Emporia, a small town of brick buildings and wide, straight streets, squats on the Kansas prairie, a two-hour drive from Kansas City on U.S. 35. It is a town of spectacular sunsets, where the horizon slides through a spectrum of color, turning red, orange, then a soft pink, before finally fading to blackness. The smells are equally spectacular; the raw odor of the slaughterhouses which put Emporia on the map are inescapable and unforgettable.
The community, with its spacious homes and century-old shade trees, has an unmistakable look of well-fed prosperity; the stockyards — the city’s largest employers — are jammed with corn-swollen cattle lazily awaiting the short journey to the kill floors, and the new industrial parks on the western edge of the town are rapidly filling with bustling, moderatesized factories.
Emporia lies on a ridge between the Neosho and Cottonwood Rivers and was platted on a treeless plain in 1857. The town charter prohibited the sale and use of liquor, making Emporia the first “dry” community in the Midwest. It also was bitterly antislave and sent a 144-man regiment to join the Union Army during the Civil War. Seventy miles to the east, in Osawatomie, the charred ruins of John Brown’s log cabin are preserved as a monument.
The residents, mostly of Welsh and English stock, have a genuine, almost contagious friendliness about them. When they smile or offer a hand in greeting, it is evident they mean it. A deeply religious community where a commonly seen bumper sticker proclaims, “My God is not dead, sorry about yours,” there seems to be a church on every corner — Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Baptist, and Catholic. The town’s cultural and educational reputation as the “Athens of Kansas” rests on two pillars, Kansas State Teachers College and The College of Emporia, one state run, the other private. Emporia even claims its own bona fide celebrity — William Allen White, the “Sage of Emporia,” who edited the Gazette for almost a half century and became, in the process, a giant in American journalism. His rambling two-story home is a local shrine.
Of a population of roughly twenty-eight thousand, less than 2 per cent are black, a scant four hundred fifty persons. There are slightly more Mexican-Americans. Virtually all the black and Chicano families live crowded in the eastern corner of town near the glistening tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad. The Reverend Mr. Chambers, pastor of the St. James Missionary Baptist Church (“The Little Church with a Big Welcome”) is past president of the local chapter of the NAACP. A son and daughter are married and no longer live in Emporia. “Most young blacks leave as soon as they can,” says Mr. Chambers in the lulling, ever unexcitable voice of a man long used to moderating his emotions. “They go to Kansas City, Topeka, or Colorado to find work. You can’t blame them. There are few jobs for them in Emporia and those that are available don’t pay much. There is a lot of unspoken prejudice here, and if you look you can see it in jobs, in housing, in education. The discrimination may be quiet, but it’s very real.”
When he returned to Emporia on a warm, Indian summer day in October 1970, Mark Essex would certainly have agreed with that statement. He had come home, as he told his parents at the bus depot, “to think about what a black man has to do to survive.”
The second of five children of Nellie and Mark Henry O’Dell Essex, the young sailor had two brothers and two sisters of whom only Benjamin still lived in Emporia. Timothy had moved to Cedar Rapids, Joyce and Penny had married and set up homes in Los Angeles and Waterloo, Iowa. His father, whose first name he shared, was a foreman at the Fanestil Packing Company, a small, family-owned firm, where he had worked for twenty-seven years. Small and wiry like his son, Mr. Essex was soft-spoken and self-effacing. In contrast, his wife had an eager, often sharp tongue. Mrs. Essex was the heartbeat of the closely knit family, where her rule was absolute, her word final.
The Essexes lived at 902 Cottonwood in a single-story frame house with faded white paint, spacious rooms, and a sunlit kitchen — the family’s principal meeting place. The house, like most of the others on the block, showed signs of hard use by children, with footpaths worn into the lawn and scattered toys and rusted bicycles lying derelict on the porch. The William Allen White Memorial School, where Essex attended grades one through seven, was on the corner across the street, its large playground beckoning to children in the neighborhood.
By all accounts, Mark Essex had a happy childhood in Emporia. A cub scout, he loved to fish for perch and catfish in the rivers and streams near the town and was described by Mr. Chambers as a “crack shot on rabbits and squirrels.” He attended Emporia Senior High School, a turn-of-the-century brick building on the corner of Sixth and Constitution in the heart of the downtown business district. He was in a distinct minority, for only twenty-nine of the school’s one thousand students were black. But Robert Lodle, who doubled then as principal and guidance counselor, was unable to recall any racial problems during Essex’s four years there. The students, he said, got along “splendidly.” Lodle said Essex was “bunched in the middle of his class” when he graduated in 1967, his worst subjects being math and English. The word “average” best seems to characterize Essex’s scholastic career.
During his first days home from Imperial Beach, Essex stayed inside the house, avoiding friends. Later, when word spread that he was back in town, he told visitors simply that he was “on leave.” At night there were long rambling talks around the dinner table about his bad experiences in the Navy. The intensity of his bitterness at first surprised, then worried his parents, but when they gently tried to caution him about the dangers of hatred, his head would jerk up as if pulled by strings. “What else is there?” he would say. “They take everything from you, everything. Your dignity, your pride. What can you do but hate them?” He vowed that he was unwilling to wait any longer to be treated “like a man.”
“He told us he didn’t see how he could go back to the Navy and start it all over again,” Mrs. Essex said. Still, keenly aware of how white society usually dealt with rebellious blacks and afraid her son might be branded a misfit and possibly wind up in jail, she urged moderation, a word which rankled Essex. He told her that he wasn’t being treated with “moderation;” he was being treated, he spat out the words, “like a nigger!”
Distressed, the parents asked the Reverend Mr. Chambers to talk to their son. The minister had baptized Mark when he was twelve years old; he had also taught the boy in Sunday school, frequently taking him fishing afterwards, a seldomenjoyed pastime to which he was devoted. Mr. Chambers quickly realized that his task verged on hopelessness.
“He told me how badly the Navy had treated him and how fed up he was. We talked a lot about discrimination and I remember him telling me how he had seen ‘the whole picture’ in the Navy. He was very, very bitter. I’ll tell you, I was worried about the boy after we talked. So were his parents.”
Little by little though, an argument at a time, the parents slowly convinced Essex that he had to return to the Navy voluntarily or risk spending his life under the cloud of a dishonorable discharge. Trying to cool their son’s molten anger was a delicate, often painful process that also seemed unfair, for they knew it was justified. But they also knew that if he didn’t go back, he would be a marked man, unable to get even a laborer’s job, unable to live. Finally, to their joy, he listened.
Essex arrived in San Diego early on the sixteenth of November; his unauthorized absence had lasted twenty-eight A days. He had had his time to think. He had had his chance, as he would say later at his court-martial, “to talk to some black people.”