The post Visual and Performance Artist Richard Lou appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Emmett Till Interpretive Center Executive Director Patrick Weems appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Civil Rights Historian Daphne Chamberlain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I get the feeling some people don’t want this conversation to happen,” said historian William Sturkey during last night’s public program at Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, Mississippi.

The framing question for the event was “What Kind of Monuments Do We Deserve?,” part of Zócalo’s two-year editorial and programming series entitled “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” supported by the Mellon Foundation.

It’s no secret that monuments are everywhere, Sturkey, the series’ moderator, said. They’re on statues, street signs, building names. But despite their ubiquity, there is a culture of silence around them, with powerful economic and political measures in place, including emerging “divisive concepts” legislation, which tries to stop discussion about their purpose and meaning in society.

During the night, Zócalo’s panelists attempted to unpack that silence, breaking down what monuments are and can be, why they are so polarizing and divisive, and what the future of monuments in this country could look like.

“Let’s start by getting on equal footing,” Sturkey began. He addressed the panelists: What are monuments, and what do they mean for society?

Civil Rights historian Daphne Chamberlain shared the first words that came to mind around monuments: “remembrance,” “reflection,” “reconciliation,” and in some instances, “rededication.” Such ideas shouldn’t be limited to physical structures, she said, adding that she even thinks of people “being monumental” for their work, and the legacies they’ve left.

Visual and performance artist Richard Lou seconded the idea that people can be monuments, and pointed out that technology can be, as well, like video documentation of the beating of Rodney King, and of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Shown over, and over, he said, “they’ve become monumental in my mind.”

For Lou, monuments first and foremost serve as an expression of power. Whoever controls monuments can control their meaning—“the most critical aspect in monument-making or monument-destruction,” he said. The evening’s final panelist, Emmett Till Interpretive Center executive director Patrick Weems, however, said that he primarily thinks about monuments in terms of peacebuilding studies—“for reimagining past wounds and creating a narrative for moving forward.”

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

“Everyone in this room watching us knows this is an emotional and very politically charged conversation,” Sturkey said. But why, he asked the panelists, does that have to be the case?

“There’s a lot of anxiety around truth-telling,” said Chamberlain to a murmur of agreement from the audience. “When you talk about feelings getting involved and of course what those monuments mean to you personally or politically… it begins to fester and then it manifests itself in such a way that you begin to see the actions of people in places like Jan. 6.”

Lou shared an anecdote from 2009, when he wrote and directed a site-specific work about Confederate general and KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. During a discussion after the performance, a woman spoke up and said Forrest had helped her ancestors in a difficult time. “She felt a very personal connection to Gen. Forrest,” said Lou. “But for people who have been marginalized, for people of color, it’s a negation of who we are, and who we strive to be.”

This is the conflict, Lou said. To the woman, “her worldview was wrecked, and if that worldview was removed, then how could she situation herself in regards to how she relates to everyday life?” The same was true for him. “My worldview exists in contrast and in opposition to what Nathan Bedford Forrest stood for.”

Weems pointed to initiatives like “The Welcome Table,” which helps communities engage in conversation around difficult subjects. We need to argue better, he said. But then there are guns. Take, for instance, the gunfire that desecrated placards put up to commemorate the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was brutally killed by white men in Mississippi in 1955. “Someone thought the way to debate whether that memorial should be there was to shoot it up,” he said.

This kind of silencing is part of an old playbook, Sturkey observed. How, he asked the panel,  can we respond to it effectively?

Weems spoke about how the Emmett Till Interpretive Center has continued to amplify its messaging across mediums, including creating a smartphone app and a traveling exhibit, “Let the World See,” which is currently on view upstairs at the Two Mississippi. “We’ve got to find ways to spread our messages,” he said.

Lou teaches at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, one of the states that have passed “divisive concepts” legislation, which, among other things, restricts what students can be taught about race. Debating better matters, Lou said, but if such trends continue, we won’t all have the same facts. “That knowledge would be subjugated,” he said, quoting bell hooks.

Chamberlain emphasized the importance of making sure that students “understand the power of the pen on paper.” She also spoke about how message makers need to be inclusive, and not silence “the histories of those of us sitting here on the stage, those of us sitting in this audience, and even spaces that reflect this history here,” Chamberlain said, gesturing around at the museum space.

Let’s start dreaming, Sturkey said: “What would our world look like—our region, our country, and Mississippi—if we had monuments that we don’t have to say, well, we can’t talk about the conflicts that they came from?”

