At year’s end many of us make gifts to worthy organizations. It helps them and also gives us a tax deduction or two.  Below are seven organizations that I hope you will consider supporting, non-profit organizations that I have come to admire during my career:

*** FAIRTEST:  The ongoing “Opt Out” movement was one of the most remarkable developments I observed during my 41-year reporting career. Suddenly—and without support of any established organizations, including teacher unions—true grassroots opposition emerged when students, parents and some teachers said “No Mas!” to high stakes testing.  Only one organization tracked the spread of this movement, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, widely known as FAIRTEST.  For decades FAIRTEST has been a reliable and honorable advocate in the battle to get beyond the ’test and punish’ mentality that dominates schools today.  FAIRTEST works with activists across the nation, testifies to legislatures, and advises colleges considering test-optional admissions. http://www.fairtest.org/

*** MARA-A-PULA is widely considered to be one of the top independent schools in Africa, and the best in Botswana. Its mission is to prepare leaders who will serve their communities. Nearly two-thirds of Maru-a-Pula’s 765 students are citizens of Botswana. Maru-a-Pula students have gone on to attend schools like Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Williams, the London School of Economics, and Oxford, where two former students were Rhodes Scholars. Because of the AIDS pandemic, many are orphans attending on full scholarship, and that’s where your gift can help. http://www.afmap.org

*** URBAN ASSEMBLY:  The easy way to improve educational opportunities is to start in kindergarten and add a grade every year. Want tough? Then start high schools with kids who’ve already spent 8 years in traditional schools.  Because Richard Kahan likes a challenge, he decided to tackle high schools when he transitioned from a successful career in real estate and urban planning. Today Urban Assembly includes 21 high performing, themed public schools in New York City, including seven Career & Technical Education (CTE) schools and three all-girls schools, serving over 9,000 students from low-income neighborhoods.  The themed schools like the Academy for Government and Law and the Gateway School for Technology are open to all students. https://urbanassembly.org/

*** NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION: Only a few years old, NPE already has more than 100,000 individual members as well as dozens of grassroots local groups. Started by veteran teacher Anthony Cody and historian Diane Ravitch, NPE opposes high-stakes testing; privatization of public education; mass school closures to save money or to facilitate privatization; demonization of teachers; lowering of standards for the education profession; and for-profit management of schools. While that’s a mouthful, the list of what NPE supports is much, much longer, including schools that offer a full and rich curriculum for all children, including the arts, physical education, history, civics, foreign languages, literature, mathematics, and the sciences; early childhood education; high standards of professionalism; and assessments that are used to support children and teachers, not to punish or stigmatize them or to hand out monetary rewards. http://networkforpubliceducation.org/

***NEW VISIONS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS has been providing vital support to NYC schools for 26 years.  Today it’s working with 50,000 students in 70 traditional public schools and 7 charter high schools. Students in NEW VISIONS schools are more likely to attend school regularly (92%), earn academic credits and Regents diplomas, and be ready for college than their peers in regular high schools. http://www.newvisions.org/

*** WHAT KIDS CAN DO was years ahead of its time when, 20 years ago, it began celebrating young people’s accomplishments. You may already know WKCD from “Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students,” but WKCD now uses digital, print, and broadcast media to demonstrate what kids can accomplish when given the opportunities and supports they need. WKCD helps thousands of marginalized kids discover the best in themselves. http://whatkidscando.org/index8.html

*** YOUTHBUILD, which I reported on in the late 1980’s, is dedicated to giving marginalized youth 2^nd, 3^rd and perhaps 4^th chances. Today it’s stronger than ever, and its dynamic founder, Dorothy Stoneman, remains one of my heroes.  Once just Boston-based, YouthBuild now reaches many corners of the globe. Clearly there’s a need: 2.3 million low-income US 16-24 year-olds are not in education, employment, or training. Globally, over 200 million youth need education, jobs, entrepreneurship, and other opportunities. YouthBuild provides pathways. https://www.youthbuild.org/

Oh, and don’t forget your local NPR and PBS stations!

Thank you, and Happy New Year….

 

(It seems appropriate to mark the longest night of the year and a dark time in our political  history by reprinting this tongue-in-cheek paean to greed.  Hundreds of readers took me seriously the first time around, nearly four years ago. I guess I should have published it on April 1.)

