Days One and Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.

Day Seven
For our last day, we toured Jackson with Pastor Hugh, a lifelong Southerner.

Hugh spoke slowly, rhythmically: sweeping stories bulked up with meaty facts. Thoughtful, meandering exposition punctuated with truth bombs. Roundabout answers that forced me to connect the dots myself. We’d only been with him for an hour or two before it occurred to me that it might be wise to take notes. So I did (thank goodness). 

Hugh used a boarded-up building to explain Mississippi’s two deltas: there’s one at the southern part of the state, but when people mention the Mississippi Delta, they’re almost always referring to the river delta in the upper west corner of the state.

Here are some of my main takeaways from our day with Hugh:

People won’t give you the tools you need to overthrow them. 
At the fairgrounds, Hugh told us that back in the 60’s the 10-day event was divided into two fairs: nine days were for white people, and one was for Blacks. When the Blacks protested (and I think this happened for a couple years running), the protestors were rounded up and caged in the fairground’s cattle barns — within view of the capitol building. At that time Mississippi law said that a person had 40 days to post bail, so the protestors leveraged that against the system: they’d get arrested and then wait to appeal their case until the 39th day, effectively clogging up the jails.

Silence doesn’t mean peace.
Hugh pointed out the old library where The Tougaloo Nine — students from Tougaloo College — held their read-in in 1961. It was a tiny event, but it effectively kickstarted the civil rights movement. At the time, Hugh explained, many white people didn’t even realize there was a race problem. “White culture confuses silence with peace, so the people who talk about the problem are assumed to cause the problem, when in reality the problem already existed.”

Heroes versus Movements
We walked by the bus station where the Freedom Riders ended their journey. “You saw that wall of photos in the Civil Rights Museum yesterday, right? Of the 450 people that participated in the Freedom rides, did you notice that none — not one — of the people on that wall are famous? They were all just regular people who protested, did jail time, and then went back to doing whatever they were doing before — going to school or cooking food or farming.”

Hugh asked if we were familiar with David LaMotte. “If you aren’t, you should be,” he said, and then he explained told us what LaMotte says about heroes versus movements: Heroes are bigger than life, so if we always look for a hero to get the work done, then we won’t ever do anything — it feels too impossible. But a movement is made up of ordinary people; everyone gets to play a part. 

The Banality of Evil
Black southern homes often have photos on the wall of the same three men — Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy — “but let me tell you something about Kennedy,” Hugh said.

By the time the Freedom Riders were entering Mississippi, the whole world was watching, and the violence was making Kennedy look bad. So right before the bus entered Mississippi, Kennedy struck a deal with state authorities: in exchange for providing police protection for the riders, he wouldn’t intervene when state officials arrested and jailed the protestors. In other words, as long as the state made Kennedy look good on the news, they could do whatever they wanted in private.

Did this mean Kennedy was a horrible person? Not really, Hugh said. Governments are about compromise. Kennedy’s face-saving deal at the expense of the Freedom Riders didn’t necessarily mean Kennedy was a bad person, or even racist. “People make the best decisions they can at the time based on the opportunities they think they have,”

Evil isn’t just a few monsters doing all the terrible things, Hugh said. In fact, there might not be any monsters. Rather, evil is the accumulation of thousands of small compliances that enable evil to happen — and may make room for monsters to emerge. This, Hugh explained is called The Banality of Evil, and the converse, the Banality of Good, also exists: lots of small positive acts that enable great goodness.

History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.
Hugh led us down Farish street, the section of town that was the heart of Jackson’s Black community in the 1960s. He pointed out Peaches, the restaurant that MLK loved, and the Alamo Theater, and the building that at different points had housed the headquarters for everything that was anything: NAACP, SNCC, COFO, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember now.