“My dream would be to re-enfranchise and fully resource the human monuments that walk among us, so they could find their full potential in this country,” Lou said.

Chamberlain called for helping young people “see themselves in the narrative in a positive way.” One way to do this, she suggested, is teaching Mississippi students today about the “power and agency” demonstrated by young people decades ago who gave momentum and life to the Civil Rights movement in the state.

Weems said that his “highest hope” was to “get to a space where we have a democratic process where we are able to show up and trust leaders to listen to decisions made at a community level.” If this could happen, he said, “we would find out we have a lot in common.”

“If we listen only to the narratives broadcast from centers of power, we’re never going to be able to talk to each other,” said Lou. “How do we decentralize the narrative and localize it and provide opportunities where we can listen to each other and remind each other that we’re neighbors and not enemies and we have a commonality, and that’s our humanity?” he asked, amplifying Weems’ point.

“Perhaps we need monuments to educators, builders, people who raised families,” Sturkey said.

Before the conversation wrapped, the panel answered questions from the audience. “If you could look 10 years into the future, could you propose a new monument in Mississippi that doesn’t exist, and what message would you want it to tell?” one person asked.

“To me, there’s an easy answer to that,” said Sturkey. “In 1860, the enslaved people in this state outnumbered white people by 80,000. Everywhere you look, there are Confederate monuments. There’s virtually nothing that recognizes their existence. And it would be something big and important and says that they mattered.”

Chamberlain suggested a monument that was a labyrinth of sorts—one that captured the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that included “all of those voices that make up all these rich histories in the state that many of us were born and raised and loved.”

“I think there’s space for Black joy, for the Chinese American experience in the Delta. We need more stories, not less stories. Let’s flood our imagination with stories,” said Weems.

And Lou called for a statewide academy where high school students can learn strategies of resistance through storytelling, artmaking, journalism, or history.

The final audience question of the night asked the panelists to speak about the most compelling monuments they see young people creating today.

Weems gave a shout-out to Emmett Till Academy started by Gloria Dickerson, and the work they’re doing to create a Civil Rights tour in the Mississippi Delta.

Chamberlain talked about the students at Tougaloo, both at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and today, who are “taking history into their own hands.”

Finally, Lou spoke about his own students who are using art to make the invisible visible and to “amplify what it means to be a human being.” That work, he said, “is a grand monument.”

The post There’s Power—and Promise—in Talking About Monuments appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fannie Lou Hamer—a poor, middle-aged, Black sharecropper—wasn’t having it. That August, she testified before a convention committee, alongside better-known civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., and demanded the right to represent the citizens of Mississippi as a party delegate.

Hamer was not the typical face of the growing movement, dominated by elite men and youthful radical activists, but a Mississippi Delta cotton picker with a sixth-grade education. She sat at a witness table, the committee chair behind her, stared down by 100 rank and file members and nearly 200 spectators and reporters. Two male colleagues had already read prepared statements, to little response from the audience; Hamer’s speech buzzed with authentic personal and emotional experience, and it stole the show. Her voice rose as she recounted virulent racism and state-sanctioned terror. She told how a white landlord, W.D. Marlow, evicted her from the land she farmed and the home she shared with her husband and daughters—simply because she tried to register to vote. She described how police beat her brutally, just for trying to teach other people how to register to vote. Hamer’s eight-minute plea ended with a haunting question: “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where…our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Hamer’s words resonate today, as the fight for voting rights for Black Americans and other marginalized groups continues. On November 3, Republicans blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from advancing in the Senate, denying Democrats the opportunity to restore voting protections enshrined in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and recently struck down by the Supreme Court. Then, as now, Hamer’s story reminds us that famous leaders like Dr. King do not stand alone in confronting those who remain deaf to the voices of justice and unity. Ordinary Americans, too, must step up to demand change.

Hamer fought her way up from one of the poorest and most segregated places in the country to challenge a deeply divided nation. Born in October of 1917, she was the 20th child of Jim and Ella Townsend. At the time, one in four Black children in Mississippi did not live to see their fifth birthday due to malnutrition and lack of access to medical care; most hospitals refused admittance to women of color and their families. Seven of the Townsends’ children died before Hamer’s birth.

As sharecroppers farming cotton, the family was stuck in a perpetual cycle of poverty, borrowing from their landlord to cover the costs of housing, seed, equipment, and work animals, and purchasing food, clothing, and medicine at inflated prices through the landlord-owned and operated plantation commissary. Before paying the family at settlement time in December, the landlord deducted all these accrued expenses from their commissary account. If the price of cotton was high, the Townsends were able to save a little money to survive the winter. Most years, though, their share barely covered their debts. “We would just, you know, exist. Not really live, exist,” Hamer later told an interviewer.

