Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

we who believe in freedom

294 we who believe in freedom Connie Curry On a winter day in 1990, Mae Bertha Carter and Winson Hudson, both from Mississippi, were visiting me in Charlottesville, Virginia. They were to speak that morning at the University of Virginia in Julian Bond’s class on the civil rights movement. I was there with a year’s post-doctoral fellowship at the Carter Woodson Institute, working, in fact, to document the story of Mae Bertha Carter. Earlier in the year, I had met Maxwell Kennedy, the youngest son of Robert Kennedy, who was in law school at the university, and I had invited him to meet Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Hudson. They were so excited. As with many black people in rural Mississippi, they saw in the 1960s, in both John and Robert Kennedy, the beginnings of recognition of and caring about the blatant racism they faced on a daily basis. Just before Max Kennedy came, the two women disappeared in the back of the house. Max arrived and was sitting on the couch, and the two women came in. Embraces and introductions were exchanged, and then Mae Bertha and Winson sat down side by side on straight-back chairs—tiny, light-skinned, blue-eyed, 68-year-old Mae Bertha, and 74-year old tall, erect, strong-featured Winson Hudson—both from the back roads of Mississippi. They took out small pieces of paper and began to sing in clear, sure voices, the 1960s song, “Abraham, Martin and John.” They changed the last verse to: Has anyone here seen my old friend Bobby? Can you tell me where he’s gone? I thought I saw him walkin’ up over the hill With Abraham, Martin and John. Well, Max cried, I cried—we all cried, and I met Julian at his car, and told him what was happening inside, and he cried. I never dreamed that 12 years later, I would have completed books telling the stories of the lives of those two incredible women. * * * crossing borders 295 In 1964, I went to work for the American Friends Service Committee, as their Southern Field Representative. Beginning in 1960, I had been on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc)— the first white woman in those early years of sncc—and afcc wanted someone who knew the South and had worked with movement people. They were anxious to help implement Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mandating local school districts to come up with a school desegregation plan or risk losing federal funding for their schools. This would have been devastating for most rural schools, and the plan that many of them drafted was called “freedom of choice.” It entailed informing all parents that they could select whatever school they wanted their child to attend in the district. A good plan on the surface, it was a snare and a delusion for the black families caught in the peonage of the sharecropping system. Nonetheless, in Sunflower County, on a cotton plantation in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, Matthew and Mae Bertha made the decision in 1965 to send seven of their school-age children to the previously all-white schools in Drew, a small town nearby. The Carters had thirteen children in all, and the first five who attended the shamefully inadequate “colored” schools had left the Delta as soon as they graduated. Matthew and Mae Bertha never hesitated in the choice to get their remaining children a better education. The afcc office was alerted to the ensuing intimidation and harassment that followed this choice, and I first went to visit the family in January of 1966. The previous fall, their house had been shot into, credit had been cut off, their crops were plowed under, they were being evicted, and their children were suffering terrible treatment from both teachers and students. On that first visit, when I asked why they had made this choice, in light of the consequences for the whole family, Mae Bertha in her eloquence told how she was tired of the worn-out school books coming from the white schools and the raggedy school buses also handed down and black teachers who had no degrees. And when I asked Matthew the question about the “freedom” of choice, hands gently folded in his lap, he looked me right in the eye and said, ”We thought they meant it.” Certainly a tragic revelation of U.S. history that, in spite of a hundred...