wealth is staying here at all. It may not be ending up in the in the bank accounts of White farmers, but in the bank accounts of corporate middle men. I don’t know.

As for the effect of all this on the civil rights movement, I really need to research that more. The mechanization happened at the same time as the civil rights movement’s heyday: the ‘50s and ‘60s. I’m curious about the details about how those two watershed transitions interacted. Despite the notorious resistance to the movement by White racists, the movement was able to be successful in part because the majority of Whites had become much more moderate in their attitudes towards Blacks. I imagine this was in large part because Whites were no longer dependent on exploiting Blacks’ labor to maintain the Delta’s economy. At the same time, it seems Black people must have been becoming more desperate as work became more scarce, pushing them toward more radical action against the racist power structure. And as the emigration of Black people out of the Delta would have picked up steam, I imagine the numbers that swelled the movement would have shifted towards the cities where people went looking for work, perhaps one influence on the shift from the rural civil rights movement of the ‘60s to the urban Black Power movement of the ‘70s. In the popular history of the civil rights movement, it was ended by the murder of Martin Luther King, but perhaps tractors were more important than assassins’ bullets. I’m going to try to look more into this.

As for the river, I'm not sure how much it played into the civil rights movement. It's certainly one of the defining metaphors for the region, though. Talk about a "fact of nature." Every discription of it talks about how unstoppable it is. We visited a really well designed museum dedicated to the river and the levee system that keeps it from flooding. But it has flooded. In 1929 it flooded the entire Delta, destroying virtually every building in the entire region. It left almost a million people homeless. Refugee camps were built along the tops of the levees. In all of this, of course, Black people suffered the brunt of the damage and the least of the relief. I'm sure it left a deep impression on those who lived through it as to the fragility of life and the depth of White America's indifference to the lives of Black people. A book on the subject was recommended to me by several different respectable people. I have to admit, since it seemed interesting but not likely to make my personalo top 20 book list, I already forgot what it's called. Oh, and did I forget to mention the Confederate memorabilia in the gift shop? It's still the South. The word that kept coming to my mind was "gross."

The last thing I’ve learned the last two days is some more about Fannie Lou Hamer. I had a civil rights poster on my wall in my classroom at Jordan with her on it. I had no idea who she was at first, and later learned only that she was involved in taking down the old Dixiecrat political machine. Well, here in Sunflower County, she’s a lot more than that. She is the quintessential revolutionary: outspoken, fearless, confrontational, focused on results, uncompromising. Reading her own words, I can’t imagine her being the polite, humble type of woman that the South is known for. She attacked Black pastors as sell-outs, assembled a small armory in her house to defend against Klan attacks, resisted working with Black moderates working within the political system, refused to put her role as wife before her work. I can’t wait to meet some people who knew her to find out how popular she was when she was alive. I have a sneaking suspicion she’s a lot more popular now that she’s not in people’s faces. I also saw some references to her pushing for the movement to stop concentrating exclusively on voting and desegregation in order to focus on economic issues. I’m curious to see how the layoffs caused by the mechanization of the farms precipitated that and whether it preceded or followed King’s shift towards a focus on poverty.

More to come soon…

Mississippi Delta, pt. 1

I'm in Mississippi with 8 of my students from the L.A. Leadership Academy. We're out here to study civil rights history at the Sunflower County Freedom Project. Today was our first field trip, we went to interview Mrs. Downey, a 70-something year old woman born here in the Delta.

I'm really excited about this opportunity to spend some time meeting people who were part of the civil rights movement here in its heyday and to even meet a few of its leaders. I've often wondered how much I have in common with these people politically. Their reputation for being conservative church people, patriotic, Democrats, etc seems directly opposed to my revolutionary and anti-authoritarian values. I was greatly relieved when I met Rev. Jim Lawson during the DNC protest planning and he told us we were continuing King's work. But I still wonder. Maybe its just my concern over the lingering effects of the lifestyle-anarchism I was a part of for so long.

