Phillip Martin
Like the Lumbees, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws met with frustration when they attempted to organize under the Indian Reorganization Act. Unlike the Lumbees, however, they eventually succeeded in gaining recognition in 1945. But the challenges they faced were far from over. Whites typically defined Choctaws as “colored,” and the latter found themselves, along with African Americans, on the wrong side of the color line. Place, shared language, kinship ties, churches, and social gatherings helped communities endure in Mississippi as in North Carolina. By 1960, however, as this letter from Chairman Phillip Martin (1926–2010) to Interior Secretary Fred Seaton attests, the Mississippi Choctaws had had enough of racism and discrimination and pressed the government to take action. In so doing, Martin deployed concepts familiar to the black freedom struggle, such as equality, citizenship, segregation, integration, discrimination, and civil rights. But did he invest them with the same meanings? Consider whether the present state of the Mississippi Band affirms or qualifies the solutions he proposed. What does this tell us about continuity and change in regard to his conception of integration and nationhood?17
Dear Secretary Seaton:
The Business Committee of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has authorized me to appeal to you as the highest official in the United States concerned with Indian people. This is not our first appeal to your Department to help us win recognition of our equality as citizens of Mississippi and America. We have appealed to our Superintendent, our Area Director, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and other Washington officials of the Bureau, and your former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Roger Ernst. As I said, this is not our first appeal, but it is our last appeal to the Interior Department to help us before we try to help ourselves by action in the courts.
The situation which we have endured too long and can no longer endure is this. We 3,000 Mississippi Choctaws live in three counties side by side with white people who discriminate against us because of our color. They will not let our children attend the public schools. They will not let us eat in the restaurants they patronize. They force us to use segregated restrooms. The hearts of our old people grow heavier every day, because they hoped for a change in their lifetime.
The Bureau, from our Agency straight up to Washington, says, “there is no future for your people in Mississippi. Send your children to Oklahoma to school. Relocate.”18 Some of our people will send their children far away to school. Some will relocate in the big northern cities, looking for equality in a slum. But most of the 3,000 will remain and multiply. History and statistics show that the Mississippi Choctaws are not going anywhere. We did not go when the other Choctaws allowed themselves to be herded out of their homeland into Oklahoma. The numbers that relocate will never keep pace with the numbers that come home again, and the numbers that are born. For better or for worse, nothing will drive the Mississippi Choctaws from the place where they are. Nothing will drive our people away, but the shame of our people’s condition has driven us, their elected Council, to desperation.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs and we Choctaws agree that our situation is tragic and no self-respecting human beings should be expected to go on living in it. Our agreement ends there. Our Choctaw goal is to change the situation. The Bureau’s goal for the Choctaws is for us to remain away from it. We do not think the Bureau of Indian Affairs should be allowed to substitute their goal for ours. That is termination against our will, the policy you said should not be forced on any tribe.19
The Bureau in Washington, the Area office and our Agency, gives these excuses for substituting their goal of termination for our goal of integration. They say that the Supreme Court decision on segregation antagonized the Southern whites so much that the Choctaws’ chance for assimilation was set back one hundred years. For a reason I shall explain, the Bureau never worked wholeheartedly for our assimilation in the past, and there is no real difference now that they are not working for it at all.
Before I explain why the Bureau tries to make us run away when we want to stand, I should say that we Mississippi Choctaws think Relocation is a generous answer to the problems of some of our people, even though it will never answer the problem of the tribe, and our Relocation Officer is a trustworthy man. I should also say that the Reservation Superintendent in charge of our Indian schools is a capable, understanding administrator, and a few other members of our Agency staff are as friendly as they dare to be with their jobs at stake. Further I should say that our Superintendent is cooperating with the Washington Office and our Business Committee to bring in industry to our area to make employment for Choctaws. (The demand for this industry came from the Business Committee, and the funds to attract it are Choctaw funds.) I have mentioned these satisfactory things here, because I do not want the Bureau to refer to them later as proof that our situation is better than we say. Each one of these things is excellent by itself, but does nothing to end the racial segregation that makes the good things of life like ashes to us.
Now I shall explain why I said the Bureau never worked whole-heartedly with us to change our situation and never will unless an official as high as you orders them to or we go to the courts. I do not like to state the reason, because it concerns our Superintendent and members of the Agency staff, and we are sorry to make these people suffer. They are average human beings, timid but not bad, and it is pitiful that their fate put them in a job they do not have enough courage to do. These unhappy people have the power to tell their superiors in Washington that equality for our people is impossible, and the power to make it impossible. We call them unhappy people because they themselves believe in and practice the racial segregation it is their duty to combat as representatives of the Government of the United States. They are part of the situation which must be changed, and may God help them, for juster Mississippians than they are, and the situation will be changed.
Several months ago a tribal delegation went to Washington. Our Area Director and Superintendent accompanied us, and stayed with us closely, and we had to ask the Association on American Indian Affairs to arrange a private appointment with your former Assistant Secretary. We told him, in front of Mr. Newton Edwards of your Department and Miss LaVerne Madigan of the Association, everything I have told you in this letter.20 We told him that our people’s goal is gradual assimilation, a goal the Bureau in Washington recommends for all Indians. We told him the Bureau’s plan of Relocation as the only answer to discrimination against Choctaws is unacceptable to us. We said we want the Bureau to adopt a policy that will make it mandatory for our Agency to help us work out and carry out a long-range race-relations program. We said we wanted this program to start immediately with honest cooperation to help us place our best high school students in Mississippi public high schools that will accept them, and place our first-grade students in the public schools of the counties where we live. We said that we were officially requesting a new Superintendent who would be capable of carrying out this program and would want to carry it out.
Mr. Ernst gave us his solemn word that our problem would be worked out, and he asked us to be patient while this was being done. Then and again after our conference Miss Madigan urged us to wait quietly, because promises to Indians have been kept since you became Secretary of the Interior. . . . Recently we invited her to visit us in Mississippi, and when she came we told her to tell the Department that another school-opening was over and our children were still segregated and our Superintendent was still saying nothing could be done, and we can not wait any longer for the help we have a right to expect from our own Federal government. Miss Madigan telephoned from New York a few days later and told us that Mr. Ernst is no longer with the Department.
We asked if the Association would help us when we take court action. Miss Madigan said the organization could not refuse that request, but she asked us not to make it until she has a chance to talk to you about this and other Indian problems she knows you would want to solve. We agreed to delay our request that long.
We hope that you will read this letter before you talk to Miss Madigan. It is not that we do not trust her and Mr. Newton Edwards to report truthfully on our situation. It is that we want it on record that we spoke out as Choctaws.