AS A YOUNG MAN GROWING up in the 1950s in an all-black community called Lucas, my home deep in the Piney Woods of southern Mississippi, I would often stay awake until a quarter past ten to listen to the Blues on the radio. Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, and Little Junior Parker were some of my favorite artists (and I can’t leave out Howling Wolf, Etta James, and Chuck Berry). Oh yes. The Blues could make whatever was going wrong feel all right. I had to sneak the old Philco radio under the bedcovers, so Dad would not hear it. He didn’t like the Blues, and took every advantage of his ability to tell me, “Boy, turn that thing off.” As far as Dad was concerned, the Blues was “devil’s” music. He felt the same way about dancing and playing cards. More to his liking were the songs we sang at church, or the country quartet singing that was common around my home. People would get together with family and friends and harmonize for entertainment, singing to the likes of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, Albertina Walker, and the Spiritual Jubilees. Whether anyone was ready or not, the Blues had come to stay. Lucas had two juke joints, which were the destination for miles around for dancing and socializing on Saturday nights. The clubs could operate in our unincorporated community, because there were no laws to prohibit them, but the local church folks didn’t want them there. Fights were known to break out. Occasionally, we’d hear of a shooting or someone knifed in the back. I was too young to get in, but even if I wasn’t, these were not the kinds of places I was in the habit of going.
We were situated far from the Mississippi Delta, in the southern half of the state. Agriculture was the major source of income, and the earliest sound of the Blues I remember was from people singing in the fields, which covered the landscape, while they were picking or chopping cotton.
The rhythm of those work songs was not unlike some of the songs we sang at church. Only the words were different: one spoke your feelings about God, another about relationships, how your girl done you wrong, your job, hardships. Some of the church fathers would be tapping their feet, listening to the radio on Saturday mornings, not realizing it was playing the Blues.
I liked country music, too. Blues and country, that’s all we had. As we moved about the house on weekends, we’d turn up the volume and listen for the sales pitches for live baby chicks and Royal Crown hairdressing. We grew our own supply of chicks, and a cup of Royal Crown could always be found in the house somewhere. By the time I turned eleven on August 17, 1952, both of my birth parents, Mildred and Thomas Armstrong Jr., had succumbed to separate episodes of illness. My mother died when I was two. My eight siblings and I (six girls, two boys) were split up and taken in by three different families of relatives. By then, I was the youngest. My mother had given birth to another child after me, but he preceded her in death. Prior to her passing, my mother had arranged for my father’s sister, Vaudra Armstrong, and her husband, Enoch Barnes, to raise me. They became my legal guardians. When I speak of Mom and Dad, of my parents, I’m speaking of them. Their daughter Nellie, ten years older than I, became my sister.
Once, I overheard a relative ask Enoch and Vaudra why didn’t they adopt me and give me their surname. Enoch replied that there was no need to, because he wanted me to always remember my real parents.
Dad didn’t have a chance to get an education beyond fourth grade. Most of his black male peers faced similar circumstances. He had to stop attending school to help support the family. He and his father worked for white people in the logging trade. Determined not to need to depend on anyone to earn a living for himself, Enoch used his knowledge of logging to start his own business. Along with agriculture, forestry was a major industry; thus, he was able to find work most of the year.
He owned several trucks that he used in his business, which was based at the house. I learned to spell the word “Chevrolet” from the side of a 1942 five-ton log truck. Enoch’s brother, Clark Barnes, operated a pulpwood business. The two of them, along with brothers Elijah, Nemirah, and Oliver, purchased standing timberland, and, from the sale of logs and pulpwood, they all made a good living. There was another brother, Javis, who chose to live in New Orleans, having declared his dislike for the same logging and farming businesses his siblings naturally gravitated to.
Dad had a regular crew of workers. Most mornings, they would come knocking at the door looking for him, if not to work, then to seek a job. Most of them lived in the community. If they were coming from further away, he might let them board for a time at the house.