After 37 years with NPR and PBS, I’ve finally come to my senses. I have had it with the non-profit world. It’s my turn to make the big bucks.

Because education is what I know, that’s where I intend to set up shop. I am going into the business of remedial education, and I know it’s going to be a gold mine. All I need are failing kids, and I don’t see any signs that the supply is drying up.

What has prompted this 180-degree turn? This sudden change of heart?

It was a recent news report, the key paragraph quoted below:

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for ‘challenging corrections budgets.’ In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full.

(The emphasis was added.)

You may be wondering what a report on prisons has to do with education, but this is deja vu all over again, in Yogi’s memorable phrase, because back in 1982 I spent six months in juvenile institutions in several states, including Minnesota, South Carolina and Texas, for an NPR documentary “Juvenile Justice, Juvenile Crime” (which won the George Polk Award that year).

Here’s what I learned: Juvenile institutions remained at-capacity or near-capacity no matter what the juvenile crime rate happened to be. For example, when juvenile offenses declined precipitously in Minnesota, the authorities simply changed the rules about what got you locked up. They criminalized behavior that previously led to a slap on the wrist. One particular example sticks in my mind: Until the crime rate went down, girls who ran away from home had been classified as PINS, persons in need of supervision, which requires no jail time. Then, rather than have the juvenile facilities empty, running away became an offense that warranted incarceration.

What a revelation: the needs of the institution — for bodies to watch over — took precedence over the needs of youth. ‘We’ve got the facility, the guards, the payroll; we need youthful offenders,’ the logic went. Because the dominant value system favored adults and jobs over kids, they didn’t even need a guarantee.

So you can see the brilliance of Corrections Corporation of America, asking for an iron-clad guarantee from the 48 states that they will keep the prisons 90 percent full! Who cares what the crime rate is. Just keep the convicts coming.

Now, let’s talk about my business plan.

What I am going to offer states and school districts is this: I will take over their remedial education in return for their guarantee that they will keep giving high school diplomas to students who aren’t ready to function.

Come to think of it, I may not need a written guarantee. Just look at the track record of school reform since in began in earnest with the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983, and since that time governments and foundations have spent billions of dollars. The dropout rate hasn’t changed much, and the number of graduates needing remedial work when they go to college has climbed dramatically.

Who have been the primary beneficiaries of ‘school reform,’ I ask you?

Duh, the for-profit companies! While consultants and think tanks have done OK, and reporters have been kept busy, the real money has been in testing and textbooks and technology and construction.

Frankly, ‘school reform’ is too expensive for states to continue with, especially since it hasn’t worked. They can cut back on reform, sign with me, and save a bundle.

I have some definite advantages over schools: (1) the technology to diagnose deficiencies and create specific programs that address those shortcomings and measure accomplishment; (2) a population of (finally) motivated young people who realize they need certain skills if they want to find decent jobs; and (3) powerful financial incentives that encourage me to teach them quickly.

Regarding No. 1: schools have semesters, but I will have self-paced modules. Learn it, prove you’ve learned it, and you’re done.

No. 2: While schools have lots of students who are bored and fed up with being treated like numbers, my clients — those former students — will be eager to learn and get on with their lives.

No. 3 is the key. Unlike today’s educators, I will get paid only when the students succeed. Should I fail, I get hurt where it matters: in the pocketbook. In most education systems, failure is blamed on the students. And then their failure is usually ‘punished’ by promotion to the next grade.

So my approach is revolutionary.

Is there competition? I am not the least bit worried about the Departments of Remediation that some colleges have created, because they function exactly like those juvenile institutions back in the 1980s — they need remedial students to stay open. So if they are successful in helping some kids, they will inevitably lower the bar for ‘remediation,’ in order to keep the warm bodies coming. Their financial incentives are screwed up.

Mind, you, I am smarter than that. I will not be calling what I do ‘remediation’ or anything that sounds remotely like failure. What I am going to offer to do is ‘certify’ the skill levels of high school graduates; it’s the same way that the mechanic ‘certifies’ your wreck of a car by banging out all the dents, changing the oil, points and plugs and installing new shock absorbers so it is ready for the road!