Farish Street is now deserted — the unintended consequence of desegregation was the collapse of the black middle class, Hugh said, echoing the same theme we’d been hearing all week — but a few years back the city obtained funding to restore Farish street. They put in trees and redid the road and sidewalks, but then the money vanished, pocketed by investors and contractors, and now Farish Street is lost once again: a partially-revitalized ghost town, twice abandoned.

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Hugh said, paraphrasing Twain, “It rhymes.”

A movement is comprised of ordinary people doing small things.
On Farish Street, Hugh pointed out the building that used to be the YWCA and told us about how when there’d been a children’s march and the police were rounding them up, a few of the kids ran into the building to hide. When the police tried to go in after them, the woman in charge, a large Black woman refused them entry — This building is for women, she said. Men aren’t allowed, and the police listened. “I’ve heard that story many times,” Hugh said, “and you know what? No one knows that woman’s name.” 

Southern buffet: catfish, hushpuppies, ribs, stuffing, butter beans, cabbage,
sweet potatoes, greens, and summer squash

The rest of our country needs a Mississippi to make it feel better about itself.
We circled an enormous mall that was the hub of consumerism back in the 80s and is now completely abandoned, except for one little corner that, rather ironically, houses the Jackson City Water Offices. (The mall bore such an uncanny resemblance to parts of Station Eleven that I actually googled it to see if they’d filmed there — they hadn’t.) We drove through the fancy part of town and through a food desert. Twenty-five percent of Jackson’s population has an annual income of fifteen thousand dollars.

At one point, after a series of questions about what Jackson’s future might hold, the strain of living surrounded by such poverty and racial tensions, Hugh said, “Hang on a sec. Aren’t y’all from Virginia?”

And then my older daughter pointed out that we hadn’t seen hardly any Confederate flags on this trip but they’re everywhere in Virginia.

Goodness and evil, side-by-side
At the home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist who was murdered in 1963, Hugh told us how Medgar had had the house built to his specification: a gravel roof so it’d be easier to put out the fires in case it’d be fire-bomed (which it was). A brick wall that rose a certain number of inches above the height of children’s beds so they’d be protected from gun fire while they were sleeping. A side door instead of a front door. A fridge on wheels positioned beside the kitchen door so it could double as a barricade.

Hugh pointed to the spot where the gunman had been standing when he shot Evers as he was unloading some things from the trunk of his car. The next door neighbor had come to Evers’ rescue, loaded him into the car, and rushed him to the hospital. But it was against hospital rules for Blacks to be treated by white staff. Evers’s wife had called their family doctor, a Black man, but when he arrived, he wasn’t allowed to use the hospital equipment. Eventually, the head doctor arrived and said he’d take responsibility for breaking the rules, but by then it was too late. 

“And here’s the thing,” Hugh said. “Twenty-four hours earlier in that very same hospital, doctors had just successfully performed the first lung transplant. That evil and goodness coexisting side-by-side pretty much sums up Jackson.”

Broken bodies, breaking bread
That evening we met back at the Open Door church for a catered feast of potato salad, pasta and chicken, green beans, cornbread, three kinds of cake, and sweet tea made by a 15-year-old girl, and then Hugh led us in a closing reflection. 

He told us that when the protestors were caged in the cattle pens at the fairgrounds, the officers made the white and Black protestors sit on opposite sides of the pens. The guards fed the white protestors first, but the most amazing thing happened: Each person, without speaking, took their cup of milk and set it on the ground in front of them, placed their bologna sandwich on top, and waited. Then the Blacks were served, and they did the same. The two groups sat there silently, facing each other, and when everyone had been served, the whites and Blacks quietly, and as one body, ate together.

“This might be heretical,” Hugh said, “but I believe Jesus has already returned — and his body has been lynched and burned and broken again and again and again.”

And then he served us communion with sweet tea and cornbread left over from our dinner. 

This same time, years previous: currently, when there’s “nothing” to eat, on getting a teen out of bed in the morning, the quotidian (5.12.14), one more thing, the reason I got up, springy dip, for a reason.