Hamer started picking cotton at age six. She was a bright child, but by sixth grade she’d dropped out of school to help pay the family’s expenses, which would only be pressed tighter during the Great Depression. Some of her siblings moved North, or sharecropped elsewhere. In 1939, Hamer’s father, a part-time Baptist minister who supplemented the family’s income by bootlegging, died of a stroke. By then her mother had gone blind and was completely dependent on Hamer for food and shelter. Hamer found solace in her church, where the Bible and her powerful singing voice gave her spiritual and emotional comfort. In 1944, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a sharecropper and mechanic on the W.D. Marlow plantation outside of Ruleville, in Sunflower County. By this time, prosperity had increased in the Mississippi Delta, but many landlords continued to cheat their sharecroppers. Around her, Hamer saw fellow African Americans linger in abject poverty, unable to vote to improve their situation.

Changes were starting to brew in post-World War II America. Challenges to Jim Crow laws reached the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine that preserved racial segregation in American schools. But in places like Mississippi white supremacists pushed back. Black people who asserted their constitutional rights faced threats, economic reprisals, physical assaults, and murder.

Hamer would have been aware of all of this when, in 1961, young people involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization founded in April 1960, came to Mississippi to empower local people to register to vote. Hamer was living with Pap and their daughters on the Marlows’ cotton plantation when SNCC activists made it to Ruleville. Hamer knew the risks in getting involved with SNCC—violence, harassment, or worse from white neighbors—but also realized she must act. In recent months, a local white doctor had sterilized her without her consent after she sought treatment for benign uterine tumors; the procedure was so common for poor Black women that it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Unable to demand restitution or accountability from the doctor, Hamer became “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

SNCC offered her a glimpse of what was possible—the seeds for liberation. The group represented the beginning of a “New Kingdom right here on earth,” she later remarked, and “the hope that we prayed for so many years.” With the group’s support, Hamer took the voter registration literacy test; within hours, Marlow evicted her but demanded Pap and their daughters stay to finish picking the season’s crop. Unprepared, Hamer moved from neighbor to neighbor until she found a small rental. The SNCC promptly hired her to work as a community field representative to help other people register, recognizing her natural leadership abilities and nurturing them through personal and professional training. Encouraged by SNCC and other civil rights organizations, Hamer began organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to represent Black and marginalized Mississippians.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer and several SNCC colleagues were returning home to Mississippi after two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina, where they learned nonviolent protest and voter registration techniques. During a layover at a bus terminal in Winona, Mississippi, police arrested them for trying to integrate the terminal restaurant and washrooms—despite recently enacted federal rulings outlawing segregated seating on interstate buses and in terminals. The police department in Winona was known for unrestrained cruelty toward Black prisoners. Hamer and her colleagues survived four days of terror, including brutal beatings and sexual assault, before they were released.

In the convention hearing room in Atlantic City, Hamer relayed what she’d been through in stark terms, describing the punches and “horrible screams” that echoed in the Winona jail, and how the police pulled up her dress, exposing her bare body. The television audience was awed; President Lyndon Johnson, who listened to the convention live, was frightened. While he personally agreed that Mississippi, with a population that was half Black, shouldn’t be allowed to seat an all-white delegation at the convention, he was losing support from white southern Democrats who were flocking to the segregationist George Wallace and the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater. Seeking to blunt the impact of Hamer’s speech, Johnson called a press conference to pull cameras away from the hearing room, and soon negotiated an agreement with prominent civil rights leaders, including Dr. King, to seat the all-white delegation and give a paltry two nonvoting seats to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Hamer was deeply betrayed—“We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” she told a reporter—but her demands for representation had not failed. A year later, Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which reinforced the rights secured by the 14th and 15th Amendments, made poll taxes and literacy tests illegal, voided other laws that obstructed the rights of citizens to vote, and allowed federal registrars to monitor voter registrations and elections in states with histories of disenfranchisement. In 1968, at the DNC convention in Chicago, a reconstituted Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, now known as the Loyalist Party, was seated on the floor; Mississippi’s all-white delegation was turned away. A record 340 Black delegates and alternates from across the country sat and voted for the party’s nominees. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, reaffirming the 1965 law.

