(Note: these learning modules encompass the actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students. Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)

LEARNING MODULE: WEEK 4, Personal Accounts

As our nation and state continues to debate emotionally-charged racial issues, I think it is helpful if people just understood other people’s points of view and where those views come from. Then we can avoid the arrogance that you see on the cable TV news networks like CNN and FOX, where people not only disagree politically but call opponents names. There is nothing wrong with the conservative point of view, and I am even sympathetic to some people who wanted to keep the old Mississippi flag (though I voted 2 decades ago to change it), but too often white Americans don’t really understand the points of view of people of other races and ethnicities. I myself took the initiative to learn about other cultures by reading three books written by African Americans, and I would strongly recommend the book written by Mrs. Medgar Evers, For Us, the Living, available through the University Press of Mississippi. She wrote about her life and that of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and it is very accurate (I’ve verified key points) and a very human story of what it was like for an African American to grow up in the Old South. Another good book is A Black Physician’s Story by Dr. Douglas L Conner, which is a more modern story about Starkville’s first black doctor; his adopted son Richard Holmes became the first African American to attend MSU (our Cultural Diversity Center is named after him). My lectures make some key points by drawing on both of these books. Those key points follow:

We should all be thankful that our lives are far easier that that of our parents and grandparents. Evers’ father was a farmer who also had to work at a sawmill or railroad to make ends meet, and Medgar's siblings also worked at various part-time jobs. Conner’s father worked twelve hours a day, six days a week in a lumberyard- 72 hours a week; his mother also worked outside the home full-time, and Conner worked various part-time jobs. Dr. Conner himself in his early days as a doctor in Starkville worked 13-hour days, 6 days a week. Medgar Evers had 13- hour workdays as an insurance salesman in the Delta in the early 1950s. How many hours do we work a week? I include work as being schoolwork, classes, part-time jobs, helping out parents. Their work lifestyle sounds a little like my maternal grandparents, Polish immigrants in Milwaukee, who worked six days a week in their small businesses (Sundays were important years ago, since it was the one day of rest.)

Both Evers and Conner experienced the culture of white supremacy in their everyday life. Both had to sit in the balcony of the movie theater (which was known as the “buzzard’s roost”) instead of sitting with white people. Both would hear the N word routinely used by whites, especially if an African American dared to walk in a white neighborhood or challenged a white customer who refused to pay an advertised price. Both had to walk by the nearest school in order to attend an all-black school with the daily walking mileage round-trip being 3 miles for Conner and 19 for Evers. The black schools were inferior in facilities, desks, and books. Medical facilities were segregated with separate waiting rooms and wards (often basement wards for blacks). Both indicated that they had to get off the sidewalk to give whites full use of the sidewalks. Buses were segregated with the long bench in the back reserved for “Colored.” So it is not just the political system that was white-dominated in the South, but the everyday life of people.

Segregated universities. Both Evers and Conner attended the all-black public Alcorn College. Medgar’s wife-to-be wanted to major in music (which no Mississippi black university offered), so she majored in education with a minor in music. After graduating, Medgar attempted to enter the Ole Miss law school in 1953, but Ole Miss turned him down after changing their policy so that it required five letters of reference from their alumni (all of whom were white). Conner liked Alcorn, as he was able to see “blacks in positions of authority and respect (p. 33).” Indeed, the college’s black physician was a very important role model for him. Congressman Bennie Thompson also attended an all-black university, Jackson State. Indeed, much of the legislative black caucus has attended historically black universities. So, two morals to take from this story are the importance of role models for everyone (including African American role models), plus respect for the importance of historically-black colleges and universities (even Trump bragged about increasing funding for these schools).

