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Introduction: The Black Freedom Struggle at the Crossroads
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Chapter
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1 INTRODUCTION The Black Freedom Struggle at the Crossroads Ours is a hell of a story, but freedom is worth every adversity. —Aaron Henry (1963) Every significant change that came about in the civil rights movement is linked to Mississippi. You should be proud to say you’re a black Mississippian. —Nelson Rivers III (2003) The claim to fame for Clarksdale, Mississippi, is as the home of the blues. In the first half of the twentieth century, many men, and a few women, gathered there to develop the blues as a musical form and consume it with pleasure. W. C. Handy, Gus Cannon, Charley Patton, Son House, John Lee Hooker, Jack Johnson, Frank Frost, Bessie Smith, Ike Turner, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson, among others, carved their mark on the local and national music scene in Clarksdale.1 Today, the most famous landmark, the Crossroads—where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery over his music—is proudly demarcated by a decorative pointer of four guitars, with each neck pointing toward the geographical compass points: north and south along Highway 61 (now 161); east and west on Route 49. Yet Clarksdale’s African American history resonates much deeper than the musical melodies emanating from juke joints and the fields. The fact that the blues, a musical form documenting hard life and harder knocks, found a fertile home here speaks to the stories of struggle and survival on the ground where it matured. A fuller history of African Americans in Clarksdale illustrates how a community organizing during the mass civil rights movement found, chose, or ap- [2] INTRODUCTION propriated opportunities in order to survive. These (real, rather than legendary ) crossroads existed on various planes—across time and place and within personal (and sometimes communal) lives. This metaphor, which Johnson’s lonely meeting conjures, helps us remember the uncertainty in the choices, opportunities, and decisions that black people made as they worked for better futures, highlighting agency and strategic organization over declension and defeat . Crossroads at Clarksdale chronicles the black freedom struggle in Clarksdale , Mississippi, from 1951 to the mid-1970s. The narrative, however, spills backward into the 1940s and forward to the turn of the twenty-first century. At the national level, while mass movement strategies forced the enactment of desegregation laws and case decisions and took down major barriers to equal economic opportunities, the reality of life for most African Americans did not change dramatically. Risky choices led to relatively slow change at the local level, with steady battles for gains, at times in tiny incremental steps. The larger national portrait of the mass civil rights movement leaves out this local story and the personal narratives and drama that permitted the everyday push for a more just society. This partially explains the indifference to the past in today’s Clarksdale. During my stay there as an exchange student at Coahoma County High School in the early 1990s, in a school that was easily 90 percent African American, hardly any black history was taught, nothing beyond specific leaders and inventors. Once in graduate school and specializing in African American history, the one book I found on Clarksdale’s history, written in 1982 and published by the city’s Carnegie Library, did not reflect history as African Americans remembered it. Rather it showed an unrealistic and sanitized version of social harmony and the blues.2 The youth of Clarksdale , starting with my peers, knew nothing of the history, the struggle, and the sacrifices made by their neighbors and relatives.This book recovers for the first time those forgotten or discarded memories. Looking at one place provides a window for analyzing the complexity of movements even within the locales. It complicates our understanding of a mass movement, or, more accurately, a mass of movements throughout the nation, each peculiar to its locale and population. This portrait uses Clarksdale as its canvas.3 By keeping this study local, the project conducts a crossorganizational comparison through time, showcasing Clarksdale’s residents and the triumphs and tragedies that occurred there as they arrived at various crossroads. These accumulative stories about the sustained push for substantive change during the mass civil rights movements are a continuation of the [18.215.15.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:49 GMT) INTRODUCTION [3] black freedom struggle, one that is unique to the history of African Americans carrying the legacy of slavery. Themes around organizing, victories, persistent problems, and the nature...