Our home was in the countryside, where family status was defined by land ownership, and communities by religion and cultural restraint. Black landowners were not uncommon in the mostly white-populated counties south of Jackson, the state capital, in central Mississippi. Most were farmers. They raised cotton, corn, and other vegetables, and typically worked side-by-side in the fields with their sharecroppers, or hired day laborers. I lived the life of a farm boy on an eighty-acre farm. Most of the food we raised, however, was for the cattle and horses my dad used in his business.
I broke my left arm when I was twelve, the result of an awkward fall: I was trying to jump a fence while training for track. My arm was broken in three places, a disaster that required multiple surgeries, metal screws, and plates. It was left permanently scarred. So, I stopped wearing short-sleeve shirts and kept holding my head high. To my youthful, naïve thinking, life seemed fair—as fair as a segregated state would allow.
Communities like ours, a mix of farmers, skilled tradesmen, and teachers, were proudly self-sufficient. We had our own gristmill, which was open for use by all, for making meal from corn. During most of the Jim Crow era, the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad ran tracks through the community. We had a postmaster who doubled as a stationmaster, and he could be relied upon to find colored folks a decent place to sleep for the night.
As was legal and therefore customary under segregation, blacks were excluded—and often exploited—socially, politically, and economically. Anyway, my parents, like most of their peers, shielded us youngsters from the degradation of this reality. They knew that we would be certain to find out eventually, but like all loving parents, wanted to protect us from the pain of suffering for as long as they could.
Under the race-restrictive laws of the Jim Crow South, few Negroes could find jobs in the industries that began opening in the late 1940s. In the early 1950s in Mississippi, two-thirds were still working in some form of agriculture (by then in economic decline), and the vast majority, 80 percent, were sharecroppers and day laborers. If most of us were poor, we didn’t know it; we were not poor in spirit. Most people raised their own food and made many of the products they used. If there was a soul in need, someone could be relied upon to help. Most important, land ownership fueled our drive for better educational and political opportunities. Landowner families were usually able to send their children to school and for longer periods of time, which meant that their descendants most often became teachers and small-business owners.
Lucas, a community of about 100 people, was home to several black land-owning families, whose names included the Halls, Warners, Suttons, Grays, Prices, and my paternal ancestors, the Armstrongs. Each of these families owned an average of two or three hundred acres, land their ancestors had managed to hold onto through a reign of terror by white supremacists in the late nineteenth century. It was a counterrevolution that brought an end to Reconstruction and shattered many of the gains black Mississippians had made after the Civil War.
Lucas had been settled in 1870 by first-generation freedmen who were followers of one Ira Warren Lucas, a black man with relatively substantial means. It is situated in Jefferson Davis County, which was formed in 1906 from two neighboring counties and named for the former president of the Confederacy. The county’s population has historically tilted toward a slight black majority.
My parents were the descendants of enslaved grandparents who, after Emancipation, made significant strides on all levels of society, only to see those gains and opportunities later vanish. The black freedmen in Mississippi outnumbered whites, more so than in any other Deep South state. During Reconstruction, many served with distinction in elected offices ranging from constable to United States Senator.
Despite those successes, hundreds of innocent blacks were killed in violent attacks by mobs of white vigilantes bent on returning the state to white supremacist rule beginning in the 1880s. Violence and electoral fraud effectively denied black Mississippians their political rights. It was the start of the Jim Crow era. By 1890, the state had adopted restrictions on voter participation requiring applicants to “read” a section of the state constitution. Before the turn of the century, the legal basis for separate but equal public facilities would be established.
My great-grandparents, Ransom and Caroline Armstrong, who had been able to vote and acquire land during Reconstruction, lived in a constant state of fear in the latter stages of their lives. Six-hundred blacks are on record as having been lynched over the six decades following the 1880s. During the twelve years between 1894 and 1906, at least fourteen lynchings occurred within a 100-mile radius of my ancestral home, according to Where Rebels Roost by Susan Klopfer. A black man by the name of Wood Ambrose was lynched in Prentiss on June 11, 1906. Other lynchings occurred over the years in nearby Brookhaven, Hattiesburg and Hazelhurst, and as late as 1930 and 1942 in Scooba and Laurel, respectively.