So my personal goal for these two weeks is to listen as deeply as possible to what these people have to say and to try to learn how some of the most revolutionary successes in American history came from a people who seem so un-revolutionary. So here are the main points from the kids' interview with Mrs. Downey:

Humility - Mrs. Downey was consistently humble. When asked what her greatest success in life was, she responded that she had managed to stay out of trouble and raise a family.

Slavery - Mrs. Downey knew which plantations her great-grandmotherhad worked on as a slave and knew the names of the different slave owners who had bought and sold her. She had learned all this from her uncle.

Racism - Her earliest memory of White Mississippians notorious pre-civil rights movement racism was the way her mother was treated. Mrs. Downey said that even as young as 3 or 4 years old, she was aware that her mother was never referred to with a "courtesy title," but always by her first name if a name was used at all. She also remembers the oppression of sharecropping, how it kept people trapped in cycles of debt that forced young people to drop out of school so they could work.

Pre Civil Rights Movement Black Resistance - When asked if she ever wanted to fight back against racism in her youth she said it just never even entered people's thoughts back then. She told of how when she would go to the store when she was young it was just assumed that you would let White people cut in front of you. It was just automatic. But she also told of how powerful the murder of Emmitt Till was and how there was always the threat of murder or lynching just below the surface.

How Successful was the Civil Rights Movement? - Racism, she said, will probably be around forever. Some problems have gotten even worse. But also, the world could always be better and we shouldn't be looking for an end to the struggle. And the movement did have the very important success of creating new job opportunities for Black people. Black people from the Delta now can be more than sharecroppers.

Today's Ills - Drugs are her number one concern for today. But connected to that is incarceration. She told us of Parchment Prison, the nearby state prison that used to be a slave plantation, about how it is full of young Black men arrested on drug charges. When I asked her if the problem was just Black people using drugs or if the problem was also the justice system, she hesitantly but thoughtfully replied that it was both and made some points regarding sentencing guidelines for crack versus powdered cocaine.

Suggestions - To the kids she suggested that they treat every individual in their lives in anti-racist ways and to seek out people across racial boundaries. She also stressed the responsibility we all have to open doors and give a helping hand to the generations that follow us.

On Love

So I'm sitting in my office/studio in the middle of the night working on a paper and got blog announcements from Erin and Shawn. They seem like good company to be in so I'm writing one, too. Yeah, maybe I'm just jocking them, but isn't that how anarchists usually take collective action?

I'm not going to be all political, though. I've been into a kind of personal/spiritual thing lately, mostly brought on by breaking up with Irina and by my little sister having a baby. I've been listening to alot of Coltrane (John and Alice) and thinking about how humans build relationships with each other and with the universe and what that says about the nature of love. I've also been tripping on what it is I want out of romantic relationships and why. And the politics of all that.

A couple of weeks ago Irina and I went to a group discussion on love and social justice work at SAJE. I got to be in a breakout group with Antonia Darder. It was the first time I've met her, something I've wanted to do ever since I saw the cover of her book Pedagogy of Love. There also was a really great panel discussion. Here are my notes from that night. They seem like a good first posting.

Love=Work Love is a verb

Love=God=Giving Life ----- Love is not anti-intellectual, it transcends the intellectual.

I am you (yes, that means we are G.W. Bush)

Love is antidote to internalized oppression (think about jealousies and infighting amongst social justice workers)

Love is connected to hurting and being hurt

Love can become corruption

Loving the oppressor means destroying the institutions of oppression - ending racism would free my racist family members from being racist, ending sexism would free men from having to act hard

Private lives and social lives divorced from each other are a breakdown of love (love=unity/synergy)

Love is listening (not based on expectations) and correcting (dialogue)

Praxis of Love - Unity of action and inward journey

Love is key to working with youth

love = humility = accountability amongst loved ones

love is the opposite of accountability

love creates space for grief

love is a corporeal sense

love is across centuries (the social justice struggle is ancient)

Languages of love:
solidarity
integrity
healing/safety
peace
humanization

Naming love stifles it

Love is sacred and profane

Love is accepting the profane humanity of others, that it is human to act inhumane