Racist speech and lynching tolerated by public officials. The Evers’ book recounts young Medgar and his brother Charles watching a speech by U.S. Senator Bilbo, when the Senator pointed out the two black kids at the outside of the white crowd in Decatur, and ranted: “If we fail to hold high the wall of separation between the races… we will live to see the day when those two (N word) boys right there will be asking for everything that is ours by right.” (p. 17, Evers book). When Medgar was 12, “a Negro man, accused of leering at a white woman, was snatched by a mob and dragged through town and out the road that led past the Evers’ house. In a near-by field he was tied to a tree and shot dead.” (p. 17) “Medgar would pass the spot while hunting, drawn against his will to see the rotting clothes with their blood stains turning slowly to rust.” (p. 18) Given such historic violence by whites, we can understand why so many African Americans today feel so strongly about allegations of white police profiling or killing of African American civilians.

Economic intimidation. After the Brown decision in 1954 requiring desegregated public schools "with all deliberate speed" (which took 15 years), many African American citizens signed public petitions calling for the local school boards to implement that decision in a timely manner. One white circuit judge in Mississippi wrote a book of his own speeches that called this decision, Black Monday- “a black day of tragedy for the South.” (Evers book, p. 108). Whites across the state formed White Citizens Councils. The Yazoo City newspaper published a paid ad by the Citizens Council that listed the names of 53 African Americans who had signed a school desegregation petition. African American petition signers soon started to lose their jobs, were refused goods by suppliers and stores, and even spouses lost their jobs. Eventually, all removed their names from the petition (2 of them just left the county), but not all got their jobs back. (p. 165, Evers book)

White violence against NAACP workers. The Evers book has several credible examples from the 1950s. In Belzoni, NAACP member reverend George Lee received death threats after registering to vote, and he died from two gun blasts into his car; the local white police claimed that the lead pellets in his jaw were dental fillings, and that even if it was a murder if was probably “some jealous (N word)” whose wife the reverend was allegedly having an affair with (p. 157). In Brookhaven, Lamar Smith actually succeeded in voting by absentee ballot, so he was “shot dead in broad daylight on the Lincoln County Court House lawn.” (p. 169). Though the accused white farmer was charged, an all-white grand jury refused to indict him. Civil rights activist Mack Charles Parker was “lynched in the old-fashioned way, dragged by his heels down concrete stairs from an unguarded cell in Poplarville where he had been charged with the rape of a white woman; then shot to death by a lynch mob, his body dumped into the Pearl River. Everyone in town knew who did it… There were no arrests.” (p. 204) When a Mississippi judge gave a speech in Connecticut and was asked if he thought his killers would ever be found, the judge replied that he didn’t think so. “Besides, three of them are already dead.” (Evers book, p. 205; also on page 118 of Katagiri book on The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a book about this public commission that Mississippi set up to defend its segregated system to the nation). Of course, the ultimate example of white violence was the assassination of Medgar Evers himself in his Jackson home carport in 1963, after Evers gave a speech on television in response to the Jackson mayor’s rejection of the NAACP’s call for a biracial committee to end all segregation and discrimination in the city. A white fertilizer salesman from Greenwood, Byron de la Beckwith was charged with his murder, and two hung juries resulted (split votes, which permit retrials). Beckwith bragged to friends about the killing, so he was retried in 1994 and convicted by a biracial jury in the new Mississippi (8 blacks and 4 whites). He died in prison in 2001 at the age of 80. Medgar Evers, on the other hand, as an American soldier during World War 2, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington. When I visited our national cemetery honoring our veterans, I didn’t really have any relatives buried there, so I went into the visitor’s center and ask where Medgar Evers was buried. They took out a special book with the most notable people buried there, I visited his gravesite, and over his gravesite was a wreath that read, “From your NAACP brothers and sisters.” While Hollywood movies seem to glorify the whites who supported the civil rights movement, I think that the real heroes who helped change our society for the better were African American southerners like Medgar Evers. After all, they fought in the trenches, so to speak.

