Sean’s Blog

It’s been an all right couple of days. I got to hold B.B. King’s guitar Lucille and shake hands with the 1960’s president of the local NAACP. Friday we watched the groundbreaking ceremony for the forthcoming B.B. King museum, saw him give a performance/talk at Mississippi Valey College, then went to the blues festival that night. We got VIP passes to the groundbreaking in exchange for helping take down the stage afterwards. Lucille had been in her guitar stand on the stage for the ceremony and when I saw someone go to put her away I asked if I could have the honor. The guitar was heavy with thick strings, not an old man’s guitar at all. I was impressed. The afternoon talk was great. He had the band play quietly behind him as he rambled for an hour about music and the perspective of a community elder. He has the exact mannerisms and personality of a Zulu poet I was mentored by at UCLA, Professor Mazisis Kunene. It was kind of haunting. The festival was a lot of fun. They ran out of fried twinkies before I could get one, though. And have I mentioned KoolAid Pickles? They’re really pickles that have been marinated in Kool Aid. They’re awful. Anyways, Saturday we did some painting on a Habitat for Humanity house and some Habitat people threw the kids a pool party. Sunday we relaxed. Today we interviewed Carver Randle and Reverend Lunsford, two leaders in the movement since back in the day. And I started reading J. Todd Moye’s Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Suflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986.

So as promised, my thoughts on politics and the blues. I think the key, as is the key to a lot around her, is cotton. Both the blues and the politics of the movement are rooted in the cotton fields. I think before I came out here that would have sounded like some romantic silliness, but I mean it. Just feeling the heat and humidity of the Delta and trying to imagine picking and chopping cotton while listening to people who did is pretty powerful. Both B.B. King and many of his generation that spoke at the groundbreaking all started their speeches by talking about picking and chopping cotton when they were young. All of our interview subjects have talked about working the cotton fields. Family, church, and cotton seem to be the keystones to the childhood memories of everyone who grew up before the mechanization of the plantations. And to everyone we’ve heard so far, these are memories filled with joy and pain and that joy and pain are the wellspring of the blues and the motivation for civil rights workers. To those my age and younger, who grew up without ever working in the fields, neither the blues or the movement seem nearly as relevant.

Today we interviewed two people, Carver Randle and Reverend Lunsford (who checked me on my gender stereotyping by turning out to be a woman – I thought of you, Q). Mr. Randle is an attorney and the former president of his local NAACP from ’67 to ’75. He once ran for State office on a ticket with Fannie Lou Hamer. Coincidentally, he’s also B.B. Kings lawyer. We met him at St. Benedict the Moor church in Indianola. St. Benedicts is a Black Catholic church that served as one of the main meeting places for the movement. He described packed meetings planning protests and a drive by shooting that had happened there. He described how after finishing college the movement was everywhere. He talked about the movement’s demands that centered around education and supporting the youth in a way that reminded me of my work in L.A.. He was inspired by Father Smeagil at St. Benedicts and the fact that the oppression of his people mad him “mad as hell.” He told stories of White resistance, FBI surveillance, the KKK. One story he told was of a meeting there at the church to plan a demonstration the next day that was interruped by the news that the local elementary school had been firebombed and that civil rights activists were going to be framed for it. They decided to cancel the demonstration, which turned out to be the right thing to do. When Mr. Randle went alone the next morning to send home anyone who hadn’t gotten the message, he found the police their waiting to attack. He was surrounded and threatened himself.

Reverend Lunsford, it turns out, was attending that very school as a third grader. She says for the next three years she went to school in various churches and buildings while they faught to get a new school built. Reverend Lunsford was a mentee of Fannie Lou Hamer who was forced to leave the Delta for thirty years by White resistance. She joined the movement young, but explained she never thought of it as “the movement” at the time, it was just being active. In writings by people a generation older than her, people speak of “waiting for the movement to arrive” like it was an army marching through that you could join up with. But for her it was the environment she grew up in. She told of a boycott of a record store when she was a teen, demanding that Black people be allowed to shop while White people were still in the store. She also talked a little about tactics and strategies. When asked what she did during the civil rights movement, she talked about political work, organization building, direct action, and creating programs. Specifically she talked about voter registration campaigns, the Council of Federated Organizations, lunch counter sit-ins, and Head Start. When none of the students batted an eye at the mention of voter registration she backed up to explain the reality of what that meant: constant threat, police beatings, murder. Still she only vaguely referred to having to escape the Delta herself, presumably under threat of death. She also spoke on how harrowing it was to go to the store and walk down the street every day with White people, some of whom you knew were Klansmen, but because of the hoods you never knew who exactly.

Both of them made some of the same points. Both spoke of how the civil rights movement is not over but how it has lost the numbers and depth of commitment it had forty years ago. Reverend Lunsford spoke of doing get-out-the-vote work a few years ago where a Black woman who they drove to the poll said she wouldn’t vote for a Black candidate because Black people had never done anything for her! Mr. Randle spoke of people being lulled into apathy by the end of fieldwork and by modern comforts even though the main goals of the movement still have not been reached. Reverend Lunsford described those goals as health, happiness, and prosperity for everyone. The movement won’t be over, she said, until everyone is free, not only in this country, but all over the world. Both of them continue their work, undaunted by the challenges.

They also both had similar advice for the kids. They both exhorted the students to work hard and know that there is no limit to the success that is possible for them. But they also both balanced that with the admonishment not to think those who don’t succeed are lazy or failures. Everyone who succeeds does so because they have had help and everyone of us has a responsibility to do all we can to help those that come after us. Mr. Randle quoted Father Smeagil that “anything less than your best is stealing.” That is, we belong to the community and not giving back everything we can is taking away from that community.

Tommorrow we interview Charles McLaurin, field supervisor for SNCC during the height movement. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about SNCC. I’ll post again soon.

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