Today America faces a new voting rights crossroads—the kind of moment Hamer, who continued to face hardship but continued her activism until her death in 1977, would find all too familiar. In 2013, the Supreme Court reversed key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Federal oversight rolled back. State and local officials closed polling sites, made voting hours shorter, purged voter rolls, and passed stricter voter ID laws. In September, Texas passed SB1, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation.

Once again, it is harder to vote in minority and poor communities, and once again, advocates are pushing back. On November 4, the Department of Justice sued Texas over SB1, arguing that it violates federal voting rights laws. Congress is still considering the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. If these bills become law, they will help secure voting rights by setting national standards safeguarding access to the ballot, improving election security, ending congressional gerrymandering, securing elections from foreign influence and dark money, and easing access to voter IDs.

This time around, we don’t have Fannie Lou Hamer to call on us to fix our deeply and profoundly broken democracy. But we carry her story, which reminds us of the travails generations of Black Americans have endured in the fight for their civil rights—and that a single, ordinary voice can bring about the extraordinary change we want to see.

The post The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some brought enslaved African Americans with them. Others purchased workers in the slave markets of New Orleans, Natchez, and Memphis, which had been stocked by traders who brought laborers from the Southeast, where owners supplemented their income by selling children away from their parents, and husbands and wives away from each other. Motivated by the possibility of getting rich quickly, planters drove their enslaved people without mercy, displaying little of the paternalism sometimes shown by well-established Southern planters to the east.

In all, more than 750,000 of these unwilling African American immigrants were brought to the Mississippi Valley between 1820 and 1860, their new lives far more difficult than their old ones had been. And so, they frequently fled. There were “heaps of runaways” living near Natchez, Mississippi in 1854, an elderly enslaved man told the future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, then a correspondent working for the New York Times. They were seeking freedom from oppression—but also, like any other Americans, the opportunity to build better lives, in grand and small ways.

The history of these most persecuted of escapees is chilling. But it also gives us some idea of how people in impossible situations still managed to shape their own destinies.

Enslaved men and women fled for many reasons, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles from home. Courtesy of McPherson & Oliver, photographer/Library of Congress.

Today we associate escapes from slavery in the United States with the Underground Railroad and heroic flights to Canada. But white Southerners used the word “runaway” to describe any enslaved person absent from his owner’s control without permission—and escapees sought freedom in many different ways.

Many left plantations for only a night or two to visit friends and lovers, or to attend clandestine parties and religious services. Others “lay out” in nearby swamps and forests for weeks or even months, or fled to cities and blended into Black communities made up of both free and enslaved people. Some who left for good tried to return to the places from which they had been taken. A few attempted to reach Mexico, which abolished slavery in the 1820s. Some headed north on steamboats.

Most runaways didn’t get far. In the memoir Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup tells the story of his friend Wiley, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, with a responsible job operating a ferry, before being sold to a trader who carried him to Louisiana. During the 1830s, Wiley wound up on Edwin Eppes’ small plantation on Bayou Boeuf in the northern part of the state, where Northrup lived as well.

One night, Wiley went out without permission to visit a friend. The local slave patrol caught him, unleashed their dogs on him, whipped him, and then took him back to Eppes—who whipped him again. Several weeks later, having had enough of his new home, Wiley tried to return to South Carolina. He escaped an early pursuit by fleeing into a nearby swamp, and made his way to the Red River, 20 miles away. He was captured and jailed in nearby Alexandria. Soon again he was working in Eppes’ cotton fields.

A few escapees managed to return home. In 1836, a man named Sam fled on foot from Mississippi to South Carolina, where he was from, only to be seen by local residents in Barnwell County, who armed themselves and gave chase. Hunted like an animal and armed only with a knife and club, Sam was hit by bird shot but refused to surrender until receiving a mortal wound.

Ginny Jerry was a determined runaway who fled often but always remained close to owner Bennett Barrow’s large plantation in Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish. Barrow kept track of Jerry’s frequent escapes in his diary, sometimes getting angered when Jerry came back from prolonged escapes heavier than when he left, presumably thriving. An 1856 editorial in a Baton Rouge newspaper raged about the way runaways like Jerry fed themselves. “These runaway slaves kill your cattle … they do not remain all night in the dark, dreary swamp … they visit your servants in your own yard … there is scarcely a night of the week that your poultry yard is not inspected by some black rascal.”

