Sean’s Blog

I’m in Mississippi with 8 of my students from the L.A. Leadership Academy. We’re out here to study civil rights history at the Sunflower County Freedom Project. Today was our first field trip, we went to interview Mrs. Downey, a 70-something year old woman born here in the Delta.

I’m really excited about this opportunity to spend some time meeting people who were part of the civil rights movement here in its heyday and to even meet a few of its leaders. I’ve often wondered how much I have in common with these people politically. Their reputation for being conservative church people, patriotic, Democrats, etc seems directly opposed to my revolutionary and anti-authoritarian values. I was greatly relieved when I met Rev. Jim Lawson during the DNC protest planning and he told us we were continuing King’s work. But I still wonder. Maybe its just my concern over the lingering effects of the lifestyle-anarchism I was a part of for so long.

So my personal goal for these two weeks is to listen as deeply as possible to what these people have to say and to try to learn how some of the most revolutionary successes in American history came from a people who seem so un-revolutionary. So here are the main points from the kids’ interview with Mrs. Downey:

Humility - Mrs. Downey was consistently humble. When asked what her greatest success in life was, she responded that she had managed to stay out of trouble and raise a family.

Slavery - Mrs. Downey knew which plantations her great-grandmotherhad worked on as a slave and knew the names of the different slave owners who had bought and sold her. She had learned all this from her uncle.

Racism - Her earliest memory of White Mississippians notorious pre-civil rights movement racism was the way her mother was treated. Mrs. Downey said that even as young as 3 or 4 years old, she was aware that her mother was never referred to with a “courtesy title,” but always by her first name if a name was used at all. She also remembers the oppression of sharecropping, how it kept people trapped in cycles of debt that forced young people to drop out of school so they could work.

Pre Civil Rights Movement Black Resistance - When asked if she ever wanted to fight back against racism in her youth she said it just never even entered people’s thoughts back then. She told of how when she would go to the store when she was young it was just assumed that you would let White people cut in front of you. It was just automatic. But she also told of how powerful the murder of Emmitt Till was and how there was always the threat of murder or lynching just below the surface.

How Successful was the Civil Rights Movement? - Racism, she said, will probably be around forever. Some problems have gotten even worse. But also, the world could always be better and we shouldn’t be looking for an end to the struggle. And the movement did have the very important success of creating new job opportunities for Black people. Black people from the Delta now can be more than sharecroppers.

Today’s Ills - Drugs are her number one concern for today. But connected to that is incarceration. She told us of Parchment Prison, the nearby state prison that used to be a slave plantation, about how it is full of young Black men arrested on drug charges. When I asked her if the problem was just Black people using drugs or if the problem was also the justice system, she hesitantly but thoughtfully replied that it was both and made some points regarding sentencing guidelines for crack versus powdered cocaine.

Suggestions - To the kids she suggested that they treat every individual in their lives in anti-racist ways and to seek out people across racial boundaries. She also stressed the responsibility we all have to open doors and give a helping hand to the generations that follow us.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.