by Tyson Amir
This is the skeletal structure of Mississippi. This is the DNA of its society built on the oppression and exploitation of black bodies for monetary gain. Blacks were a majority in population in Mississippi for decades before and after the Civil War. Whites represented a minority population in the state. If they were to maintain control of a majority population that had every right to overthrow their authority, then they would have to maintain that control through force, violence, and terror. Mississippi was not afraid of using violence and terror as a means to institute white dominance in society. This is why Simone sings, “Mississippi Goddam.” If we were to create a list of the worst states to be black in, Mississippi would most likely come out as the worst of the worst the majority of the time that list was compiled. Blacks in Mississippi experienced the most brutal treatment during and after slavery. Mississippi has the historic distinction of being the place where Medgar Evers was murdered before his family in his driveway. It gave birth to some of the worst slave codes and black codes ever seen. Mississippi is legendary in its terror, brutality, violence, resistance to integration, and exploitation of blacks. The fact that so many blacks have roots in Mississippi means that the legacy of that trauma, abuse, torture, and oppression lives on in us wherever we may call home.
Wright was born and raised in Mississippi. He eventually migrated to Tennessee before leaving the South completely, but his foundation is Mississippi. I'm from at least four generations of Mississippi on my mother's side. Sadly, I don't know my mother's father's lineage because she didn't even know who her biological father was until she was in her forties. We know who the family is now but are not connected with them and are not familiar with that side's family history. They were from Mississippi though. What I know for a fact is my mother's side and that makes me the byproduct of four generations of women who survived Mississippi. Grandma Dolly, who they say was mixed with native blood, my Great Grandma (Big Momma), my Grandma (Grandma Essie), and my momma. Kira and I were the first in four generations to be born outside of Mississippi.
Richard Wright would eventually leave the state of Mississippi for Tennessee, Illinois, and then the United States for France. In all the places he was to see and experience his Mississippi upbringing was still a major part of him. I am California born and raised, I'm a Cali boy down to my socks. I love the opportunities and experiences that my home state has afforded me. I'm thankful for what I have been exposed to here in California, but as much as I am California, there is no denying that I am also Mississippi.
That land and the struggles of the peoples in that land have carried the blood of my family for generations. I'm a transplant. I am the seed of Mississippi planted in a fertile alien soil. My family had to leave like Richard Wright in order to fully realize potential of who they could be. Mississippi had been the beginning and ending of so many black lives and families. It had served as a cotton-tinted glass ceiling preventing any inkling of success. Every era of black life in Mississippi was hard. Slavery, to Jim Crow, to civil rights to the new Jim Crow. If you're black and you want a chance at a good life, then Mississippi was not the place for you to be. This is why there were numerous migrations out of the state of Mississippi over time. So many blacks made the decision to leave Mississippi that their departure changed the population demographics and made whites the majority. Whites would never have become the majority in Mississippi if it were solely based on birth rates. The horrendous life that blacks experienced was the catalyst for blacks to move which eventually gave whites a majority in the population.
Thousands of blacks attempted to leave Mississippi immediately after the abolition of slavery in 1865. Over the course of the next few decades, blacks continued to leave Mississippi in droves. Wright was born in 1908, forty-three years after the abolition of slavery. My family, like Wright, became part of those mass migrations from Mississippi. Wright ended up in the Midwest while we ended up on the West Coast. The route my family took went from Mississippi to Germany and then to North Highlands, California, right outside of the state capitol, Sacramento.
California, contrary to what some might believe, is not some paragon of equality and fairness for blacks. Black people have suffered from racism and oppression in California as well. You don't get groups like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense or the Brown Berets or Cesar Chavez UFW (United Farm Workers) without having a context that is rife with racism and discrimination. Those movements are byproducts of years of discontent and systemic abuse. My mother and grandmother eventually found themselves attempting to survive in this context. California afforded my family more opportunities than Mississippi, but it came with costs, just like the experience of Wright in Chicago. He was better off and had more access to things he desperately wanted but American racism is alive and well in all parts of this land. Racism is diverse but equally diabolical anywhere it appears on the horizon. It serves as a crippling force in all of its forms, and each is harmful to black lives.
Although my family relocated to California, Mississippi is still our home. There is no way to relocate all of my family blood that is buried in that red soil. More of my family still lives in Mississippi than any other part of the United States. I have cousins, great aunts, and uncles who still call Mississippi home. My sister decided to move back to Mississippi and has built her family and practice there. I have two beautiful nieces in Mississippi right now. I am not ashamed to say that I am equal parts California and Mississippi.
