An Election Story to Remember; Told by Civil Rights Activist, Author Hunter Bear

GUEST BLOG: Note by Hunter Bear   (March 17 2014)

Prof John Salter (Hunter Bear) harassed at a Jackson, Miss. lunch counteer

And with a big, all-around clear plastic 

ballot box as well.

When we lived in Chicago, [where a hundred tribes or so are represented], I was active as a Native person and volunteer in Native programs on the Northside. Among other things, I was Chair of the all-Indian Native American Community Organizational Training Center and a member of the 15 person Indian coordinating committee for the Great Lakes Indian Resource Development Program of Americans for Indian Opportunity: Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Our family was very active, too, socially and politically, in the American Indian Center which was going through a period of incredible and nationally known factionalism -- right to the brink and then everyone would pull back just in time and catch their breath. [Much of this, btw, had been caused by the Anthro department at University of Chicago.] 

I was always intrigued by observing how outwardly venomous combatants could be in our Indian Center disagreements and then [and regardless, too, of tribal background or blood degree or income levels] greet one another as long-lost friends indeed when surrounded by the harsh and alien realities in downtown Chicago. A much older Native mentor of mine, the late Bill Redcloud [Chippewa] and another older colleague, herself

a founder of the Center, and an enduring close friend to this moment, Susan K. Power [Standing Rock Sioux], both commented once that "The Whites, when disagreeing, so often try to completely destroy each other. We Indians usually stop long before that." Both Bill and Susan certainly recognized that there are exceptions to this -- but were talking about the general rule. 

We had all just come from a wedding where the offspring of one Indian Center factional leader married the offspring of another -- I was best man -- with a traditional religious leader blending his Native beliefs with a few Christian ones to perform the ceremony. A piano was played by a very leading factionalist who, at that point, had become enamored of fundamentalist Christianity and was a minister in the Moody Bible Institute

context. Everyone was together.

When the high factionalism of the Chicago Indian Center finally wound up as an election dispute in an Anglo court, a weary judge eventually ordered that each side select one Indian person -- just one -- who each side trusted and who was a full member of the Indian Center -- and that person would set up and carry out a new election. Each side turned and selected me. [I confess to having had some trepidation on that one -- but never displayed it, of course!] I constructed a long, high ballot box which was essentially clear plastic  so everyone could see the ballot go down and stay there.

When election time came, March 17 1973, I ordered every Anglo newsperson off Center property and I stayed by the Box from 8 am to 8 pm -- leaving only twice for the restroom and, then, leaving observers from all sides watching each other like the eagles they were. Each factional side fed me well. Some people came several hundred miles to vote. It was a wild and woolly election -- Indians who were quite low-income and some doing relatively well economically -- all clashing and then all gossiping congenially together.

The election, btw, was so honest our side lost. The Center pulled together -- as Indians always do -- and lived through all sorts of vicissitudes to survive to the present moment.

FROM http://www.hunterbear.org/NATIVE%20ISSUES%20AND%20OTHER%20MATTERS.htm

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

Check out our massive social justice websitewww.hunterbear.org  The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

SHOOTING LUPUS --  Driving this oft-lethal deadly
disease of mine back into its genetic cave and into
impotency in an eight year war:http://hunterbear.org/shooting_lupus.htm

See our very full COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm

See my  new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book,"
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new 10,000 word
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual:
 http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm  

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm:
(Photos)

Quick way to learn what happened to Emmett Till

Who Killed Emmett Till?

https://payhip.com/b/x9dV

by Susan Klopfer

The Mississippi Delta is not a place I would have picked to live and if you had asked me a few years ago what I knew about the region, it would have been a puzzle since I knew nothing of its history or culture -- I'd never even heard of Emmett. But it did not take long to gather fascinating information about the story of this young man who was killed in the cotton hamlet of Money, Mississippi back in 1955.

His lynching, for whistling at a white woman, is legend. His act kicked off the modern civil rights movement. When people talk about Trayvon Martin, they sometimes compare these two stories. And there is reason why. 

https://payhip.com/b/x9dV

What happened to cause a young African American student's lynching in the Mississippi Delta? When Emmett "BoBo" Till threatened Mississippi's rigid Jim Crow laws this fourteen-year-old paid with his life. Till's murderers were set free yet his death spurred Rosa Parks to take her important stand in Montgomery. By the time of this 58th anniversary, the case was finally reopened with new and intriguing information. 

How many people were involved? Who hid the killers overnight? Where is the first trial's transcript? Learn new facts on this and other Delta murders - Clinton Melton and his wife (1955)- he was shot, she was drowned; Jo Etha Collier(1955), gunned down on graduation night; attorney Cleve McDowell (1997), shot to death by a client? 

https://payhip.com/b/x9dV

This Emmett Till book gives readers a unique look at Mississippi's secret government agencies and its private white Citizens Councils that spied and did harm to those who fought segregation and more. It remains a murder mystery today.

https://payhip.com/b/x9dV

Could the plight of women 'back then' be a sign of things to come? (A review of The Help and more civil rights discourse)

My Mother’s Witness

The Peggy Morgan Story

Carolyn Haines

River City Publishing

2003

Have I read The Help or seen the movie, yet?

