Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II

Epilogue: I Have Not Ended the Story For There Is No End: Continuing Histories of Clarksdale’s Black Freedom Struggle

244 EPILOGUE  I Have Not Ended the Story For There Is No End CONTINUING HISTORIES OF CLARKSDALE’S BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice.—Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) Despite the symbolic gestures of fairness, decency and respect [that we are only beginning] to practice in the American South, the quality of life [in the Mississippi Delta] . . . is still compromised by our racial preoccupation. It is not sufficient merely to listen and report, but we must think of doing something that will . . . finally . . . resolve what seems to be a historical and endless problem in this country.—Jerry Ward, chairperson, Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1997) There will always be a civil rights movement in America. If you didn’t fight the last time, you can fight now, because the battle rages and we need warriors.—Nelson Rivers III (2003) The school day began at 6 A.M. The dusty yellow school bus would start its long journey from the Lyon subdivision where I lived for a year out in the county, surrounded by cotton fields. With my Sony Walkman clamped to my ears, I would climb on that bus before 7 A.M. and stare out of the window as it chugged around the fields, picking up children from what could only be termed shacks. Our destination, Coahoma County High School, right on the EPILOGUE [245] town line (and at one time the consolidated school, built in the fifties in an effort to avoid integration), was about a forty-five-minute meander away. As the crow flies, it would take only ten to fifteen minutes to get to school, but my stop was the first on the route, so every morning I got to see those places where “progress” had passed on by. Even with indoor plumbing and electricity, most of these houses from the outside resembled the thirties WPA photographs of the Delta.  Walking into Coahoma County High School in 1991 shocked me. It was not the America I thought I knew from my childhood visits to the Northeast. I had expected the rural landscape, and I anticipated the flat fields of cotton and the accents different from my own, but I did not foresee the stark inequalities marked by race. I was not very conscious of racism in my childhood, in part because of my parents’ vigilant protection from the ugliness that they had experienced (I know that now). But parents in Mississippi could not protect their children from the harsh realities. The school, desegregated by court order in 1970, was practically all black. In the graduating class of 1992 of about seventy students, perhaps five were white. On that long school bus ride every morning, we sped by the pristine campus of Lee Academy, where most white students sat at their desks. I had not expected this—I had not read about this in my world history class. At Coahoma County High School, I learned about race in America very quickly—trial by fire—and I faced my own personal crossroads. Yet my Mississippi history class planted the seed that has produced this book.The teacher, a perfectly decent young white man, taught solely from the textbook without deviation or pause. The War of Aggression and the Lost Cause elicited not a flicker of discomfort as he stood before African American students. Beyond a brief mention of Martin Luther King Jr., it was as if the postwar black freedom struggle had never come to Mississippi, and there was no acknowledgment of the famous local, Aaron Henry, who represented the district in the Mississippi legislature at the time. Black Mississippi history pooled around the few acceptable characters, mostly artists or inventors but none with any political chops. Even with my scarce knowledge of the state’s history, I saw the bias and was irked. Now, decades later, with research to draw from, I empathize with those students in 1973 who protested and got expelled for trying to change the curriculum to reflect their histories. Fast-forward to the end of the decade. In July 1999, President William Jeffer- [246] EPILOGUE son Clinton gathered an entourage that included the secretaries of transportation and labor and agriculture, the small business administrator, and the undersecretary of the treasury, and left Washington, D.C. Billed as an “antipoverty” investigation, the name of the...