While I would often hear stories about mistreatment of Negroes, I had never completely felt the indignity of segregation until my second year in high school. My first real-life experience made me realize something wasn’t right about the conditions of black folks in Mississippi and helped me understand what that something meant.
From the start, nothing was going right that day, late in the summer of 1954. The memory is so etched into my brain and my bones, I can recall it happening as if it were just this morning.
It’s a Friday, and I didn’t awaken at the proper time because I had been up late the night before listening to Randy’s Records Highlights, the radio broadcast on WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee. At 7:30 AM, I head out of the house on foot, and because I’ve missed the bus to school, I’m walking quickly east along the stretch of U.S. Highway 84 that passes through the middle of Lucas.
The highway, originally an Indian Trail that aided early settlers from the East, is a major throughway to Texas. Already, the tropical sun beams down oppressively upon me as I make my way to the local Ball’s Grocery. From there, I’ll surely find someone to catch a ride with to Prentiss, the largest business district in our area, five miles further east along the highway. Classes will be starting in minutes at Prentiss Normal and Industrial Institute, the private high school and junior college for blacks, located just north of town.
On my way to hitch a ride at Ball’s, I pass Cousin Bertha working in her yard. “Hello there,” she yells, staring at me with her hand on her hip. I’m sure she knows I’m late for school, but doesn’t ask. “Morning,” I call back and nod. The thought occurs to me that she’s always working in that yard and must have too much time on her hands. Only she and her granddaughter, Catherine, live in the twelve-room home, left to her by her late father.
The early birds are assembling at the store, purchasing fuel for their cars and trucks and getting their supply of cheese and crackers to carry them through the day.
Running now to catch Mr. Arthur Kelly before he pulls away, I slow down and call for him to wait just long enough for me to retrieve pages of homework that had slipped out of my bag and scattered along the highway. Mr. Kelly gives me a sermon that could have been entitled, “Go to sleep early and wake up early.” That’s the cost of the ride, I decide, once he finally tells me to get in, and he drives the five miles into town. The main street through –Prentiss, State Highway 13, Columbia Avenue as it’s known locally, is lined with various shops and small businesses, drugstores, eateries, the –Piggly Wiggly, doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. Before we get to the main strip, he lets me out across from the Dairy King ice-cream shop.
It’s early, but already a hot summer day and not too soon for an ice cream cone. I walk up to the front window and place my order. Immediately, I am told I am at the “wrong” window.
“Can’t you see the sign?” The attendant jerks his thumb to the side window. As I back away, the large “White Only” sign glares down at me. I walk around to the side window, where a sign on the wall reads, “Colored.” Next to it, a large, metal drum used for garbage. It is not covered. A swarm of flies buzzes. I turn to leave the place, letting the flies feast undisturbed, and not waiting for my order to be filled.
So it was, my first, independent meeting with Jim Crow.
The agitated attendant’s attitude, as if I had taken something from him, had shocked me. I can still hear the loud command, “Move around to the side window.” I had stepped out of my “place.” From that day forward I began to hate all white people. Mother would quickly take care of that problem, though, by reminding me that my grandmother, who I knew little about, was white.
Of course, before the ice cream incident, I understood that there were rules that gave whites the advantage over blacks. Most weekends, I would go with my dad into some of the white-owned stores just outside Lucas, where we had to wait until the cashiers finished with all the white people before they took our money.
On this day, however, I had ventured into one of these establishments alone. Not seeing anyone waiting, I didn’t see anything wrong with walking up to place my order, almost tasting the cool, vanilla cream before I opened my mouth.
What I did not know was that, at that moment in time, white Southerners’ attitudes toward Negroes were hardening. It was September of 1954. School had only been open a few weeks, and the Supreme Court was holding hearings in Washington on its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, handed down four months earlier, which had found segregated schools inherently unequal.
The ruling came as an affront to the sanctity of family tradition for white Southerners. They had been raised to believe that the Negro race was impure, that separation of the races worked extremely well and interracial marriage would destroy a civilization. This was an alarm for changes to come.