My mother’s enthusiasm was all over the place when she asked me this question. At 94, she had just seen the movie; a group from the Episcopal Church went together for the afternoon showing downtown. I could feel her disappointment when I said no, and I really did try to explain.

“Mom, I lived near Greenwood, Mississippi for several years, and it wasn’t that nice of a place for black people, or poor white people,” I told her. “I am not going to see it, so I can’t really criticize the movie except for what I have read and heard, and from what I know life was really like.”

I know. She and her friends saw the movie, and it made them feel good. "Times really are better," she offered.

What's frustrating about all this is that there are apparently some fleeting moments in this movie, when a better, truer, almost good movie seems to be struggling to the surface in spite of itself, as one reviewer, MSN’s Glenn Kenny, tells us. “Moments…that confront the ugly truth of our nation's history with both a clear eye and some genuine compassion.”

My Mother's Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story

While all the cast members must have done their level best, and were certainly deserving of any and all film awards, their fine performances could not have made "The Help" all that less problematic…perhaps "just merely tolerable whenever they're in the scene."

I actually know Greenwood pretty well, because of the research I’ve done when writing about the modern civil rights movement as it played out in the Mississippi Delta. Greenwood was the home to Dr. Aaron Henry, a phenomenally brave man, a WW II veteran who came back home after the war, hoping to change the way his fellow men and women were treated. And in Greenwood, as throughout Mississippi, life could be brutal. Henry was a true hero, and his own story, The Fire Ever Burning, introduced me to the history of these time. (He wasn't mentioned in The Help.)



Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)


A wonderful woman from Greenwood, Peggy Morgan, a person who I soon met by telephone, after moving to the Delta, often gave me her time freely, sharing her stories straight out of the belly of the Greenwood beast. It was because of her courtroom testimony, that the person who probably killed the state’s first NAACP Field Representative, Medgar Evers, finally went to prison. 

Peggy is a brave soul and spent most of her life suffering with constant and horrid fear – before and after the trial of Byron De La Beckwith – eventually telling her story to Carolyn Haines, author of My Mother’s Witness: The Story of Peggy Morgan. This IS the book to read whether or not you have seen or read The Help. 

Peggy is powerful in her descriptions of what life was really like in this town, telling Haines of the world she shared of torment and transition within the society she was born into; the book starts shortly after the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in nearby Sunflower County, outside of another brutal small town, Drew.

“Shortly after the murder of Emmet Till, Inez Albritton (Peggy’s mother) became privy to information regarding the details of his kidnapping and subsequent death. Till was visiting relatives in the Greenwood area, a city boy who may not have taken the ‘rules’ of Delta society seriously. He allegedly whistled at a white woman, an advance that was not tolerated. Only 14, he was beaten, shot, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a seventy-pound cotton fan bound to his neck with barbed wire.”

But how could Inez Albritton have known any more about this murder committed by Mississippi men? How was she to become a "willing repository of secrets that allowed these murders to range free?" 


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Both Inez and her daughter, Peggy, shared a world that was a mirror image of of the turmoil and violence within their family, and within their society. In a twist of fate, both would be connected with two of the most notorious racial murders committed in Mississippi, drawn into brutality and viciousness by the men in their lives – husband, father, uncle – “and by the very geography of the Mississippi Delta…the rich soil that sprouted cotton so abundantly was also the dividing line of a rigidly enforced social order.”

You see, shortly after  Till was murdered, Inez Albritton became privy to details through her husband and his friends, who knew too many details, and this knowledge was instrumental in her destruction, Morgan me. “Like many women of her social class [poor, white], she was a faceless female, the bearer of children, the provider of meals, sexual pleasure and some small income, the object of drunken abuse – in other words, a wife. Property of the man who gave her his name," Haines observed.

Ironically, in current times when women are observing with astonishment nearly every day on television news the actions and words of GOP legislators and political candidates such as Rick Santorum (demanding society regain this demanding and hostile status for women), it is probably a good time to review what life was like (and apparently still like, I would guess, for the political spouses of men of this ilk). What have we to lose? (I just caught up my dues to NOW.)

As Inez’s sixth child, Peggy found herself possessing information that would set her on the path to repeat her mother’s fate. I came to know Peggy, and she told me her story, almost ten years ago when we lived in the Delta, when I was writing about Till and others who were murdered in this God-awful (and at the same time fascinating) region. We talked on the phone, many times, from her new home many states away. I have not heard from her though, in several years, and because of the mental state she seemed to be in then, I wonder now if she is still well or even alive. (I have a call out to one of her friends to answer this question.)

