On September 10, 1962, the day the Supreme Court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit Black student James Meredith, shots were fired into several homes of civil rights workers and local people active in the voter registration drive including the house where Mrs. Hamer was staying.
Mrs. Hamer weathered repeated violence and harassment. She received a $9,000 water bill from her county although her house lacked running water. She tried to register to vote again after she learned how to interpret the Mississippi constitution from citizenship classes only to be told she could not vote because she had not paid poll taxes for two years (how could she without being able to register?). But nothing dampened her spirits and she finally registered to vote and went on to teach others how to do so.
She later ran for Congress against segregationist Jamie Whitten, the powerful chair of the House Agriculture Committee who worked hard to keep Mississippi Blacks hungry and voteless. She fought until she died for good Head Start programs and to bring economic development to Mississippi through pig farming to help stave off the hunger of discarded sharecroppers. She was a delegate to the 1970 Democratic Party and ran for state senate and lost in 1971.
She gave everything for Jesus, freedom, and justice. I was so proud when she came to visit me in Washington to participate in the dedication of my first child Joshua Robert to God. May her spirit of grit, love, and courage infuse his life and all my and our children’s lives.
I still try to be half as strong and half as good as Mrs. Hamer. It is my dream that the mothers and grandmothers of America will come together in our time across race, class, and faith and tell all those in power with our voices, votes, and organizing to let our children go from the bondage of gun violence that kills them every two hours; from the bondage of poverty and poor education that tracks them to prison rather than to college; from the bondage of drugs that comes from idleness, too few legal jobs, and too little purposeful service; and from the bondage of self-serving community and political leaders who have forgotten if they ever knew that the purpose of life and public office is not themselves but justice and service to the common good.
I was sitting in Jackson with a Mississippi college president’s wife looking at television during President Johnson’s inauguration. The president’s wife glimpsed Mrs. Hamer at one of the inaugural balls and burst out, “Oh my goodness, there Mrs. Hamer is and she doesn’t even have on a long gown.” I replied, “That’s all right, she’s there and you and I with our long gowns are not.”
So many Americans who are busy dressing up in fancy clothes don’t stop to think about whether they are going any place in them that is worthwhile. Mrs. Hamer never made that mistake.
MRS. MAE BERTHA CARTER
It is impossible to overstate the amount of courage it took for Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, her husband Matthew, and eight of their thirteen children to exercise their “freedom of choice” in 1965 to become the first and for several years the only Black students to attend formerly White public schools in Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi. Sunflower was segregationist Senator James O. Eastland’s home county. It was a scary, violent county during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. I always tried to leave it before sundown.
But the Carters didn’t leave. They stayed, fought, and changed it as Mrs. Hamer did. They loved their children, wanted the best for them, and believed education was the ticket to freedom. They were determined to pay whatever it cost to get their youngest children out of the cotton fields. And they paid a lot.
I was privileged to be the Carters’ lawyer when they sued in 1967 to challenge Mississippi’s “freedom of choice” plan designed to avoid real desegregation. In the suit filed for Mrs. Carter and her children Larry, Stanley, Gloria, Pearl, Deborah, Beverly, and Carl in the U.S. District Court against the Drew Municipal Separate School District, I wrote: “Fear of White retaliation, firmly grounded in fact, has deterred other Negroes from choosing the formerly White school pursuant to the District’s freedom of choice plan.” I sought injunctive relief against the segregated and discriminatory system that placed a “cruel and intolerable burden” upon Black parents and children. We won the court decision throwing out Mississippi’s so-called freedom of choice plan. But Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter and her children faced many tough daily battles ahead.
After she and Mr. Carter refused to withdraw their freedom of choice papers their plantation boss evicted them. But they were determined that their younger children would not have to share their older children’s back-breaking days picking cotton and attending poor all-Black schools which operated only part of the school year and provided hand-me-down old White school buses and precious few books and supplies. “In that Black school, they had you paying for everything” Mrs. Carter told CDF staff in an interview a few weeks before her death. Wanting their younger children to attend better schools, the Carters stood united because “We thought it would later on make the world a better place. We knew it was the right thing to do.” The older children signed their own freedom of choice papers and Mrs. Carter signed for the younger ones. “Don’t care where you go in this world, you need an education. I don’t know why, but I just knew it.”
Their sacrifices were greater than most people would or could bear. The Carter home was shot into and fear of night snipers caused the family to sleep on the floor for several years. The land they had tilled for years was lost, their remaining crop was plowed under, credit was denied them, and they couldn’t find any work or housing. In her marvelous account of the Carters’ struggle, Silver Rights, Connie Curry details the cruelty White adults taught White children to perpetrate against the Carter children including urging them not to sit next to them in school and to call them names.
