This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Fight

17. We Shall Remember Them

17 We Shall Remember Them At the rising of the sun and at its going down, We remember them. At the blowing of the wind and the chill of winter, We remember them. When we are weary and in need of strength, We remember them. . . . As long as we live, they too will live; for they are now a part of us, as we remember them. Traditional prayer said at graveside by Reform Jews After the Voting Rights Act became law on August 6, 1965, we imagined that things would improve dramatically for Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans through­ out the South. We left thinking that the battle had been won, or at least that the free­ dom fighters were on the road to victory. National media informed us that progress was slow, but I was ignorant of the ongoing terrorism, lost jobs and stolen land, and even murder of activists that continued in Wilcox County. Movement teachers were fired from their decent paying school positions and blacklisted from other jobs. Tenant farmers lost their homes as well as their income from farming. As I continued talking with folks, I learned how deeply people were scarred by the continued backlash they suffered due to their own and their parents’ work in the movement. Some former student protesters bear permanent physical and emotional scars. A few who live in the county still feel so unsafe in their own community that they requested anonymity. Others moved away and cannot bear to return, even to visit family or to attend school reunions. Interestingly, activists over sixty-­ five years old tended to have a more optimistic view of both the past and the present than most of those who were younger than I am. In Memory of Major Johns One of the leaders who inspired optimism in others was our beloved SCLC field director Major Johns. I never got to tell him how much he taught me about courage and discipline. Born and raised in Plaquemines, Louisiana, Rev. Major Johns was instrumental in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi , Ala­bama, and Louisiana for at least a decade, yet he is scarcely mentioned in books written to date. It was difficult to find people who knew We Shall Remember Them / 211 him personally, although his importance as a student civil rights leader in Baton Rouge has been documented in the global nonviolent database at Swarthmore University.1 In 1960, five years before we met him in Camden,­Major Johns was arrested along with other South­ern University students for­ sitting-­ in at a Kress lunch counter in Baton Rouge as part of a multistate Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) integration drive. When they got out of jail, Major Johns and two classmates stood on a school bus while he made a rousing speech.2 He and other CORE members organized a march of more than three thousand South­ ern University students to the state capitol to protest segregation and the arrests of students participating in sit-­ ins at segregated drugstore soda fountains and bus terminals. All of the arrested student leaders were expelled from South­ ern University and barred from all pub­ lic colleges and universities in the state. In 2004, long after Major’s death, the student civil rights workers were awarded honorary degrees and the state legislature passed a resolution in their honor, sadly Major Johns did not live to see that day.3 Jesse Smith, who had shown Luke and me around Lower Peachtree in 1965, remembers Major spending time at his home and at his father Rev. Smith’s church. “Major Johns, once in while he would talk about the black history of America—Crispus Attucks and all that. He was so inspiring. He’d quote from the Constitution about the right of the people to form or abolish this kind of government. There was so much power in his words; that man could speak!”4 From others, I heard that Major became an ordained minister after his time in the movement. He was always a man of great faith and he was able to graduate from Louisiana State University as well at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary where he received master of divinity in 1979. Johns died in Baton Rouge at age forty-­ six, from a brain aneurism, while working at a school for troubled boys in New Orleans. Major Johns had a big heart and really understood young people. Although Major Johns didn’t live to receive his...