Day Five, continued
After spending the majority of the day with Leroy, we drove to Nanih Waiya, a Choctaw Indian Mennonite Church, for a mid-afternoon lunch of “Indian Tacos” (fry bread with all the fixings — beans, ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream), sweet tea, pecan pie, and banana pudding.

In the meeting that followed, they told us about how their church was bombed three times during the civil rights movement, and a few of the older women talked about growing up as sharecroppers, and how the three groups — Blacks, whites, and Choctaw — didn’t like each other. I don’t know why, one of the women said. We just didn’t like each other. But now so many Choctaws are married to other races that eventually there might not even be a Choctaw race. 

Day Six
We drove to Jackson where we attended Open Door Mennonite Church, a tiny congregation of super-friendly folks.

Afterward, we went to a restaurant for lunch — catfish, sweet potato fries, fried green tomatoes — with Pastor Horace, and then spent the afternoon at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. 

At first I wasn’t too excited (I was getting weary of absorbing information, and nothing quite compares to the EJI museum!), but then I started digging into the displays, sitting for the movies, actually reading the information and trying to connect it to the stories I’d already heard. After a week of being so focused on a theme, the bits of information were beginning to stack up, sort of like a Russian nesting doll of experiences. For example:

• Inside the Freedom Summer of 1964 were the freedom schools. 
• Inside the freedom schools were lots of Black families who hosted Black and white college students who’d come to the south to teach the children and get people to register to vote. 
• Inside the voter registration efforts were church bombings, murders (included the lynchings of the three civil rights workers), marches, protests, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the (1965) passage of the Voting Rights Act.
• And inside all those things were a handful of individuals doing small things — reading a book in a library, wading into the water at a whites-only beach, registering to vote (click that last link and then scroll part way down the page for a sample literacy test!) — that, together, made up a movement.

In the Emmett Till display, I listened to a recording of a person working with the Emmett Till Interpretive Center who had been involved in the installation of a commemoration marker at the murder site. He told about an interaction he’d had with a man who’d been angry about the marker.

“Why are you bringing this stuff up now?” The man had demanded. “That’s in the past!”

But the worker, instead of getting angry, asked the man if he had children, and explained how helpful it can be to a grieving community when they can publicly remember what they have lost.

The man walked off without saying much, but the next day he returned. “My wife is a seamstress in a fabric store,” he said. If you’re going to have an unveiling of a marker, then you need a good piece of fabric. We’d like to contribute that for the ceremony.” 

“I could’ve called gotten upset and labeled that man a racist,” the person concluded, “but I didn’t and look what happened.”

This same time, years previous: double chocolate scones, the quotidian (5.10.21), the quotidian (5.11.20), an honor, Thursday snippets, prism glasses, tomato coconut soup, the quotidian (5.11.15), immersion, happy weekending.

Day Five
We met up with our tour guide for the day: Leroy Clemons, a racial equity trainer, and the executive director of the Neshoba County Youth Coalition.

We started our tour in front of a church where there was a marker commemorating the three civil rights workers who were lynched in 1964 when Leroy was just two years old: Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

Standing there, he talked about growing up on the Black side of the tracks in a safe, warm community, and never being afraid, and he told us how all 39 members of the police force were members of the Klan when he was growing up. No one mentioned the lynchings of the civil rights workers when he was a child— it was too painful for the adults, he said — so he learned about it on his own when he was in the 8th grade. One of his teachers recommended a book to him and, reading the story, he’d recognized his town and pieced things together. 

^{photo credit: a group member}

He talked about how, back in the early 2000s, Neshoba County had national record-high teen pregnancy numbers and how, through the formation of the youth coalition, they’ve dramatically slashed the numbers.

“But how?” we asked.