The decision to leave Mississippi was not an easy one but it was necessary for a chance at a different life. In an attempt to find better, and to make better for themselves and the ones to come, my family moved west. We sought a more fertile soil for the seeds of our family to grow in. It has not been easy, but we've experienced some success. And every day we continue to strive on with Mississippi and all the lessons she taught us, be they good or bad in our hearts.
The content of the piece is very special to me because it tells the story of the matriarchs of my mother's family. It's a story of four generations of women and some of what they had to deal with in surviving being a black woman in the American South. The piece ends with my mother hoping and praying the best for her son, but it's a story of the power of women. I know that I come from strong women who sacrificed a great deal so that theirs could live. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly told the world about the gifts and the beauty of the southern woman in their song "Southern Girl." Mr. Beverly put that velvet like vocal through the mic and sang a praise for our sisters south of the Mason Dixon line. Maze's song pays homage to the glory of all the women of the south but the truth is ain't no southern girl like a woman from Mississippi. She has survived the worst, and she's still here.
I'm indebted to the women of my family, and I'm thankful to be one of their progeny. I hope that I carry some of what made them excellent. I pray that my efforts as a man and a human being make them proud and make their struggles and sacrifices worth it in their eyes. Mississippi and my family have an old love/hate relationship. It has birthed us and put us in the dirt far too early. It has forced us to toil its rich soil and allowed us to plant and reap some of what we've sown for ourselves. It hasn't given us any quarter at any time. We would never call it a friend, but it's home. It's hard to have love for a home that has had no love for you, but Mississippi is home and for better or for worse is in the heart.
A Word on Mario Woods
After the completion of this text I was asked by my school to help facilitate the graduation ceremony where Mario Woods was supposed to walk the stage. I was approached by my supervisor to see if I would be interested in leading the portion of the program that would be dedicated to recognizing Mario and presenting his diploma to his mother. I humbly accepted that responsibility. I felt honored to be charged with that duty, and after leaving school that day I was inspired to write a few words to speak to my experience with Mario. What follows is the poem that I wrote, but I wasn't able to recite the version that appears here; I was requested to recite an edited
version of the poem at the ceremony. After the event I was contacted by the communications director of the United Educators of San Francisco. He asked me if I would be interested in writing an article about Mario for publication in the UESF newsletter and possible publication in a major national periodical. What follows after the poem is the draft version of the article I wrote about Mario entitled “A Word on Mario.”
A Poem for Mario (2016)
I see him
In my mind he still sits
in that same place.
Young black face
tucked in the back of the class.
He's quiet, not quick to cat off
or laugh as time pass
because he's busy trying to master his own path.
I see the pain inside.
I see he don't want to remain inside.
I see the brain inside.
At times he'd raise his hand high to share some of his insight.
I see he gets it.
I see the boy, he's young, black and gifted.
We both see that our blackness leaves us trapped in the system.
He's gotta date, he's gonna hit those gates soon.
A new start,
motivated by the promises he made to his mother that he carries in his heart.
He's a good dude, but he ain't perfect.
Truthfully, none of us are,
and as far as the word go,
may he who is without sin cast the first stone.
There won't be any rocks flying,
but on that day them shots were flying,
like a firing squad who wouldn't stop
until he dropped and was dying.
Hearts dropped and broke and couldn't stop crying.
Now his folks shocked as I am
trying to calm the violence rising inside them.
And I know this shouldn't be a eulogy keynote.
I should be standing, smiling right beside him,
watching him walk off with his diploma a brighter future on the horizon.
But you and I are left to think of what might have been.
Mother Gwen lost a son,
Others lost a family member or a friend,
Me, I lost a student.
May we never lose our love for him.
May we never lose our hope that we will win.
And his leaving us will not be in vain,
for we will make sure this never happens again.
Rest in Power and Peace, Mario.
Justice for Mario Woods
__________________________________________________________________________
Reflections of a Black Boy
Miracle of life
Mother gives birth to child
Mother holds child for the first of many times
180 seconds
Child is taken away by doctors
Mother loves child every second of his life
831,945,600 seconds.
Swine genetically modified
stampede sacred ground with weapons of mass destruction
leaving nothing behind.
9 hooves on triggers
40 plus shots
21 direct hits
5 second barrage
the final grains of sand succumb to the pull of gravity
831,945,595
831,945,596
831,945,597
831,945,598
831,945,599
831,945,600
sands spills all over the floor
death spills out onto the floor
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
__________________________________________________________________________
UESF Article
I have taught high school courses in the San Francisco jail system for more than a decade. The San Francisco Sheriff's Department decided to establish a school within its incarcerated facilities in 2003 to try to reduce recidivism and ameliorate the effects of the school to prison pipeline. Despite the challenges of providing education in an incarcerated environment, the school has been a major success. In 2014 we were awarded the Hart Vision Charter School of the Year Award and just last year we won the prestigious Harvard Innovations in American Government award. In my time with the school, I've witnessed tremendous life-changing successes in the lives of some of my students. Conversely, I've witnessed painful tragedies which have resulted in too many untimely deaths of those who once sat in my classroom. Recently, one of my former students had been christened the latest black face gunned down by law enforcement. On a cold day in December in San Francisco, powerful forces conspired to involuntarily draft him into the world of hashtags and memorial t-shirts and posters. My student had become the latest black faced burnt offering on the altar of America.