The only possible threat to my business would be an education system that focused on the needs of individual children; a system that taught and encouraged thinking instead of teaching (and testing) things. In that approach, time would be the variable, performance the constant. Students would be empowered to dig deeply into issues and…. (Why bother going on about this — it’s not going to happen!)

I’m looking for investors. Act now, to get in early.

(if you’re interested in the comments from 2012: http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=5587)

Our bus of 40+ “pilgrims” left Mississippi and headed for Selma, Alabama, the site of three historic Civil Rights marches in March, 1965.  As the bus sped along, we watched “Selma,” Ava DuVernay’s wonderful film that brings to life the struggle southern Black citizens faced when they attempted to register to vote.  (The narrative and photos regarding our experiences in Mississippi are here.)

Earlier we heard about the obstacles put in way of Black would-be voters from Flonzie Brown Wright, who was inspired to join the Civil Rights revolution after the assassination of Medgar Evers in June, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi.  Black registrants, she told us, had to correctly answer 21 questions, while Whites had to answer only six. Item 17 was the toughest: The Registrar cut the Alabama Constitution in small slivers, the applicant would pick one sliver and then interpret its meaning…to the Registrar’s satisfaction.   The sliver Flonzie pulled said ‘habeas corpus,’ a phrase she had never heard–and which she suspected the Registrar hadn’t either. She couldn’t explain it, and so the Registrar marked her application ‘denied.’  By the rules, she had to wait at least 30 days before reapplying.

Flonzie told us that she went home and memorized the entire Constitution. 30 days later, she returned to the Courthouse, just happened to pull ‘habeas corpus’ again, and passed. Of course, she now realizes that ‘habeas corpus’ was probably written on every single one of those slivers!

(In time Flonzie would run for office and win, eventually becoming the supervisor of the Registrar of Voters!)

Blacks throughout the South had been agitating and protesting over voter registration for some time.  In fact, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had spent months on a campaign in Albany in his home state of Georgia.  Because Dr. King’s effort to register voters there had not succeeded, he came to Selma. He reasoned that, because Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark (below) was known for his hair-trigger temper and stubbornness, Selma offered a better opportunity to call national attention to the cause.

Dr. King was correct.  Clark ordered his troops to take action against non-violent protesters who were blocking the Selma Courthouse steps.  Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American teenager, tried to stop a police officer from savagely beating his grandmother. In response, the policeman beat and then shot Jackson, killing him.

While no Civil Rights activists were killed during the actual march from Selma to Montgomery, two others died.

After the successful march to Montgomery, James Reeb, a White Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, inadvertently walked into a segregationist bar. He was savagely beaten and died two days later.

Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a White homemaker from Detroit, was driving several marchers back to Selma when Klansmen drove up alongside and shot her to death.

But it was Jimmy Lee Jackson’s death that catalyzed was the March 7th march, the one we all know as “Bloody Sunday.”  Organized in the Brown Chapel A.M.E Church , the march began in a vacant lot behind the red brick building.  (Joan and I and many of our group each brought home a small pebble from that lot, a reminder of the courage shown by those men and women.)

The Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate General, spans the Alabama River.

The city of Selma basically ends at the river; the other side is under the jurisdiction of Dallas County, and it was there that 200 state troopers, some on horseback carrying whips and cattle prods, were waiting for the approximately 500 marchers on Sunday, March 7th.

Sheriff Clark ordered the marchers to turn around. When they refused, the officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent protesters with billy clubs and sending more than 50 to the hospital. Young John Lewis, now a long-serving Congressman, was among those savagely beaten.

(On the following Tuesday the marchers, now numbering 2000, again began to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge. On the other side, the same force awaited. But as the marchers reached the crest of the bridge, the police withdrew. Dr. King and the others knelt in prayer. When he arose, Dr. King turned around and led the marchers back to Selma in what became known as “Turnaround Tuesday.” He apparently feared a trap, which would have led to greater harm to the marchers.)

The national outcry that followed “Bloody Sunday” changed things. When Alabama Governor George Wallace refused to provide protection, President Lyndon Johnson sent in  2,000 soldiers, mobilized 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard, and ordered the participation of  FBI agents and Federal Marshals.  Marchers began the 54-mile journey on March 21, averaged about 10 miles a day, and slept in Black-owned properties en route. The group–now numbering about 25,000–arrived in Montgomery on March 24, 1965.

