Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi

4. The Holmes County Community Center

67 4 The Holmes County Community Center November 1964–January 1965 The regular Wednesday night Mileston community meeting was one of the first activities to move into the center building. It developed out of the 1963 citizenship classes on voter registration that local leaders Ralthus Hayes, Reverend Jesse Russell, and Willie James Burns taught. All were Mileston project farmers who had gone to South Carolina for teacher training by the SCLC. The teacher training began with the Highlander Folk School, which established citizenship schools in 1954 in South Carolina to help adults learn to pass literacy tests on the way to voting. The schools spread across the South until the state of Tennessee moved to shut down Highlander in 1961, blaming it for much of the strife raging across the South. The SCLC carried on the citizenship schools, continuing to educate voters under the guise of adult literacy classes. SCLC staff including Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton drove all over the South recruiting prospective students, who were then bused to South Carolina for a week-long training program. The citizenship schools clandestinely taught the fundamentals of practical politics, democracy, community leadership and organizing, civil rights, and the strategies and tactics of resistance and struggle. The program was designed to get participants to establish citizenship classes in their own communities. Mileston’s Wednesday night meetings, which began after Mileston leaders received SCLC training in 1963, were first held in the Mileston Sanctified Church. When the meetings moved into the center, right next door, it was a natural homecoming. No special celebration was held, but people felt that this meeting place was meant to be—this was what the 68 BECOMING PART OF HOLMES COUNTY movement community reaped from the lessons that activist Abe Osheroff brought to Holmes County. Each community meeting began and ended with song. Song and music protected, cradled, and inspired those in the struggle. The movement standby “We Shall Overcome” closed every formal movement meeting. Everyone gathered in a circle, crossed arms, joined hands, and swayed out the many powerful verses: “We are not afraid. . . . Truth shall set us free. . . . God is on our side. . . . We shall overcome.” A powerful effect was felt by all as we sang freedom songs like “Oh Freedom,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” “If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus,” and “Like a Tree Planted by the Water, We Shall Not Be Moved.” The music often brought individuals and the community through difficult times. The spirit of the local people lightened those times. One day some The older Mileston women sometimes gathered before the regular Wednesday night meeting at the Community Center at Mileston. Left to right: Alma Mitchell Carnegie, Annie Bell Mitchell, Caldonia Davis, Florence Blackmon, and Maude C. Vance. The Holmes County Community Center 69 lumber and blocks from an unfinished construction project were left on the floor of the main meeting room. Mrs. Carnegie, whose name was spelled like the steel mogul’s but was pronounced “Car nuh GEE,” came to the center that day for a meeting. Seeing a plank inclined on a block, the playful sixty-eight-year-old woman walked right up it. With arms gracefully swinging out, one hand daintily holding the skirt of her clean but well-worn housedress, she looked like a child curtseying. Her back straight as a rod and her feet in wide old-lady shoes, she firmly, gaily, quickly strutted—one foot in front of the other—up the low plank, then turned and nearly skipped back down. She took a joy in it like an eightyear -old child would—doing it just for fun. Rosie Head and Elease Gallion were the first Mileston young adults to work at the center and were in their twenties when the movement sparked their hearts and minds. Rosie and her children Willie C., Dolly Mae, Shirley Mae, Luther Dale, Calvin “Butchie,” Debora Denise, and Donald lived with her parents Robert and Pecolia in a house rented from the Mileston Farmers Co-op. It was on the highway, almost within sight of the center. Elease lived on her father’s farm on the Mileston road, even closer to the center than the highway. Each had gone to the Greenwood freedom meetings in late 1962 and early 1963; the young SNCC organizers in Greenwood were definitely an attraction. Elease had also worked...