BEING PART OF THE struggle in the early days was somewhat different from the days after the Freedom Rides, when the movement gained greater momentum around the country. There was no national media coverage. While we were breaking the laws and customs of the South, we were viewed as troublemakers, if not criminals. It required “gut-wrenching courage,” but we gladly participated in the picket lines and marches. We were there because we felt we had to be there.
Students at Tougaloo were somewhat isolated from the early visible action. I was relegated to voter registration and department-store protests. I was trying not to get arrested so I wouldn’t cause Medgar any problems with the NAACP. The first activity to gain national attention was in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the first lunch counter sit-in at a Woolworth’s department store, on February 1, 1960. Tougaloo students did not stage a sit-in until thirteen months later, in March of 1961. You may ponder why this was the case. My own determination is that it was because of a lack of aggressive leadership.
While various actions had been playing out for some time in Mississippi, they began to intensify after a group of Tougaloo students staged the first public demonstration.
On the morning of March 27, 1961, the “Tougaloo Nine,” as they came to be known, stopped at the Carver Library, an all-black library, to request books they knew would be unavailable there. They then proceeded to the main library branch on State Street, where they looked through the card catalog, took books off the shelves, and sat at tables and read. When the police arrived, they ordered the students to the “black library.” When the students refused to leave, they were arrested and held for more than thirty-two hours.
The names of the Tougaloo Nine were Ethel Sawyer, Meredith Anding, Jr., James Sam Bradford, Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Lassiter, and Evelyn Pierce.
In later years, Ethel Sawyer and I corresponded, and she reflected on the experience: “The Tougaloo Nine struck a major blow to the prevailing attitudes held by European Americans in the state of Mississippi that all were in agreement on the appropriate “place” of African Americans. The blow sent shock waves throughout Mississippi’s collective and individual systems. When the nine Tougaloo College students walked into the Jackson Municipal Library on March 27, 1961, in what is referred to as Mississippi’s first sit-in demonstration, the state of Mississippi would never again be the same.”
The arrests of the Tougaloo Nine prompted students at Jackson State College, the larger, local black college funded by the state, to organize a public vigil. Joyce and Dorie Ladner were among students expelled for participating in the demonstration. Administrators at their school would not condone anything that might be construed as a challenge to the laws of the state, in the interests of its standing with the government of Mississippi.
The sisters transferred to Tougaloo, and joined our “band of brothers,” as Dorie liked to refer to our group of freedom demonstrators. Often, when speaking with Joyce, I got the impression that their reason for choosing Tougaloo was because of its involvement in the struggle. Many of us at Tougaloo wanted to be a part of that library sit-in, and after it happened, the school’s chaplain, Edwin King, a young white Episcopal minister, and Medgar Evers became less restrained in their leadership, allowing our demonstrations to pick up momentum. They called for action, and more students in addition to those who had already been involved in protests responded—ready, willing, and able to work to finish the job.
The start of the student sit-ins alerted the rest of the nation to the growing resistance to segregation in the South. The sit-ins attracted the interest of professionals and students in education, politics, law, and religion, who would travel South to get involved.
Out of Harlem, New York, came Bob Moses, a talented mathematician, teacher, and graduate student of philosophy at Harvard University. His goal was to take the life out of segregation in the Deep South by going for its heart. He went to Atlanta first to work with SNCC, but Ella Baker and others there convinced him that to accomplish his task, he needed to organize the grassroots—the small farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers in Mississippi.
Moses made the trip to Jackson, where he met Medgar, who sent him to work with Amzie Moore, an NAACP organizer in the Delta. The largest numbers of black Mississippians lived in that section because economic opportunity was richest, but the exploitation of blacks was so egregious that they were forced to live in third world conditions.
Moore convinced Moses that the key to breaking the grip of segregation would be the vote. Moses found a typewriter and hammered out a voter registration project that won SNCC’s approval. He started in the Delta, but eventually moved his base of operation to McComb, where he worked with local movement leader Curtis Bryant. There he opened a Freedom School, teaching the state constitution and mobilizing blacks to get registered.
On the occasional weekend at Tougaloo, when I took the bus home to Prentiss, which was about thirty miles southeast, I had to make a choice: Either ride at the front of the bus and risk getting arrested, or ride at the back. At first, I sat in the back with the rest of our folk. But the freedom movement had been enlightening. I knew that I didn’t have to accept second best, and other Negroes weren’t putting up with it, either. Medgar had instructed me not to get arrested unless it was sanctioned by the NAACP; however, I was determined to not sit at the back of any bus.
This created a dilemma. How could I exercise my part in the movement while not getting arrested? First, I would always try to be one of the first ones on the bus; if the third seat from the front was available, I would sit there. Sometimes, the driver would insist that I “move to the rear of the bus.” When that happened, I would sit as close as possible to the front, behind the cloth curtain that separated the blacks from the whites. The curtain was hanging on a rail and you could move it. When the driver wasn’t looking, I’d move the curtain forward one seat and then move myself up.
Most of the time, the driver was the same person on that route, and he didn’t care where I sat. It was when a white person was on board the bus and saw me sitting up front that the driver would demand I move. At that point, if I didn’t move, he would call the police. Never once did another black come to my aid during the times I decided to oppose being moved to the rear. Once, a small, elderly black lady spoke up and said, “Son, we don’t want no trouble, just come on back here, and sit with us.”
Before I moved away from Lucas to go to college, I would often question my mother about the Emmett Till murder. All she would say was, “We have to make things better.”
