The Past Is Never Dead

"Every time a man stands for an ideal or speaks out 

against injustice, he sends out a tiny ripple of hope." 

                                                             ~  Aaron Henry

                                                                           Clarksdale, Mississippi

“Aaron Henry recalls the days when Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were on the line, calling from Washington to his tiny Fourth Street Drugstore in Clarksdale to give heart to the movement. Foot soldiers in the bloody civil rights wars crowded the store's narrow aisles in those days, desperation and what sometimes seemed like misplaced hope overcoming their justified fears. Now, in the soft afternoon shadow, the phone is silent, and there is only one visitor, come to ask how things have changed.

Henry, a thickset man of 68, has been head of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since the civil rights movement was at its peak. Mississippi's Delta was one of its deadliest battlegrounds, a crescent of tormented land between Memphis and Vicksburg, hemmed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the poorest and blackest part of this country. A generation ago, some of the most oppressed blacks in the most harshly segregated state in the U.S. rose to claim their share of America's dream, and some whites did their violent worst to stop them.

Henry himself was arrested several times for his civil rights activities, and was once chained and shackled to a garbage truck to keep him from escaping. He glances up at the piece of tin that covers the hole in the ceiling where a bomb was thrown in 1964. All that is dim history now to most of the world. But not to Henry… ”

                                                            ~ Excerpt from Time Magazine 1991

                                                               Hugh Sidey’s America: Sad Song of the Delta 

I met Aaron Henry in 1971 at his 4^th Street Drugstore as he rushed back and forth between his pharmacy and the soda fountain, his campaign staff and the scores of UAW workers down from Detroit to support the civil rights movement. We campaigned for him that year knocking on doors, assisting in voter registration and doing what we could to help get out the vote in rural Clarksdale, Mississippi.

It had been eight years since his friend Medgar Evers, having dropped him off at the airport and headed home, was assassinated in his driveway as his wife, hearing the shots, sheltered their children in the only place she thought might offer some protection, their iron, claw footed bathtub. Aaron Henry was told years later that it had been a coin toss that decided that it would be Medgar and not he who would be assassinated that night. 

It had been seven years since a speech by Aaron Henry inspired a young student by the name of Andrew Goodman to volunteer in Mississippi along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, and it was in the summer of that year that the remains of all three young men were found buried in a dam, murdered by white supremacists. 20 years later the film “Mississippi Burning”, based on their story, would be nominated for 7 Academy Awards.

It had been three years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, barely 75 miles north of Clarksdale, and two months later that Robert Kennedy was gunned down in a hotel in Los Angeles.

All this was swirling through my head as we drove across the state line, the enormous Mississippi sky looming over us, miles of cotton fields and abandoned sharecroppers shacks rolling past. But to a naïve college kid from Washington D.C., this was also a time when all things were possible. A man had walked on the moon just two years prior, the Supreme Court had just ruled that the US Government’s attempt to suppress publication of the Pentagon Papers would amount to prior restraint and allowed the New York Times to continue publication, the 26^th amendment had just lowered the voting age to 18, opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a fever pitch, and  Lt. William Calley had just been sentenced to life in prison for atrocities committed during that war. It seemed as though the world was finally beginning to right itself, and I remembered what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had once said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice“, and at the time, I believed.

Medgar Ever’s brother Charles also ran for public office in 1971 and his hopes were focused on becoming the first black Governor of Mississippi. Charles, always a controversial figure, had returned home from Chicago upon the death of his brother and had taken over as field director of the NAACP in Mississippi. Charles had subsequently been elected mayor of Fayetteville in 1969 and became the first African American mayor of a bi-racial town in the state of Mississippi since reconstruction. When he was elected mayor all of the white members of the police department resigned rather than serve under a black administration.

Charles Evers
1971 Campaign for Governor of Mississippi

So in 1971 the lives and the campaigns of these two men were intertwined in an effort to move  Mississippi to a place beyond racial divides. So too were the names of many prominent Americans; Ramsey Clark, John Doar, Walter Reuther, Fannie Lou Hamer, Orville Freemen, Hubert  Humphrey, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and nearly every leader in the field of civil rights, all focused once again on the seemingly endless struggle for justice and equality in a state that at times seemed determined to enforce segregation at all costs, and for all time.