Final, provocative ideas for our modern age, drawn from the Conner book, primarily

Maybe we need more self-help in health care. Conner wrote that about three-fourths of patient visits were psychosomatic, so he suggested that doctors have more of an understanding of their patients as human beings, and that doctors should study the liberal arts such as sociology, history, and African American culture. He opposed abortion after the first three months, as he felt that human life was then present; he wrote that with modern birth control measures, there was no need for abortions. He opposed smoking, drinking more than 1-2 drinks a day, and marijuana legalization (though he favored decriminalizing it). He denounced our overreliance on over-the-counter and prescription drugs, which he saw as a product of the fast pace of modern life. For a long healthy life, he said: “eat regular meals, sleep regularly, don’t eat too much, get enough exercise, and don’t worry too much.” (p. 101, Conner book) He sounds like what my life is like; I hadn’t seen a doctor since 2008 until the big Covid scare. Racial quotas aren’t always the answer. Mississippi Democrats by the 1980s required an even race and sex division on their state delegations attending the national party convention. Though very active in the state Democratic Party and a delegate to the three previous national conventions, Conner wasn’t able to attend in 1984 because the party had enough African American males. Why do we still have nearly all-white “academies”? Most academies arose as the public schools desegregated, as a way to avoid race mixing. Some claim that they serve a “class consciousness” role, as kids get to mix with a peer group that may help them in later life. When they were created, though, some parents would send their girls to the academies while their boys would stay in the public school, which suggested a desire to avoid race mixing. Any of you attend an “academy,” and how do they operate today? I hear that many do offer scholarships to minorities, and that many do permit Christians to openly worship. Some Republicans connect with the black community. Gil Carmichael was a progressive Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Mississippi governor and U.S. senator (against Eastland); he was a Meridian businessman who wanted a new state constitution, and Conner voted for him. Another progressive Republican was Jack Reed, who was a racial liberal from Tupelo, a businessman, and was Chairman of the state Board of Education; he narrowly lost to Democrat Ray Mabus for governor in 1987, four years before Fordice won. Indeed, the title of Mrs. Evers book is taken from President Abraham Lincoln (whose statue some white radicals have tried to deface) and his Gettysburg address, which also states that we have “unfinished work,” and that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Freedom to demonstrate. In 1970 Conner was jailed for marching against segregation in Starkville and not having a permit. A federal judge held that peaceful marches were legal, that the city could not require a permit tax, and that marchers only needed to notify the city one hour ahead of time. Interesting that since that time more recent board of aldermen instituted more regulations so that legal action had to be threatened so that the board would permit an LGBTQ march (which is now annual, and accepted by the city), and an effort to require marchers to purchase insurance resulted in MSU permitting the 2020 anti-racism rally to be held at our amphitheater instead of a city park (the city has since eliminated this insurance requirement for such 1^st amendment marches and rallies). It does give us some food for thought today, as this virus crisis led to the closing of churches to in-person services and liberal Democratic public officials denouncing Trump rallies and citizen demonstrations against the government lock-downs. Indeed, some Trump supporters protesting the election outcome were tried and convicted for merely walking into the Capitol on January 6, since the Capitol was a "restricted area" due to Covid (Republican pundits oppose lumping them together with the violent rioters, and Thompson's Committee fairly showed the difference between the two groups). Human decency is a common denominator of everyone. Despite everything, the Evers’ moved to Mississippi from Chicago, as they hated the big-city impersonal life of the North and Medgar loved hunting and fishing (so does Bennie Thompson). Though Mrs. Evers moved to California, she conceded that: “In Mississippi, we were all victims. The disease was hate, fed by fear, nurtured by ignorance, fostered by guilt. We were all, black and white, its victims.” (p. 374, Evers book) When Mrs. Evers visited Mississippi on the occasion of the opening of the nationally-acclaimed Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, she was treated with great respect, and she praised the changes in the state. Dr. Conner wrote that “It is wrong for blacks to hate whites, since some whites helped promote racial integration …. Hate does nothing but create more hate.” (Conner book, p. 175) Conner writes that the world needs “more blacks and whites working together for our common good.” (p. 175) Interesting that that philosophy of human beings mirrors that of Nelson Mandela himself.