Her statement was not the reason I had now joined the movement, but it became my leaning post.
Many people doubted what I was trying to do. Some thought that I was being silly and foolish, or even crazy. Nonviolent resistance was not on their agenda. However, it took little persuasion to get them to realize that something needed to be done to improve our living conditions.
You must understand that Southern segregationists truly believed that black Mississippians were happy. My goal was to somehow show them that their assessment of “black Mississippi life” was beyond unreasonable. Lord, just let me live long enough.
In the struggle for freedom in Mississippi, Tougaloo College was the mother that rocked the cradle. Any and all steps toward justice in the Magnolia State can be attributed in part, if not fully, to Tougaloo students and staff such as Chaplain Ed King. He worked with the NAACP to organize students for demonstrations, including the first public sit-in, driving civic activism in the state to a new level.
Tougaloo was a special place. It nurtured the inquisitiveness of one’s soul. The faculty had the difficult task of instilling the college’s philosophy of the independence needed to function in a segregated society into the minds of poor, undereducated black students. We learned that “now” was the time to affect change.
Tougaloo was a beacon shining on all dark corners of a segregated Mississippi, and it was that light that was used by many of the foot soldiers to courageously navigate the dangerous roadways of hatred. While sitting on the grass under the old moss-draped oak trees on campus, planning the next protest with other schoolmates, we felt that we could change the world.
Tougaloo Eagle Queen
TOUGALOO, EAGLE QUEEN, WE LOVE THEE,
MOTHER EAGLE, STIR THY NEST.
ROUT THINE EAGLETS TO THE BREEZES,
THEY ENJOY THE TEST.
That verse of my Alma Mater almost always brings me to tears. It has more and more meaning to me as time goes on.
We always had special guests to visit the campus. One of them I remember well—Bob Zimmerman, better known today as Bob Dylan.
Below is an e-mail message that I sent to a few movement friends after seeing Bob’s 2005 film, No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:09 AM Subject: Bob Dylan—No Direction Home—Film
Hello Dorie, Joan, and Joyce:
I must say that I have a different perspective of Bob Dylan now than what I had of him during our conversations in Mississippi in 1960. At that time, I thought that Dylan showed empathy for the civil rights movement. He saw the emotion. He expressed the understanding. He had the ability to come to the civil rights scene, digest it, and put together some of the greatest “protest” songs ever. His way of manipulating words got your attention. His “story,” even though he may say that there wasn’t one, changed one’s way of thinking. I know that he was in “constant movement” within his music. Even Joan Baez could not slow his musical movement or change his direction. He had a musical mission. Bob had something to say, and he said it in a way that others wanted to but couldn’t.
Bob always had the ability to bounce back. He could show us that there was still something left in him. The material was great. Bob is an icon. Bob’s demeanor in the last segment of the movie (just before his accident in real life), indicates that a type of demise was taking shape. Yet, I think he overcame it.
There was a kind of mystique about Bob. His guard was mostly up at all times. He did not want you inside his head. If you inquired of Bob “who are you?” Bob would want to know why you are asking such a question. To him, it was as if you were indicating that he was more than who “Bob Dylan” was. He did, however, spend a few days in the Mississippi Delta visiting one of the Freedom schools. The school students really enjoyed those music sessions.
Upon viewing the film No Direction Home, I see that Bob had no empathy for the movement. He had absolutely no control over what direction he or his music took. He was destined to write and sing the songs that he sang, but he never wished to try to change the world with his music. He just wanted to sing. Home, unknowingly to Bob, was in his music. There is no direction to the present. Similarly, he will forever seek a new home. When he reaches his new home, those of us left will continue to marvel at his journey. I salute Bob Dylan.
Thomas
As I stated above, “He had the ability to come to the civil rights scene, digest it and put together some of the greatest ‘protest’ songs ever.” He would tell you that he didn’t write “protest songs.” He would tell you that he was not a “folk singer.” As he stated in 1965 in a Time magazine interview, “I don’t have anything to say about the things I write. I just write them. There is no great message.”
Many of us who met Bob Dylan in the South thought that he might one day become a spokesman for the movement. We were wrong. He was not, in our sense of the word, a freedom fighter. Bob was a poet: a great poet.
Yet, ask yourself this question: Why did Bob Dylan teach a music class in the Ruleville, Mississippi Freedom School in 1964? Of this freedom school highlight, Margaret Block (freedom fighter), stated that, “It was so cute, how he would gather the children around him and then play the guitar and sing with them.” (Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited) That’s the Bob Dylan we knew in 1960.
One beautiful night in April 1964, in Tougaloo’s Woodworth Chapel, Joan Baez drew what was at that time the largest completely integrated audience ever in the history of Mississippi. Because of the efforts of Tougaloo chaplains John Mangum and Ed King, the chapel can be considered the place of origin of Mississippi’s civil rights movement, along with the Masonic Temple, where Medgar had his office.
During the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s, speakers and entertainers who performed in the chapel included such icons as Ralph Bunche, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin,
Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry Belafonte, Leontyne Price, Frank Sinatra, Andrew Young, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Jr., James Forman, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Jr., Burt Lancaster, Dick Gregory, Joan Baez, and many others.
The L. Zenobia Coleman Library at Tougaloo maintains a vast collection of documents, tapes, and artifacts related to the movement, along with the personal papers of many Mississippi activists. Notable alumni of the college include Walter Turnbull, the founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem.