Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

1963

1963 One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. John F. Kennedy, June 11, 1963 By most accounts, 1963 was the most significant year of the civil rights movement. It was also the bloodiest. The previous summer I had been involved in a number of voter-registration campaigns throughout the Delta, and I’ve indicated how those activities put my parents on edge. They knew how dangerous participating in civil rights activities could be. If I didn’t take a break from my activities, I ran the risk of not completing my senior year. My mother also stood to lose her job as a maid in the Greenwood public school system. Although I continued to support the movement, I could not be such an active participant as I had been earlier on. So my mother seemed relieved when I decided to spend the summer of 1963 visiting my father in Portland, Oregon. I would get to meet a father whom I didn’t really know and, I hoped, find a job to help meet the expenses of my first year at Morehouse. But the activities of 1963 were so tumultuous that they resounded throughout the nation and indeed the world. When I enrolled at Morehouse, 1963 182 I kept up my participation, though in a more limited way, in desegregation protests in Atlanta. The year of my graduation from high school was such a pivotal year because it was the centennial of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation , granting freedom to millions of individuals in bondage. Lincoln made it clear that his primary purpose was to save the union, for he believed that the nation could not long endure half slave and half free. The president’s motivation notwithstanding, African Americans saw this as a beneficent act that would grant them the same rights and privileges enjoyed by white Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. One hundred years had passed and blacks were still facing injustices in all aspects of public life. Despite the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, blacks weren’t allowed to vote in most areas in the South. They couldn’t use countless public facilities, including restaurants, theaters, parks, and libraries. A document alone, they learned, without the determination of a nation to back its claims was like receiving a check with insufficient funds. This was, at least, the case that Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to press in his speech on August 28, 1963. Indeed, King wanted to heighten and prick the conscience of a nation that didn’t fully realize the plight of its black citizens. It was by all reckoning a year of Kairos, as the theologian Paul Tillich put it in his Protestant era. Kairos refers to a moment that is rich in content and significance, a time laden with possibilities and ripe for some important undertaking. Nineteen sixty-three was such a year. The events of that year were so powerful they demanded each of us to answer the question, “Where were you?” On the other side were intransigent individuals who were determined to maintain the status quo of keeping blacks in an inferior position relative to whites. These individuals spoke vaguely of state rights and sovereignty and southern heritage. Seldom were the words “white supremacy” spoken among elected officials, but those who heard Alabama Governor George C. Wallace deliver his inaugural address on January 14, 1963, got a clear message: “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. . . . In the name of the greatest people that have trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. . . and I say. . . segregation today. . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”1 In no single year were forces more clearly aligned on either side. The outcome of this tug-of-war was more often than not violent. While King didn’t 183 1963 advocate violence in the least, he recognized fairly early on that making sure the other side’s violence...