This photo–the curb outside the Alabama State Capitol–requires some explanation.

Governor Wallace refused to allow Dr. King to speak from the Capitol grounds, including the marble sidewalk. In fact, we were told that he ordered troopers to shoot anyone who set foot on the sidewalk. (Our guide said ‘shoot to kill,’ but no one has corroborated that.)

So the March organizers brought in a flatbed truck and parked it about a foot away from the sidewalk. From that flatbed and using hay bales as his lectern, Dr. King gave one of his most memorable speeches, “How long? Not long.”

Unfortunately, no plaque marks the spot or the occasion, one of the turning points in the African American struggle for equal rights.  (There is, however, a star marking the spot on the Capitol steps where Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, spoke to his supporters during the Civil War.)

“Bloody Sunday” and the Selma-to-Montgomery March changed American history. Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Right Act of 1965 that same March, and the Congress passed it. No more trumped-up tests for voters and other phony barriers.

Dr. King, who delivered that memorable speech, was only 25 when he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954 (above).  Dexter Avenue Baptist is the only church that he ever pastored, although he delivered many memorable sermons at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the church his father pastored. This Church, since renamed to acknowledge King’s role, is just one block from the State Capitol, and it was here that many of the meetings that sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott were held.

Local Civil Rights activists–not including Dr. King–had been planning for some time to challenge Montgomery’s segregated (but allegedly ‘separate but equal’) bus system. All ‘colored’ riders were required to sit in the back of the bus and to give up their seats if a White passenger couldn’t find a seat. Moreover, ‘colored’ passengers had to enter the front of the bus to pay their fare but get off the bus and board through the rear door.

When 42-year-old Rosa Parks boarded a bus to go home from an exhausting day at work on December 1, 1955, she sat in the first row of the “colored” section in the middle of the bus.  When the bus filled up and the driver noticed that several white men were standing, he demanded that Parks and several other African Americans give up their seats. Three other African American passengers reluctantly gave up their places, but Parks remained seated. The driver asked her again, once again she refused, and she was arrested and booked for violating the Montgomery City Code. At her trial a week later, in a 30-minute hearing, Parks was found guilty and fined $10 and assessed $4 court fee.

At the marvelous Rosa Parks Library and Museum, visitors virtually experience what Mrs. Parks did. You stand alongside a real city bus and watch the entire drama unfold inside. Not to be missed!

We learned that the boycott might never have come off had it not been for another unsung hero, Jo Ann Robinson of the Women’s Political Council.  She mimeographed thousands of circulars and had them distributed.  It said in part, “This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday.”

Somehow the local newspaper got a copy of the circular and turned it into the lead story, which actually had the unintended effect of publicizing the nascent boycott!  The world moves in mysterious ways.

And notice that Jo Ann Robinson’s circular called for a one day boycott!  It lasted for well over a year, 382 days to be exact.

When 40,000 African Americans stopping riding the buses, the economic pain for the city and the company was immediate: about $3,000 per day in fares.  It was a difficult struggle for the boycotters, who had to find alternate ways to get to work, if in fact they did not lose their jobs.

As the Museum’s exhibits relate, the bus boycott meant 382 days of walking to work (for some, 20 miles), seemingly impromptu ‘car-pooling’ (because scheduling would have been illegal), harassment, intimidation, and violence for the Montgomery’s African-American community. Dr. King, who had been chosen to lead the movement because he was young and new to the city,  and his family were in personal danger.  His home was attacked.

Dr. King and nearly 100 others were charged with ‘interfering with a local business.’ Rather than waiting to be arrested, they turned themselves in, crowding the jail and eventually the court.  He was fined $500 and served two weeks in jail.

Meanwhile, the local NAACP, under the leadership of E.D. Nixon, argued in court that the city ordinance mandating segregated seating was unconstitutional, based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After being defeated in several lower court rulings and suffering large financial losses, the city of Montgomery finally conceded defeat and lifted the law mandating segregated public transportation. The bus boycott was over!