If a number of black educators in Mississippi feared they would not fare well under integration, and thus were reluctant to embrace the landmark ruling, as some historians have noted, the black teachers of Jefferson Davis County were among the exceptions. Not only did my Aunt Mabel, my primary teacher in elementary school, support Brown v. Board of Education, she had traveled to Kansas to serve as a potential witness in the original case, though she was never called to the witness stand.
Mabel Armstrong was a fiery, heavy-set fat black woman who didn’t care what you thought of her. She always spoke up for what she thought was correct. Not the type to harbor selfish interests. Phyllis Norwood, a former high-school sweetheart of mine, worked as a teacher with her and remembers she could curse like a sailor.
The perceived threat to job security held by some black educators in the wake of the Brown decision may not have been far off the mark. In the early 1970s, when integration began to be implemented, Wade Sutton, a Lucas resident and one of four black teachers assigned to the formerly all-white Flora High School in Madison County, was fired for placing a copy of Johnson Publishing Company’s Jet magazine on a student reading table. Members of his family said it was a Jet magazine, although records of the State Sovereignty Commission state that he placed a book of poetry containing “foul and undesirable pornographic material” on the table.
In the early 1940s, there were plenty of small, one-room schools for blacks located in Jefferson Davis County. Most of them were in private cabins or churches. My first school experience was in one of these. However, many one-room schools were consolidated in the early 1950s. Lucas Elementary School, grades one through eight, was one of those multigrade schools with the potbellied stoves used for heat. The teachers would be the first to arrive at school. They would go out back, gather wood from the woodshed, and make fires in the stoves. After that, students maintained the stoves for the day. Partly because of this experience, I would later recognize the meaning of “separate but equal.”
The principal at Lucas Elementary was Professor Earnest –Lockhart, from the Mt. Olive community. He was also one of my teachers. A wonderful man. He came to the Lucas school after graduation from Jackson State College. He and his beautiful family lived near my family. Even in the early 1950s, he was a freedom fighter. Not only was he president of the Jefferson Davis County Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he also worked closely with Mississippi State Field Secretary Medgar Evers and President C. R. Darden. He participated in national NAACP conventions.
My first intense puppy-love relationship was with the professor’s daughter Eunice Lockhart. She was the most beautiful chocolate-looking girl I had ever seen. Her family was friends of ours. We had great times together, sneaking a kiss here and there. There was a trip to the Mississippi State Fair in Jackson that we traveled to on the local school bus. That 125-mile round trip wasn’t bad at all. Little did I know that would be the last time I would actually enjoy the back of the bus.
Not long afterward, the disturbing news came that Mississippi segregationists had found out about Eunice’s father participating in national and statewide meetings of the NAACP. Records of the Sovereignty Commission indicate that they began to watch him through the work of unnamed informants. They received word that he was passing out literature announcing an NAACP meeting. The state of Mississippi abruptly ended Professor Lockhart’s teaching career in the state. He made plans to move his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Since the family lived only five hundred yards from my house, Eunice walked over to notify me of their leaving on the day before their departure. That was one of the saddest days of my young life. For many years after that, I thought of Eunice. Her mother had been a really good cook at the Lucas school. Willie Armstrong, a cousin of mine, told me once that if he saw Mrs. Lockhart at school on a particular day, he knew he was going to eat well that afternoon. Well, Eunice moved away with her family.
On that unforgettable morning at the Dairy King, I had been on my way to classes at Prentiss Institute, one of only a handful of high schools for blacks in Mississippi. Walking the remaining mile there seemed to take forever.
When you entered that campus, you felt at home. You felt that the place was yours. You owned it. You were a part of making life better for all blacks, and that made you proud.
I had missed my history class. The instructor, Professor J. H. Armstrong, who was my cousin, was no longer available to discuss the Dairy King issue. That was not a problem, because he would stop by the house that night with a few shirts for Mother to iron. I would speak with him at that time, and when I did, he concluded that I should stay away from that place. No member of my family ever visited the Dairy King again.
High school was easy for me. I enjoyed learning and made good grades. I really didn’t need to study very hard, therefore, I failed to develop good study habits. I would pay a price for that later during my first semester in college.
Day-to-day activities at Prentiss Institute were of the black world. The town of Prentiss was of another. What mattered to people in one world generally did not in the other.