In a four-and-one-half-hour interview in April 1999, Miz Mae Bertha described how she felt as a mother when she first put her children on the school bus to go to the White school:
I don’t know. It feel so bad. But it was something that we had to do. We got up early in the morning, children got ready to go to school and we could look down the road and we could see the bus coming. We didn’t have to wonder what bus it was. Because it was a bright, real yellow bus and we knew that was the White bus. Because they had been riding on these old broke-down piece of buses. So you just knew what was coming.
And I stand on the porch until the children came out, got on the bus and the bus pulled off. And when the bus pull off, I went inside, fell down cross the bed and began to pray. I didn’t say too much but Lord, take care of my kids.
And when they come from school, I would go back on that porch and I see them about a mile away. And they get off the bus and I count them, one by one. Then I thank God. Lord I thank you for taking care of my children today.
And then I will ask them how was the day. And they began to tell me the things that happened at school that day. And then sometimes we sing.
And we—we couldn’t forget, so we’ll sing that song, [singing] “got up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom, oh, I got up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom, hallelu … hallelu … lujah.” There’s one thing they say, [singing] “Ain’t no harm to keep your mind, stayed on freedom, it ain’t no harm to keep your mind, stayed on freedom, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah.” And we would sing different songs, “Ain’t Going to Let Nobody Turn Us Around,” “Keep On Walking to Freedom Land.” And then we’d feel better. And get up the next morning and go to school.
The Carter family stuck it out. The younger Carter children graduated from Drew public schools and seven of them went on to graduate from the University of Mississippi. One of them, Beverly, served on the Drew School Board. Two sons served in the Air Force for over twenty years, another son is a hospital administrator, and two daughters have management jobs.
Their mother was always there for them, listening and helping them talk it out. The only things she wouldn’t let them say were that they hated all Whites or that they wished they’d never been born. Asked in April 1999 if she regretted sending
her children to experience such relentless White hostility she answered:
No, unh-unh, not a one, no. I told the children anytime that I can stay at home and know my child is in Vietnam in that war still, he didn’t know how he got there and why he was there. Two of them went. And going to Drew public school, he know he was trying to get a better education for himself and we knew it.
So, I always said, if you are going to die for something you should know what you are dying for. And he was—they was going to be dying for education. Over there, they didn’t know what they were going to be dying for. But they had to go.
So, I didn’t have no regret, because I know and my husband know there’s nothing you can do in the United States without a education. You already dead. You got to face the fact, already dead. You just like fish out of the water. How long can that fish live out that water? You got to have some kind of skill. Don’t fool yourself.
And now it’s safe enough—they try to keep them out of these schools, they shot at us, they did everything to us. And, now, they get ready for a job—just a job—you can’t get it.
Asked what was her best moment: “I tell you the best moment with me. When they all graduated from college and went on towards getting some jobs. That’s my best moment. That’s the best moment that I had. You can now go get you a job. And go in business if you want to.”
Asked about the secret of her success in raising her children, Mrs. Carter said: “We didn’t have a secret. We showed them love. They could come and tell us anything. My husband always quoted this to his children. ‘When you’re happy, I am happy. When you’re sad, I’m sad.’ He loved his children. They were our first priority. You can’t forget about your children. Don’t ever get too busy to listen to your children.”
MAYOR UNITA
Unita Blackwell was the first Black woman mayor in Mississippi. Elected in the town of Mayersville, Mississippi, in Issaquena County in 1976, she served for nineteen years during her first stint and worked her way up to chair the Black Women Mayors’ Caucus and to become President of the National Conference of Black Mayors in 1989. After she left office the first time (she is again Mayor), she was a Mac Arthur Foundation Prize Fellow. But she earned her late life honors the hard way and speaks movingly of experiencing “emotional violence every day” for her movement work in Mississippi. As Unita puts it, she “filed a lawsuit against almost every agency and operation of White people in the State of Mississippi.” I was fortunate to serve as her lawyer for some of them. During one period, Unita says she got arrested every day for thirty straight days and was jailed about seventy-five times for trying to organize people to register to vote. After 1964 when she joined the movement, she says she never slept uninterrupted for years because she and her family and friends would take turns sleeping and mounting guard against the Klan. She shared with my son Jonah how it felt when a cross was burned in front of her house and she showed him the exact spot.
I recently persuaded Unita to tell her story for an oral history video with an audience of college students who crowded into the Shirley Comer Room at the former Alex Haley Farm, the Children’s Defense Fund’s center for spiritual renewal and intergenerational leadership development. They were rapt as she shared her life history and illustrated how she and her dear friend Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer with whom she often shared a bed or floor had snoring contests. She claimed Mrs. Hamer always won!
As you will see from her words below, Unita has never stopped growing, learning, rolling with the punches, and punching back when she had to. She is always laughing and making other people laugh. Her creativity of expression is sometimes unrestrained by the niceties of grammatical syntax. This disturbed a bright student leader at Spelman who hailed from Mississippi and who knew that Unita and I were friends. She was, she said, confused about what to think of Mrs. Blackwell because she didn’t speak “good” English. I told the student to listen to the substance and ignore the style because Unita had more to say worth listening to than thousands of proper-speaking say-nothings. Unita warned her young charges at Haley: “Now you going to hear a lot of broken English and stuff here and if you all know better just put it back together and we go on. I know you can find them somewhere, the verbs and the adverbs and so forth.” But I’ll let Unita tell her own story and you listen in.