“We don’t talk about abstinence-only or safe sex or STDs or birth control, none of that,” Leroy said. “What we do do, is teach critical thinking skills: How’s it gonna feel when you have to tell your wife that half your paycheck goes to support another woman? What are you gonna do when you can’t get a job because you have a whole string of little ones to care for? Everyone makes mistakes, but the more mistakes you make, the harder they are to fix. But we tell our youth that if your mistake hasn’t killed you, then we can help fix it.”

“But lots of times girls find themselves in bad situations that they didn’t have much choice about in the first place,” someone pointed out. “How do you support girls who are dealing with things that are beyond their control?” 

“Our motto is: once a member of the Neshoba Youth Coalition, always a member,” Leroy said, “and if someone wants to get out, we help them find a way. For girls who are in bad relationships, we ask them why they need that person? What are they getting from that relationship? Once they can think critically about their choices, they can begin to make changes.”

He drove us though the business district on the Black part of town, pointing out all the stairs leading up from the road to now-empty lots where houses once had been. He pointed out the last diner on that side of town — I think he said it’d just gone out of business a week earlier. At the end of the street was the newly-integrated elementary school he’d attended. One of the little girls he played with — he even went to her house to play, and was treated well there by her family, he said — was the daughter of one of the Klansmen involved in the boys’ lynching. 

“I never knew anything about what had happened, so I didn’t know to be afraid at school,” Leroy said. “The teachers may have said things, but it just went right over my head.”

“But your parents,” I said, “weren’t they scared?”

“Yes, terrified, though I didn’t know it at the time. I remember they asked me so many questions. I know now they were checking to find out if I was being mistreated, but back then I just thought they wanted to hear about my day.”

^{photo credit: Rose Shenk}

Standing in the shade of an abandoned gas station where I watched a four-wheeler speed down the street in front of us and run the stop sign, Leroy told us that years after the movement, civil rights workers returned to Philadelphia to apologize. “We made a mistake,” they said. “We asked for equality when what we should’ve asked for was equity.” 

It struck me then (and at other times during the trip) how the civil rights movement was far from perfect. People didn’t know what they were doing. They messed up, misjudged, and asked for the wrong thing. Demanding change and making justice: these things are messy and imperfect. People betray each other and change their minds and give up. People lose their jobs, their homes, their lives. Looking back, the movement appears so linear and organized, almost like it was predestined, but it was anything but.  

He told us the story of the reopened murder trial 40 years after the event. Leroy and one of his white friends had decided to plan a commemoration of the civil rights murders, so they called a town meeting. “How do we remember this together?” they asked the people gathered.

“How about we hold a march?” one of the Black people suggested, and all the Blacks in the room nodded along. And then one of the white people said, “Or we could sign a declaration saying that this will never happen again,” and the Black fell silent and the white people nodded along. No decision was made that night, and after the meeting, Lero went to his white co-leader and asked, “Why didn’t you white people like the idea of a march?”

“Do you know what a march means to white people?” his friend said. “It means y’all are mad and you’re coming for us and there’s gonna be riots and looting! And what was so bad about signing a declaration anyway?”

“Do you know what a declaration means to Black people?” Leroy countered. “Absolutely nothing! White people have been signing, and breaking, declarations since forever. Words on a piece of paper don’t mean anything to us!”

So they called a second meeting. This time, there was no commemoration-planning agenda. Rather, the goal was to let the townspeople, both Black and white, tell their stories of what it was like growing up in Philadelphia. As people talked, the whites began to learn that Blacks weren’t angry at them — they didn’t want to fight them or get back at them, and the Blacks had lots of stories of the white people who had helped them — and the Blacks began to learn all the ways in which the whites had also been terrorized by Klan. 

The town meetings continued, the group eventually became The Philadelphia Coalition, and this group, along with some other events and key people, like the work of investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell, led to the reopening of the civil rights workers’ murder case. Forty-one years to the day after the lynchings, the Klansman who’d organized the murders was convicted. Leroy, who was very involved in that case, appears a number of times in the documentary (which we watched that evening as a group). 