These people all knew the odds that they were facing in their struggle for justice and equality in Mississippi. No state in the South was more resistant to the struggle for racial justice. No place was more violent. No place had a higher rate of lynchings. No state in the country had a lower percentage of African Americans registered to vote. The pernicious effects of poverty, the denial of equal education, the state's plantation economy, and the lack of legal recourse all served to deny African Americans jobs and opportunity, and to enforce racial oppression.

Still, I was optimistic. The Voting Rights Act had been signed by Lyndon Johnson just a few years prior in the wake of the brutal and deadly violence at Edmund Pettis Bridge during the march from Selma to Montgomery. Despite continued defiance of the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education ruling and the massive resistance coordinated by a group of white southern congressmen in their "Southern Manifesto" the Federal Government had promised to step in to enforce the ruling, and the Congressional Black Caucus had just been established as a way to meet and discuss concerns that were important to the nine (out of 435) black members of the House of Representatives.  

But in 1971 uncertainty was still palpable on both sides of every door when a white kid knocked, asking the occupant to vote for a black man. But the United Auto Workers, pastors and divinity students from the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, volunteers from the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO, all deemed "outside agitators" by the local police force, were here again to support the movement and their swagger and determination based on previous years experience chided the rest of us to step quickly up the stairs, ready to be either physically thrown off the porch or simply have the door slammed in our face.

Both Aaron Henry and Charles Evers lost their election bids that year, but there was never a sense of defeat. They would simply try again, as they had done over and over, year after year. This was just one more small step in the long march toward justice and equality, and we all promised to return in a few years to bear witness to their eventual and inevitable success. It was an easy promise to make. I could leave this place of conflict and turmoil, of inequality and racial injustice, and return  for a time to a place where these uneasy truths still existed but could conveniently be ignored. At least by a white kid. At least in the north. The people of Clarksdale, Mississippi had no such opportunity. 

Aaron Henry (1997)
4th St. Drugstore, Clarksdale, Mississippi
Posters of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner

It has been 48 years since I was last in Mississippi and the state still has not elected an African American as Governor. As a matter of fact, Mississippi has not elected a black candidate to any statewide office in the 140 years since reconstruction. Just last November, amid statements swirling about a “public hanging”, glorification of the Confederacy, and a revisionist view of the Civil War, a white candidate from Mississippi once again defeated a better qualified, more experienced black candidate for the U.S. Senate seat.

But the clock is now being turned back in Mississippi. In 2013 a conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without Federal approval and once again allowed barriers to be established against free and fair elections such that the nation has not tolerated since the era of Jim Crow. More challenges to the Voting Rights Act are currently being prepared and that court is now more conservative than it was just six years ago. The devastating effects of historically founded racism both subtle and overt, along with the codified bigotry and dog whistles sparked by the tolerance of the current administration, are eroding the gains made at such a terrible cost in the 50's, 60's and 70's. The current climate in Washington D.C. fuels the conflicts at the state level. Problems remain to this day with voter registration, voter engagement, and voter participation, but the supreme issue now, as then, is racism. Infighting, gerrymandering, and the overwhelming power of the mostly white Republican Party compound the problem. 

That the name J. Edgar Hoover is still chiseled in stone atop the FBI building in Washington D.C. is a clear indication to anyone willing to notice that bigotry and racism are still tolerated here. It was J. Edgar Hoover who quashed the FBI investigation into the 1963 bombing of the 16^th St. Baptist Church in which four young girls were killed in one of the Ku Klux Klan’s most heinous acts of violence in the civil rights era. It was J. Edgar Hoover who did everything in his considerable power to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy.

In March of last year Linda Brown, the Kansas child at the heart of the landmark 1954 ruling “Brown v Board of Education” died at the age of 76, and we need to ask ourselves what, if anything, has changed. As the prominent Southern writer, William Faulkner once remarked, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”