As a young girl I learned to be strong. I’d walk with my mother on hot days with the dust between my toes and want Mama to carry me, but she would say, “Come on, you can make it.” I was raised up that way, my mother encouraging me saying, “You can make it.” My mother couldn’t read and write. My grandmother could. My grandmother was taught to read and write by her boss’s wife, not because they were so gracious but because she was a cook and the woman wanted to have her recipes.
I grew up on a plantation in Mississippi and every summer me and my sister went to my aunt’s in Arkansas to help out because she was sick. She was sick but that wasn’t the reason. My mother sent us there until school started again to get us out of working on the plantation.
My father and uncle and our families had to move to Tennessee because the boss who was short got into an argument with my father who was very tall. The boss swung at my father and my father lifted him up by the collar. At that time you did not put your hands on White people. A Black man could be killed for that. So the family moved to Tennessee.
My childhood was one of ironing and washing and chopping and picking cotton but I loved books and had good teachers in school. Miss Franklin was particularly good to me and encouraged me to speak publicly in school. She told me that I was a good speaker, and that it was important to be the best you can be. She would make me speak every Friday and tell me how to stand, say your speech and smile. It was Miss Franklin who named me. The tradition in my family was for the oldest brother in the family to name the family’s children so my uncle named me. But he could not read and write so he called the children by two initials. I was UZ. Miss Franklin told me I couldn’t go through life like that so she named me Unita Zelma. I told my mother who thought it was a good idea. Teachers are so important to children. They are the next thing to parents.
When I was young I had a Black boyfriend but he was very light-skinned and I was very dark. He had a hard time with other children because he liked someone so dark and others were jealous because I had a light-skinned boyfriend. One time I went to “White town” to pick up the mail and a White boy called me “nigger, nigger, nigger.” And we just got into it. When I got home and told my mother, she just took me and hugged me and said, “Don’t worry about it. You’re my child. You’re my child.” (Sorry to be crying. I could feel that. I’m sorry.) I saw fear in her eyes because she didn’t know whether her whole family would be wiped out. That’s the way it used to be. And we need that kind of love. My mother was ready to die for her child. From then I went on to understand this vicious race problem in this country and how color was so important even in our own race. And my friends was all kinds of colors. We were brown-skinned, light-skinned. But they said: “If you’re light, you’re all right. And if you’re Brown, stick around. If you’re Black, stand way back.” So you know where I was supposed to stand.
I got teased by other children for being so Black, and I asked my mother why I was very Black and she replied, “Don’t worry about it, you’re honest.” I hung on to that though I didn’t really understand how it related. Children hang on to things adults say, and it’s so important to be wise in what you say to children. When people criticized my color, I’d say, “Don’t worry about it, I’m honest.” I was determined to be whoever I was, I guess. They say my self-esteem was hanging on a thread but mother kept it going.
When my husband’s grandmother died, we went to take over her land in Mississippi. I was worrying about how to educate my child and didn’t want him working in the fields. It was the time of the so-called freedom riders and Stokely Carmichael showed up in my life and Charlie Cobb and they was out there in the fields with the overalls on. I’ll never forget Stoke
ly. He was really trying to get down with it so he could be like a farmhand. They came to the fields to talk to the people. But I knew they weren’t locals because they were walking fast. No one walked fast in the Mississippi heat. Then they said, “Hello.” The locals said, “How y’all feeling.” And we say to each other, “That’s them.” I was leading Sunday school and two of the freedom riders came to my class. They didn’t have on church clothes. We had a thing about church clothes. I told the class, “God helps those who help themselves,” as Charlie and Stokely stood up and asked if they could speak. One was from Brooklyn and they couldn’t understand his accent, but the other was from Virginia and they understood him. I asked them to come back to the 11:00 service to speak. They asked at the service if they could have a meeting in the church, and the parishioners voted that they could though there were some who opposed. The head deacon didn’t approve so he said the sheriff said they couldn’t have a meeting in the church. I called the sheriff on the phone to ask him about it and he said he hadn’t said that and he’d sue whoever said he did. That was the first time I heard you could sue people like that [laughter]. I went back and told the people it was okay to have the meeting.
At the meeting I was encouraged to register to vote. I thought that was a good idea. I’ve been asked what made me get into the movement. It was the needs: the needs to be met for education, for us to live and eat and be decent and have the necessities of things in life. I stood up when they asked who would try to register. My husband pulled my dress to make me sit down and said, “Don’t get up ’til I get up.” I sat down and waited, and he didn’t get up, so I poked him until he did stand, and then when he got up, I stood up, and I’ve been up ever since.
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