Leroy told us that Mr. Killen, the Klansman who’d organized the killings and then been convicted four decades later, had said he wanted the boys to be lynched right along the road close to his house so he could pass the place every day and remember it. 

“We’ll go to that spot,” Leroy told us, “but we won’t stay long. I don’t like to tempt fate” — a statement which confused me until he explained that lots of Klansmen are from that area and live around there. (And then later our group leader shared that on one of her first tours with Leroy back in 2018 or so, Leroy had told the group, “If you see me start to run, run with me,” and only then did I begin to get an inkling of the risk he was taking.) 

Before we went to the murder site, Leroy took us out into the country to Mt. Zion Baptist, the church that had been burned prior to the civil rights workers’ murders. Standing in the yard of the church, Leroy walked us through the series of events that led up to the murders. 

^{photo credit: a group member}

Because Schwerner, one the civil rights workers, had spent some time working at that church, the Klan was on the lookout for him. One evening, there was a church meeting and a neighboring Black man noticed a strange Black man walking back and forth outside the church and, assuming the strange man was a guard and that Schwerner was inside, he tipped off the Klan. (Schwerner wasn’t inside — he’d left the area — and the strange man was just an out-of-towner who’d come for his daughter’s birthday and was waiting for the meeting to wrap up inside.) The Klan assembled, put up road blocks, severely beat some of the church people, and burned the church. When Schwerner returned to Mississippi not long after, he went to visit the burned church, along with Chaney and Goodman, and on their way back to Meridian, they were apprehended and killed. 

That’s the briefest of summaries, the best I can remember, but the version we got from Leroy was convoluted and nuanced. Like, for example, how the Black man who tipped off the Klan was a member of Mt. Zion Baptist, and how he remained an active member there for the rest of his life. Like, how certain details of the story came from children of Klansmen, and their memory of events. Like how the grandchildren of some of the Klansmen have married Black people.

The more Leroy talked, the more complicated the story became. There was nothing linear or clear-cut about this history, and listening to him, I felt the weight of that — heavy, unwieldy, and murky. 

^{photo credit: a group member}

Leroy then took us to the spot where the boys were murdered. We clustered on the edge of the country road while Leroy stood on the pine needles at the side of the road and recounted the details of the lynchings, details that were still being pieced together: The car chase. The shootings. The broken bones. The dismembering of one of the bodies. The last young man running and getting shot down, playing dead, and then being buried alive. The mundane details of coordinating a middle-of-the-night mass burial. The search for the bodies, and the discovery of more than a half dozen other lynched Black bodies in the process. 

He gestured down the road to his left, telling of the Klansmen who lived back that way. “Killen’s brother lived down there,” he said, “and in the documentary you’re gonna watch, he’s the one sitting in a recliner with a rifle on the table beside him. He died in that same chair last year, and no one found him for so long that his body had begun to decompose.” Leroy paused, and then he said, almost gently, “He died alone. Such a terrible death.” 

As we were leaving the site, my younger daughter asked about the blood. Wouldn’t that have been a giveaway?

“Killen came back the next morning,” Leroy said, “and cleaned up the area, as well as the chains and guns which he then returned to police headquarters.”

***

P.S. In a 2013 Hechinger Report interview, Leroy says, Our main focus wasn’t about prosecuting an 80-year-old man. It was about changing Neshoba County. It was about doing the right thing, about saying enough is enough, about speaking with one voice. This may sound crude, but some of these people will never change … it will take a few more funerals before we get to be where we need to be. There are still people who are determined that nothing will change in this city, state or country … they will go to the grave with their secrets and they will never tell, and a lot of it is out of fear. They don’t want to re-live those days. They have voluntary amnesia.

This same time, years previous: our sweet Francie, settling in, the quotidian (5.8.17), the science of parenting, how it is, so far today (updated), rhubarb cream pie, nekkid, kind of a joke.