The picturesque town, with colorful storefronts and crepe myrtles lining the main thoroughfare, is the county seat. The courthouse (provincial, bright orange brick with white trim) is perched high on the north end of Columbia Avenue. Midway down the drive, the historic Bank of Prentiss stands tall and white with its high porch and Greek Revival pillars. Most of the residents of Prentiss are white. Blacks primarily reside out in the surrounding countryside, although some live in the area back of the business district, known as the Quarters.
On Saturdays, many blacks would come into Prentiss and congregate on a designated street corner on the main strip known as “Buzzard’s Roost,” a place comprised of boards nailed together to create wooden benches. It was kept clean Monday through Friday, when blacks were not allowed there. If “too many” blacks sat there during the week, the police would determine that they had better things to do. Saturday was Black Folks Day to sit on those benches. That street corner would be filled with garbage and trash because there was no pick up on Saturdays. It was a street corner where blacks congregated to discuss the next week’s farm work. Whites avoided that area on Saturdays like the plague.
The white farmers of Jefferson Davis County were the first in Mississippi to vote against beer after its legalization in 1933. With this same standard of morality five years later, they refused to sanction round dancing in the Community House that had been constructed with federal Works Progress Administration assistance.
The human behavior of avoidance borne of the culture of segregation was of particular interest to Professor Theodore Paige. He was an administrator at my high school, but everybody called him Professor. One Saturday afternoon, I ventured into town and noticed he was parked on the east side of the strip.
All of the parking on Columbia Avenue was on a 45-degree angle, facing the stores. When I approached him to offer a greeting, he invited me to sit in the car with him. After a few moments, he began to explain to me his reason for being there: He was “people watching.” His main concern was the interaction of whites and blacks as they approached each other on the sidewalk.
From his people-watching observations, he had concluded that black women (more than black men) took that extra step to avoid getting too close to whites as they passed. On the other hand, black men would speak with white men as they passed more often than black women would. However, his most amazing discovery was that black men did not speak to white women unless they were known to each other.
Professor Paige was serious about this study. He came prepared with his notes, notepads, and other material to document his visits to various small towns where he would observe this behavior.
He concluded that segregation was alive and well in the town of Prentiss. He had observed that whites joyfully displayed their sense of superiority as they sometimes waited for blacks to step off the sidewalks to allow them to pass. Black men realized the high pedestal on which white women were placed, and therefore they did not want to show any familiarity in public. To me, this was odd. I once heard an old white gentleman state: “An open door to (black) education leads to an open (white woman’s) bedroom door.” Truth be told, that door had been open for a long time.
You didn’t second-guess what the instructors said or did at Prentiss Institute, because they knew your mother and father. We were there to get a high-school education and learn a skill or a trade that we could use to become economically self-sufficient.
The founders, Jonas E. Johnson and his wife Bertha LaBranche Johnson, were deputies of Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of the power of education, industriousness, and self-reliance. Mrs. Johnson had studied under Washington at Tuskegee Institute. Mr. Johnson, a native of Mississippi, had graduated valedictorian from Alcorn State University, the first land-grant college in the nation, located in the southwestern-most corner of the state. Before settling in Prentiss, Johnson had established a school for blacks in Laurel.
The couple happened to be traveling through Jefferson Davis County when they first arrived with their three small children, and weren’t expecting to stay. Seeing it as virgin territory for educating blacks, they put down roots in 1907 and borrowed money to build a school on land once worked by slaves. They received a grant from the all-important Rosenwald fund, established by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, a Sears and Roebuck Company founder, who helped to build schools for blacks throughout the South. The grant had to be matched by the local community, which in most cases meant that whites also had to buy into the idea of a private school for blacks. Prentiss Institute was licensed as a high school in 1909, and as a junior college in 1932.
So that we could earn a living from the land, we were trained in the science of agriculture. I loved biology. I would choose it later as my major course of study in college, hoping to pursue a career in medicine. I wanted to outsmart the doctor who told me when I was fourteen that I would not live past age twenty-one, because of damage to my heart caused by a bout with rheumatic fever.