The white backlash was strong.  In March 1957 the city of Montgomery passed an ordinance making it “unlawful for white and colored persons to play together, or, in company with each other . . . in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, pool, billiards, softball, basketball, baseball, football, golf, track, and at swimming pools, beaches, lakes or ponds or any other game or games or athletic contests, either indoors or outdoors.”  And violence erupted. Five Black churches were burned, and two buses were fired upon by snipers, wounding several Black passengers, including one pregnant woman.

Rosa Parks eventually moved to Detroit, because neither she nor her husband could find work in Montgomery and because of death threats.  She remained active in the battle for Civil Rights throughout her life.

Not far from Dexter Avenue Church and the State Capitol is the Civil Rights Memorial Center, a living monument to the Movement’s ‘foot soldiers,’ the many unsung heroes who died during the struggle.  This deeply moving memorial was designed by Vietnam Veterans Memorial architect Maya Lin.

 

The Memorial, a project of the invaluable Southern Poverty Law Center, invites quiet contemplation and a renewed commitment to racial justice and tolerance.

So many brave men, women and children, dead at the hands of violent racists. Most of those memorialized here were unknown to me, but look carefully at the photo below to find the names of the four little girls who died when their Church in Birmingham was bombed in 1963.

Visiting Montgomery was a deeply emotional experience on many levels, but nothing was more moving for me, and many others, than being in the King family home, a modest dwelling owned by the Church.

Entering the King family living room, which we have all seen in photographs and on television, was a powerful moment.

And I was not prepared for the waves of emotion that swept over me when I touched the dining room table where Dr. King, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, E. D. Nixon, Harry Belafonte, and others planned their next moves.  (No photos because by then their small home was filled with all 40+ of us.)

Visitors are free to walk into Dr. King’s small study, even to touch his books and his collection of LP record albums. To pick up the rotary phone and imagine hate-filled voices threatening the King family.  Or sit at the kitchen table where Dr. King prayed for guidance late on January 27, 1956, when he was plagued by doubts.

I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.

The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”

Three days later his home was fire-bombed, the family barely escaping serious harm. When an angry crowd gathered outside on the streets, Dr. King emerged and spoke to the people gathered there:

If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Remember the words of Jesus: “He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword”. We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: “Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you”. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love. Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance.”

As we all know, in 1968 Dr. King was ‘stopped,’ murdered by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. The Civil Rights movement stuttered and stumbled on occasion, but, as Dr. King foretold, it has not been stopped, although, arguably, the drive for equality, tolerance and freedom faces its greatest challenges in 2017 and the years ahead.

The final stop on our memorable Civil Rights tour was Birmingham, often called “Bombingham” in the 1960s.  If you have read Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, you know that industrial Birmingham played a central role in the South’s deliberate–and largely successful–strategy for keeping many Blacks from achieving financial and other success, from Reconstruction to the beginning of the Second World War.

(If you haven’t read Slavery by Another Name, I urge you to do so.  Quite honestly, it’s an experience that demarcates my life into before I read the book and after I read it.)

In the 1960s, Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.  Homemade bombs were the weapon of choice for white racists (thus the city’s nickname). Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s police commissioner, was notorious for–and apparently proud of–using brutality in combating demonstrators, union members, and Blacks.  Birmingham was also the focus of Civil Rights demonstrations, some led by Dr. King.  He had been arrested in the Spring of 1963, and it was after that arrest that he wrote the famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

And many of the Civil Rights demonstrations and marches began here, at the 16th Street Baptist Church, making it an obvious target.

Bombers struck on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963.  The bomb went off just outside the room where five teenage girls were  getting ready to sing. Four died.  A fifth young girl, Sarah Collins, age 10 and the younger sister of Addie May Collins, was blinded in one eye.

Across the street from the Church is this majestic memorial to the four girls.  Note the dancing shoes.

That image remains in the forefront of my memory.  Four young lives snuffed out by white racists.

After the bombing, Alabama Governor George Wallace sent police and state troopers to quell protests. Two protestors were killed.  However, outrage over the killings led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965.  As noted in Part One, the case was reopened after Jerry Mitchell’s investigative reports.  Two of the bombers were eventually brought to justice.  The case was directed by former United States Attorney Doug Jones, who told the full story to our group one evening.  J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, had sealed the files after the bombing, thus effectively preventing prosecution of suspects.  That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, Jones told us, because, if a case had been brought to trial in the 1960’s, an all-white jury would have acquitted the defendants.  Mr. Jones in now in private practice in Birmingham.