In the fall of 1837, Jerry was gone for six months until Jack, likely another of Barrow’s enslaved workers, found him, beat him badly with a club, and brought him home. But Jerry persisted. Once in 1839 he claimed to be sick, and Barrow told him to “work it off,” but the servant instead chose “to woods it off.” Ginny Jerry’s last recorded escape occurred in 1845. It ended after three months when Barrow hired professional slave catchers to find him. Their dogs tracked Jerry and forced him into a tree; Barrow allowed the animals to pull Jerry down and savagely bite him.

The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole brought their enslaved people with them on the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma. In one noteworthy account of escape, an enslaved named Ben, who had been left on the eastern side of the Mississippi, ran away from his owner to follow his wife, who had been sold to a Choctaw man who took her west. Ben was captured and jailed in St. Francis County, Arkansas, but broke out and continued his journey.

Enslaved people in the Lower Mississippi Valley were less closely supervised than those in the country; urban owners relied on their enslaved servants to shop, run other errands, and bring in money while “hired out” to work for other people. This was especially true in New Orleans, where the population in 1850 included 90,000 white people, 10,000 free Black people, and 17,000 enslaved people. In a typical 12-month period in 1853 and 1854, some 1,300 enslaved people were arrested as runaways—although most of them might be better described as walkaways, since they left one part of the city only to relocate in another.

Advertisements for escapees in the New Orleans Daily Picayune suggest that many intended to pose as free people and use their previous experience to get paying jobs. Among them was a young woman named Lucy, who was well-known to customers in her owner’s “Soda, Pie, and Cake Shop.” George Anderson’s pre-escape career included work as a livery stable hand, a horse-drawn cab driver, and the operator of a milk wagon for Citizens Dairy. An enslaved man named Gus did carpentry work, Dennis built barrels, Philina was “a superior dressmaker and seamstress,” Susan dressed hair, and Ben Nash unloaded bales of cotton from steamboats.

A reward posted in the Daily Piayune for capturing an escapee. Courtesy of the Daily Picayune (New Orleans), September 17, 1841.

Some fled for the North on steamboats, often assisted by boat crews that included enslaved people and free Blacks. The Daily Picayune was convinced that “colored stewards, or cooks, or hands on boats use their cunning and the means peculiar to their positions to conceal slaves on board boats till they reach safe places for landing.” The ease of steamboat travel created an opportunity for individuals not suited for long escapes on land. Eleven-year-old Harry, who was 4 feet 5 inches tall, managed to avoid discovery until his boat got north of Vicksburg. He wound up in the Chicot County jail in southern Arkansas. Peggy, a “delicate and small” woman who worked as a milliner in New Orleans, fled with four dresses as well as what the Adams County jailer in Natchez, Mississippi, called “many other articles of clothing too numerous and too tedious to enumerate.”

The people best positioned for successful escapes were those who worked on steamboats. John Scott had already fled from one boat and been captured on another when John McMaster of New Orleans purchased him at a bargain price. McMaster, anxious for the $25-a-month that Scott earned as a cook, sent him out on at least three different steamboats, and the upwardly mobile man rose to second steward on the Louisiana before he jumped ship in Louisville, in the slave state of Kentucky. The record stops there, but he may have gotten someone in the Black community there to ferry him to freedom on the north side of the Ohio River.

Enslaved people often faced violence when they tried to flee. White southerners viewed apprehending runaways as a civic responsibility. Many were also attracted by the $10 they received by law for taking captives to jail, as well as rewards sometimes privately offered by owners. Non-owners were not supposed to damage other people’s property except in self-defense, but the law was seldom enforced, and many Blacks were killed while on the run. In the early 1850s, for example, near Marksville, Louisiana, the Picayune reported, “a young man shot a negro boy, supposed to be a runaway,” and a young man in Union Parish who killed a runaway was said by the Picayune to be “justified in the act”—without further explanation.

Fugitives sometimes fought to prevent being captured. One runaway killed the overseer who found him entering a slave cabin on a plantation near Woodville, Mississippi. A man was ferrying Bill and Roland to jail in a rowboat on Bayou Salle in 1842 when the two captives got loose, threw him overboard, and shot him in the water with his own gun. In New Orleans a runaway escaped after stabbing two men who tried to capture him; participants at a Congo Dance threw bricks at three police officers who attempted to arrest a fugitive among them; and someone murdered a slave catcher, targeted because of his profession.

From “fugitive slave” to “runaway,” the historical language used to describe these people who were fleeing from injustice and oppression does not adequately describe their experience. Risking life and limb for the chance at various degrees of liberty from bondage, today they are being recognized for who they really were: “freedom seekers.”

The post The Black Freedom Seekers Who ‘Managed to Shape Their Own Destinies’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.