“Industrial” in the school’s name meant industrial arts, like carpentry, bricklaying, and learning to be a blacksmith or seamstress. “Normal” meant the liberal and fine arts. I learned to play the trombone there. On more than one occasion, I would practice at home by climbing on top of our barn in Lucas and treating the neighbors to free concerts.
Prentiss Institute attracted students from throughout the region and state. By the 1950s, it had grown to include 700 students, forty-plus teachers, and more than twenty buildings, a huge undertaking for the Johnsons in an era when blacks were expected to be subservient to whites.
After establishing the school, both of the Johnsons became influential all over the state. Mr. Johnson organized a statewide “Committee of One Hundred” (COH) in 1923. It was comprised of Mississippi’s top 100 advocates for the concerns of Negroes from each of the state’s eighty-two counties. Unknown to the masses, the group worked discreetly with white civic leaders to improve black communities. The Johnsons gave the Committee direction, and its strongest participation consistently came from the historically non-plantation areas south of Jackson.
Johnson and his Committee won over Mississippi state legislators by explaining that they were pushing for ways to stop the migration of blacks out of the area. Other white leaders followed.
Had he pressed with his fist, he would have faced a most certain death. Citing the work of the Committee in his definitive Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, historian Neil McMillen noted, “The organization’s patient behind-the-scenes pressure on the white establishment in the 1920s and 1930s helped prepare the way for the more spectacular breakthroughs of a subsequent age.”
Long before voter registration drives in the 1960s would enlist some of the poorest of the poor, black Mississippians had known voting. In 1868, there were 86,973 blacks registered; that was 96.7 percent of the total number eligible.
That number began to drop significantly twenty years later with the onset of Jim Crow, and by the 1950s stood at less than 6 percent. Apparently, the obstacles Negroes faced in merely attempting to register to vote had become so overwhelming, most were no longer willing to pay the price.
The Supreme Court’s finding of inequality in segregated schools in 1954 energized black voter registration campaigns in the state, which up until then had focused on the small, black middle class in cities. Now, the main leader of the campaigns, the NAACP, moved into rural areas.
At the same time, the White Citizen’s Council, vowing to prevent any semblance of integration, was appealing to the white middle class in towns and villages in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Following in footsteps made by their parents’ generation, which had instituted Jim Crow laws, the legislature added more restrictions to voter registration in 1954, requiring applicants to write a “reasonable” interpretation of a section of the state constitution.
As a young boy, I learned through family discussions that if more blacks demanded their right to vote, things could change in Mississippi. Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry, the state’s NAACP leaders, knew this, and acted upon that premise. It was their example that would later move me to begin to question my freedom, to ponder the measure of man I would seek to become.
In 1955, the number of black Mississippians registered to vote was 21,502, about 4 percent of the voting age population. White registered voters totaled 423,456, or 59.6 percent of those eligible.
If the percentage of black voters wasn’t paltry enough, the next year, huge numbers of them were suddenly and arbitrarily stricken from the rolls in several counties. That was two years after the Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling in 1956, the same year in which the Mississippi legislature established the State Sovereignty Commission. Historian John Dittmer has described the agency as a secret police force that operated like a small-time FBI, placing informants and spies in civil-rights groups to thwart their efforts, and owing its allegiance to the White Citizens’ Council. The Commission was very much at work in the late 1950s, although most people did not know it existed.
The total number of blacks registered in Jefferson Davis County was 1,221 before the rolls were purged in 1956; afterward, that number decreased to 50.
To the more than 1,000 Negroes who were disenfranchised, county Circuit Clerk James W. Daniels offered a useless explanation: “No one here has been refused the right to vote because of race or color. They have been refused because they have failed to qualify under the laws of Mississippi.”
I am forever bound to Jefferson Davis County, if not for being born there, then for the actions of Circuit Clerk Daniel. It was essentially his actions that year that would later order my steps into the movement.
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission records made public in 1998, more than forty years later, revealed that its investigators were in communication with Jefferson Davis County officials in 1956, and suspected names of NAACP members were removed from the voter rolls by Circuit Clerk Daniel.