Where are we as a country today, as Barack Obama prepares to leave office?  Will we allow the past to repeat itself?   Will our President-elect, seemingly unburdened by an understanding of history or by intellectual curiosity, unleash the forces of hatred? Has he already done so?

Even if Mr. Trump surprises us, it is still difficult to be optimistic after reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which lays out in excruciating detail how the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs has racialized our justice system and populated our prisons and parole systems with millions of African American men, thus marking them as ‘second class citizens’ who are unable to vote, serve on a jury, or qualify for valued jobs.

But, as our Civil Rights tour made manifest, America has been in the depths before, and we have emerged triumphant.  The pendulum swings, and it clearly has swung in a direction that many of us find frightening and depressing.

We must continue to believe, with Dr. King, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”   And we must work together toward that end.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.  Please share this 2-part journal with others, particularly your younger friends and acquaintances.

 

(Photos by Joan Lonergan, Leslie Worthington and Julia Parker; historical photos courtesy of the Associated Press.)

(For more information about the tour, contact the talented and energetic Tyson Elbert of Mississippi State University at tyson@sig.msstate.edu.  I can be reached at john.merrow@gmail.com)

 

What follows is a journal of response and reflection after a remarkable 4-day journey along what might be called the Civil Rights Trail, from Jackson, Meridian and Philadelphia in Mississippi, and Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama. My wife and I and about 40 others made this trip at a time of rising anxiety among minorities and many whites about the increase in hate-related behavior following our recent presidential election.  The question hanging over us: will we allow the past to repeat itself?

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI:  (Our first stop) The Greyhound bus station in downtown Jackson has been restored since the days of the Freedom Riders, who were seeking to desegregate public accommodations (as required by the Supreme Court). It takes a powerful imagination to visualize busloads of Freedom Riders arriving May 24th, 1961, guarded by tight security. In other cities the Freedom Riders had been viciously attacked, their buses burned, and the city of Jackson was determined to avoid violence (fearing for its reputation, not the Civil Rights activists.) And so, on arriving at the Greyhound station, the activists got off the buses and walked into the ‘White Only’ waiting room, where they were immediately arrested, marched into other buses, and taken to jail or directly to Parchman Farm, Mississippi’s notorious maximum security state prison. At their trial (and before convicting them), the judge actually turned his back whenever their defense attorney was speaking. He sentenced 161 Freedom Riders to 60 days in Parchman, although the convictions were eventually overturned. While at Parchman, most were held in isolation. Mississippi’s Governor, Ross Barnett, is supposed to have told prison officials, “Break their spirits, not their bones.”

Medgar Evers, a college-educated World War II veteran and a prominent civil rights activist, lived and died here.  Died on June 12, 1963, shot in the back by Byron De La Beckwith, a prominent member of the White Citizens’ Council. Mr. Evers had survived two earlier assassination attempts; a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home and, one week before his murder, someone tried to run him down as he was crossing the street outside the local NAACP office.

Our guides on the trip were former ‘foot soldiers’ in the struggle for Civil Rights. One told us how Mr. Evers had been taken to the local hospital, where he was denied treatment because of his race and only admitted when hospital officials realized that he was ‘important.’ It was too late. He died..and was later buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

De La Beckwith got away with murder…for  31 years.  Finally, in 1994 he was brought to justice and sentenced to life imprisonment (Two previous trials in 1964 had resulted in hung juries).  De La Beckwith died at age 80 in 2001, seven years after being convicted. We heard this gripping story, and others, from a remarkable reporter, Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson.Jerry, whose numerous awards include a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, is a fearless reporter whose work has put at least four notorious race-baiting Klansmen behind bars…including one of the men who bombed the Birmingham church in 1963 and one of the Klansmen who murdered James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964. Jerry is also a warm, generous, engaging story-teller as well as a credit to the profession I recently retired from.

