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275 Afterword Henry and I spent nearly two additional years in the county after the elections, but we stayed out of the political realm as much as possible. Henry was engaged in his economic and health research programs. He and Demitri Shimkin led an innovative and extensive study of Holmes County, making it perhaps the most thoroughly researched county in the state. Some of their work was funded by the Department of Health, Education , and Welfare. I spent much of that time photographing, recording, and interviewing local people and writing descriptions of them and their activities. The Head Start program in Mileston, one of the very first in the United States, expanded and prospered and is still strong. The health clinic, started by Josephine Disparti in the kitchen of the Holmes County Community Center, became a model for comprehensive community health centers, which serve more than 30 million Americans today. Robert Clark served for thirty-six years in the Mississippi state legislature , running the House Education Committee. In the final ten years of his tenure, he served as Speaker Pro Tempore. His son, Wandrick Bryant Clark, won his seat in 2003. Since the 1967 elections, hundreds of Holmes black men and women have been elected as school board members , mayors, sheriffs, and other public officials. Three years after we left the county in 1969, Henry and I returned to show off our one-month-old son Aaron to the local people. Then I did not return until months after Henry’s death in 1982, when I went back to Holmes to share in mourning for Henry with Holmes leaders. I also helped on Robert Clark’s campaign for the U.S. Congress, which turned out to be unsuccessful. Over the years I visited often, spending time with local friends such as Rosie Head Howze, Walter Bruce, Robert Clark, Hartman Turnbow, 276 THUNDER OF FREEDOM the Montgomery family, and Norman Clark. I celebrated at two family “Appreciations”—one for Howard Taft Bailey and the other for Bernice Patton Montgomery. Several times in the 1980s and 1990s, long-distance-truck-driving Edgar Love stopped in D.C. to visit me and Aaron. Then in 1999, three years after I moved to Duluth, Minnesota, Edgar Love, Walter Bruce, and Zelma Williams Croom came to Duluth. They spoke at the premiere of my Holmes County photography exhibit “The Some People of That Place” at the Tweed Museum of Art on the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) campus. In 2001 I brought to Holmes for the very first time that same photographic story of their movement, in an expanded touring form. The FDP displayed the one-hundred-piece exhibit for nine months. The black school superintendent provided buses for every school child through all twelve grades to come to Lexington to see it. Zelma came back in 2004 to speak at the University of Wisconsin– Superior’s Multicultural Center opening of the “The Some People” touring exhibit. She returned in 2008 to speak about the Mileston Head Start to UMD students in early childhood education. ...

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