According to the declassified records, Daniel had received a stolen NAACP “Minute Book” from unnamed informants, and he spied upon the general community. Of course, the Commission was passing that information along to the White Citizens’ Council.
Daniel and the sheriff of Jefferson Davis County, Shelby Mikell, as well as other unnamed informants, gave the Sovereignty Commission various reports about the “racial situation” in the county. In one documented exchange, Daniel and Mikell told an investigator that the NAACP was operating underground in Prentiss. In another, they stated that they suspected Prentiss Institute of being a “hotbed” of NAACP activity. The Johnson’s son, A. L., who was being groomed to take over the school’s operation, was suspected of being involved, thereby minimizing his parents’ accomodationist approach to race relations.
In addition to local officials and the unnamed informants, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was supplying information to the Sovereignty Commission about race relations in Jefferson Davis County.
One year later, Aaron Henry, the state president of the NAACP, launched a statewide registration drive to counter the precipitous drop in registered black voters. Classes were conducted to teach blacks more about the state constitution in an attempt to get larger numbers to register. Henry wanted to register 100,000 black voters in the state, the catastrophic number estimated to have been purged the previous year.
State law provided that any citizen could register at any time during the year, and the NAACP encouraged Negroes to register with regularity. However, due to the stringent qualification law, it was still difficult for blacks to register in certain areas.
Rev. H. D. Darby was one of the Negro voters who had been dropped from the rolls in Jefferson Davis County. He had moved his family to Prentiss from Laurel some ten years earlier to give his children a high-school education. The family lived in a farmhouse on the campus of Prentiss Institute. Five of the children became students there.
Darby made at least four attempts to re-register to vote in 1957, but each time the circuit clerk would not permit him. Others who had been previously disqualified also returned, and were met with the same results. That year, Darby became actively involved in the Jefferson Davis County NAACP.
He had lived through having his reputation smeared by local whites. A minister by profession, he also sold cosmetics, and was accused of being a ladies’ man.
Fed up with all the mockery and intimidation, Darby filed a federal lawsuit in March of 1958, challenging, for the first time in the history of the state of Mississippi, the rigid restrictions on blacks who attempted to register to vote. With the assistance of the NAACP legal department, Darby sought to have such rules declared unconstitutional. It was the first lawsuit of its kind to be filed under federal provisions of the civil rights law passed by Congress in 1957.
The NAACP had offered to help Negroes anywhere in Mississippi sue for violation of their voting rights. After Darby responded to the call in Jefferson Davis County, he was celebrated as Man of the Year at a state meeting of the NAACP in Clarksdale.
The public hearing of Darby’s voting case was carried out in the courtroom of the federal building in Jackson. Negroes from throughout Mississippi sat there in rapt attention. Constance Baker Motley, of New York City, and R. Jess Brown, of Jackson, were attorneys for the plaintiff. The decision of the three-judge panel, presided over by federal judge Ben Cameron of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, rendered a negative decision that left Mississippi’s stringent law intact. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund declined to appeal to the Supreme Court and indicated that the case would be turned over to the Civil Rights Commission instead.
Having witnessed basic rights of citizenship being taken away from members of my family, teachers, and others I knew, coupled with the anger of being cut down to size just when I was beginning to notice myself within the world around me, reinforced in my young mind the cruelty of segregation, bias, and hate.
That this was considered normal, increasingly struck me as inhumane. White citizens marched proudly to their “whites only” water fountains, restaurants, schools, and churches. Blacks moved to a different beat, were usually in poor health, undereducated, and were eligible for few, if any, choices to support themselves other than working for meager earnings. This “normalcy” was never full of anything but inequity.
The situation was affecting how people lived in and around Lucas. Most of our residents were very poor. Some could not secure loans to continue their farming operations. It wasn’t too difficult for them to make the decision to leave the state in search of higher-paying jobs in the industrial north. The knowledge of all these things instilled in me the burning fire of “change.” We could not wait for a new organization or new directions. We were mandated by fate to use the tools that we had and make them more aggressive. We needed to fortify our dedication and loyalty to the cause. We needed a new way of fighting racism.
All of this remained heavy on my mind.