Our trip was organized by  the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University and the Education Policy Center at The University of Alabama. Most participants worked at Community Colleges in Alabama and Mississippi and were serving as Educational Policy Fellows in a program run by the Institute for Educational Leadership. My wife and I gained (paid) admission because I serve on the IEL Board.

This was our next stop, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, which is in rural Mississippi but near both Philadelphia and Meridian.

This church has been burned twice, in 1964 and again in 1971.  The first burning occurred in June of 1964 when two groups of Klansmen surrounded the church, expecting to find Michael ‘Mickey’ Schwerner inside.  The Church’s leaders had agreed to allow a Freedom School to operate there, and someone had shared that news with the wrong people.  We learned that the Klansmen fought among themselves about the ‘appropriate’ punishment for the Church and parishioners. They savagely beat some churchgoers and then left, but one of the two Klan groups later returned and torched the church, destroying it.

We were privileged to hear from parishioners and church officials everywhere we visited, and what remains most striking, unforgettably so, is the forgiving attitude of those who were victimized by white racists.  When I expressed amazement, one woman said simply, “If you let hate fester, it will kill you.”  She paused and added, “And then they win.”

When word that Mt. Zion Church had been burned to the ground reached Mickey Schwerner in Oxford, Ohio, where he and his wife were helping train the Freedom Summer volunteers, he packed his bag and left for Mississippi.  Accompanying him were his close associate James Chaney, a native of Mississippi and an African American, and one bright volunteer, Andrew Goodman of New York City.

Arriving in Meridian, they went to their headquarters to tell the two young people at the office of their plans. One of them was Roscoe Jones, then 18 years old, who was one of our guides on this remarkable tour.  Roscoe told us that James Chaney asked him to come along, but Mickey said Roscoe couldn’t come without his mother’s permission, which he did not have.  Because he stayed behind, he is alive today.  Roscoe, now 69 years old, is pictured below at James Chaney’s gravesite.

On the drive from Mt. Zion back to Meridian, their station wagon got a flat tire. While they were changing the tire, local law enforcement noticed two whites and one black and stopped to question them. When a cop recognized Schwerner (known to them as ‘The Goatee’), the police waited until the three drove away and then arrested them.  The charge was ‘speeding.’  They were held in the Philadelphia jail (below) until well after dark–long enough for the law officers to inform the Klan and for members to gather near the jail.

As Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman left town late that night they were followed by law enforcement and others. Before they reached the Neshoba County line (and perhaps safety), their car was pulled over after a high speed chase, and all three were abducted, driven to another location, and murdered. Schwerner and Goodman were shot on the spot, but Chaney was savagely beaten before being killed.  Andy Goodman, a New York college student, had been in Mississippi less than 30 hours.  They were murdered close to this spot below.  Buried in an earthen dam, their bodies were not discovered for 44 days…and then only after a substantial reward was offered.

(During the search, which included dredging canals and ponds, searchers discovered NINE additional bodies, victims of earlier violence.)

That was in 1964, and, sadly, the race hatred remains.  Plaques commemorating their deaths are ‘routinely’ trashed. Notice in the photo below the TWO plaques near Mt. Zion Church, the vandalized one on the ground, its new replacement recently installed.

And James Chaney’s grave has been vandalized so many times that some local citizens have welded bars to keep it from being toppled over. The bars are clearly visible behind the tombstone.

On James Chaney’s tombstone are these words: “There are those who are alive yet who will never live. There are those who are dead yet who will live forever. Great deeds inspire and encourage the living.”

When the state of Mississippi refused to prosecute, the US Government charged 18 men with civil rights violations. Seven were convicted in 1967 but served only minor sentences.

However, the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman changed history. One consequence was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after which minority registration soared from about 6% in Mississippi to over 60% today, for example.

And to come full circle, 41 years after the murders and after extensive investigations by reporter Jerry Mitchell, one perpetrator, Edgar Ray Killen, was charged. Killen, an ordained Baptist minister and active Klan member, was convicted in 2005 on three counts of manslaughter and is serving a 60-year sentence.  Killen was known to all as “Preacher.”

With that, our bus left Mississippi and headed for Alabama, which I will write about next. Meantime, I urge you to watch “Freedom Summer,” a superb PBS film from WGBH and American Experience.

(The photos were taken by Julia Parker, Leslie Worthington and Joan Lonergan.)