A Day in Mississippi

Every time I travel to Mississippi from Georgia I'm confronted with a flood of memories. Friends occasionally remind me that Mississippi is no different than any other state in the "deep" south and, on the whole, I know that's true. Yet for me, Mississippi invariably rises to the top as the epitome of racial injustice, intolerance, bigotry, economic exploitation and, in spite of all, contradictions. Perhaps this is because its history of oppression is so conspicuous. Mississippi folks concerned about oppression have always challenged it, however. They simply never give up.

After September 11, 2001, George Bush said he was going after terrorists. I thought, "Great, maybe, he'll go after some of the real terrorists of American citizens, like the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups in Mississippi and throughout the country." This was a pipe dream, I know.

Mississippi's bleak contemporary and historical record is legendary and graphically described in books and film. Witness, for example, the founding of the notorious White Citizens Council in 1954 by the Mississippi Delta white elite, partly to counter civil rights achievements such as the Supreme Court's Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education decision in 1954 to integrate public schools. As Martin Luther King said in his book Stride Toward Freedom:

Then there are the white citizens councils. Since they occasionally recruit members from a higher social and economic level then the Klan, a halo of partial respectability hovers over them. But like the Klan they are determined to preserve segregation despite the law. Their weapons of threat, intimidation, and boycott are directed both against Negroes and any whites who stand for justice. They demand absolute conformity from whites and abject submission from Negroes.

In 1955, there was the horror of the tragic torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers. Till's death is considered one of the catalysts for the launching of the modern civil rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955. In 1963, Mississippi NAACP field director Medgar Evers was assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith who was a founding member of the White Citizens Council. In 1994, after 3 trials, Beckwith was finally convicted of this murder. Then there were the riots at the University of Mississippi when, in 1962, aspiring black student James Meredith attempted to integrate the school. Meredith did attend the university, however, and he did graduate without incident. In 1964 three young civil rights workers -- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner -- were murdered by the Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which was depicted in the film "Mississippi Burning". There were some minor convictions for these murders, but the case is on-going.

In 1987, I organized the Africa Peace Tour that was sponsored by the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Quakers, Unitarians, United Church of Christ, Oxfam, and others. Mississippi was preeminent in our planning and we started in Biloxi, Mississippi at the Methodist retreat center. With 30 speakers from the U.S. and Africa, our mission was to expose communities in seven states in the South to U.S. policies in Africa, particularly in southern Africa. We focused largely on the struggles of those in Angola and Mozambique whose revolutionary governments had successfully wrenched themselves from Portuguese colonialism in 1975.

Subsequently, these countries were being accosted by brutal guerilla factions such as UNITA and Renamo, with the support and encouragement of the U.S. right wing and U.S. religious fundamentalists. As in Mississippi, the U.S. right wing was not going to allow those of African origin claim their independence without a violent response. The U.S. support, under Ronald Reagan, of the South African apartheid government and against the freedom efforts was also a major focus of our discussion. Overall, the parallels of the struggles for justice in the U.S. to that of other countries are always striking.