His name was Mario Woods; you may have heard of him by now. His death was witnessed by millions of people due to cell phone cameras and social media. The problem with only seeing the last minute of someone's life is it can in no way inform you as to how they lived. The mainstream media did what it often does when badge kills black body. It moved heaven and earth to find numerous ways to demonize the person of Mario. Television, print and web-based news highlighted his "checkered" past and his "record" with law enforcement, as if prior history is a lethal offense and said individual with history is to be executed on sight with impunity and lacking due process. Headlines branded him a drug addict, gang member, and other socially invective epithets that like those twenty police bullets assassinated his character. Mario was found guilty by the media of being poor and black and sentenced to death by social denigration. Those that did not know Mario and didn't attempt to question the fabricated narrative of the press were more likely to believe what was being "reported" about him and feel his execution was justified.
I knew a different Mario. I too, was one of the millions who witnessed his horrific murder online. But the difference between me and most of the world is I knew the one who was on the other side of those police revolvers. On December 2, I was scrolling a social media timeline and a hashtag followed by ten letters that I had seen multiple times on one of my school rosters kept appearing.
San Francisco is celebrated as one of the world's greatest cities but its popularity far outweighs its actual physical size. It is a 7 x 7 square mile city in which the gentrification effort led by the tech community is well underway. The historical black and brown populations are being forced out at what seems like close to light speed. There are still a few black and brown enclaves in the city, but at the current rate it's just a matter of time before they are whitewashed completely. The schools in the Fillmore or Bayview Hunters Point or the Mission are usually the worst in terms of academic performance. Social services are nearly invisible in these neighborhoods. The poverty and the depression are heavy and very real. The people, their spirits, and the cultures they have created are beautiful but a community cannot thrive on prayer alone. Poverty and systemic discrimination are powerful corrosive forces that can strangle the life out of a community. People eventually begin to succumb to the pressures of their surrounding environs and act out in a manner that they wouldn't if quality education, services, and access to good housing and employment were present.
This is the world that Mario was formed in. He was raised on the oft-unforgiving blocks of Bayview Hunters Point. He was a smart kid who really loved and supported his mother. You didn't have to look too hard to see his talents and intelligence. Still, he lived in a place where very few young people his age saw a way out that didn't involve surviving the traps of the street. He wasn't a tall man. He didn't have a physically dominant presence, but he had a presence. I was always able to tell when he was in the room even though he was fairly quiet. There was a silent confidence to him like he knew a secret about himself that nobody else really understood. He had his struggles with the world around him but he had confidence in himself that he would find his way through. I noticed this about him fairly early on while he was a student in my class
room. I taught Mario math on two separate occasions in 2009-2010. His first trip to my class didn't go too well. This could've been the result of multiple factors. Jail is not the easiest place to learn anything. One of the most celebrated young minds of the twentieth century Tupac Shakur said, "Prison kills your spirit, straight up. It kills your spirit. There is no creativity, there's none of that." There are many stressors one faces while incarcerated. I do not know what Mario was dealing with at the time, but he did not fully apply himself to the curriculum for some reason. I also realized it wasn't because he was unable to understand the work, there was something that was holding him back, and as a result he did just enough to pass.
The second time he walked through my doors and took my class he had a different level of focus. Whatever was holding him back was no longer there, and he earned one of the highest grades in my class during that semester. He passed my algebra class with a B+. The silent confidence was radiating from him. We were both able to see that secret that he had hidden. He and I both knew that he was intellectually capable and could focus enough to figure his way through whatever he would face in life. This was the Mario that I knew and grew to respect. He left my class feeling accomplished and even more confident that he could change his life for the better.
He had to serve time in prison, but upon release he found his way to a residential program and into one of the community arms of our school. Mario had already completed his GED but under our charter a student could convert their GED into a full high school diploma by completing additional course work for credits. Mario made the decision to do this because he knew it was something his mother always wanted for him. Mario applied himself with the focus that I witnessed while he was in my class for the second time. He was known as a positive influence in his class, often motivating and helping other students accomplish their academic tasks. And in July of 2015, he completed all of his requirements to earn his high school diploma. He had also recently found work and acquired a new driver's license. He was on his way to the life that he and his mother wanted for him.