But from what she told me, life in Greenwood was anything like life as described in The Help. It was just brutal beyond words for women – poor and/or black. Peggy always wanted to vindicate her mother’s death, and tried very hard through Haines’ book, a must read whether or not you choose to see or read The Help, that is, if you want to know what life was really like. Here is a small taste of what she described of her mother's paralyzing life:

“Gene walked slowly across the room to Inez. His hand shot out quicker than a snake could strike, and grabbed her arm in a punishing grip. ‘You crazy bitch…the last thing I need is your guts fallin’ out all over the floor right here in front of the children.’ He pushed her hard toward the door, slapping the back of her head hard…[then] went back to the bedroom to find his pants. Inez remained hospitalized until her surgery had healed sufficiently. But her mental condition did not improve. She was thirty-five and the hysterectomy dealt her a terrible blow….now she felt useless. What tiny scrap of self-worth Gene’s fists had not beaten out of her, the doctor’s scalpel had taken.”

Peggy, I hope that I can find you once again. We have more to talk about.

White, male politicians -- don't even think for one moment that you can do this to us ever again.

Take care, Susan

(You can subscribe to this blog by email.)


My Mother's Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story

My Mother's Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story

Carolyn Haines

River City Publishing

2003

List of eBooks and Print Books on Emmett Till and Other Mississippi Stories

Just wanted to share this list of links for eBooks and Print books on Emmett Till, and Other Mississippi civil rights stories for Black History Week.
Susan

e-Books

Who Killed Emmett Till? (eBook, Smashwords)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8175

Cash In On Diversity (eBook, Smashwords)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/63393

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Where Rebels Roost (Amazon, Kindle)

http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Mississippi-Rights-Revisited-ebook/dp/B0015HSAJ0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324329150&sr=1-1

Susan Klopfer’s Print and Nook Books (Barnes and Noble)

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/susan-klopfer

Delta Bookstore for Print and eBooks (LuLu Books)

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/thedelta

Print Books

Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited (Amazon , Print)

http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Roost-Mississippi-Rights-Revisited/dp/1411641027/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324329065&sr=1-1

The Emmett Till Book (Amazon, Print)

http://www.amazon.com/Emmett-Till-Book-Susan-Orr-Klopfer/dp/tags-on-product/1411638

McFadden's 'Gathering of the Waters' Takes In-Depth Look at Emmett Till's Murder

Just another Mississippi County Courthouse

Bernice L. McFadden's new novel, Gathering of Waters, explores the history surrounding the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a major event in Civil Rights history. Rather than sticking close to the events of Till's death, Gathering of Waters looks at generations before and after Till's life in Money, Miss.




Consider this author's opening passage:

"I am Money. Money Mississippi.

I have had many selves and have been many things. My beginning was not a conception, but the result of a growing, stretching, and expanding, which took place over thousands of years.

I have been figments of imaginations, shadows and sudden movements seen out of the corner of your eye. I have been dewdrops, falling stars, silence, flowers, and snails."

This author's all-knowing, mythic voice of the town drives Gathering of Waters and allows McFadden to explore Till's life and death without the rigid limitations of history. So much has already been written about Till's death, probably best by his mother (Mamie Till Mobley), that writing a novel centered on it risks repeating what has already been said. McFadden's real contribution is to ignore the wider historical context of Till and focus in on emotional, human aspects of his story. McFadden's magical touches are a refreshing, unexpected approach to the hard facts.

Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden. Akashic Books. $15.95. 250 pp.

What? You haven't read Howard Zinn? Take a look for yourself and see why he is a favorite author

"Social movements may have many 'defeats'-failing to achieve objectives in the short run-but in the course of the struggle the strength of the old order begins to erode, the minds of people begin to change; the protesters are momentarily defeated but not crushed, and have been lifted, heartened, by their ability to fight back."

- Howard Zinn

When Mississippi Does it Right -- Aaron Henry: A Civil Rights Leader of the 20th Century

Aaron Henry, civil rights leader


Kudos to the Mississippi Historical Society for the beautiful piece written on civil rights leader, Aaron Henry (by Constance Curry, who with Aaron Henry wrote The Fire Ever Burning. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.)

Aaron Henry’s Fourth Street Drug Store, which opened in 1950 in Clarksdale, became a hub for political and civil rights planning for three decades. Aaron Henry Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 90.24, Box 144, Folder 4.

Writes Curry -- Aaron Henry was born in 1922 in Coahoma County, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. From a young age, he worked in the cotton fields alongside his family on the Flowers Plantation outside of Clarksdale. He remembered those years vividly when he recalled,

“As far back as I can remember, I have detested everything about growing cotton.” Regardless of his early hardships, education was a priority for ...

Continued --

Emmett Till Blog; Murder in the Mississippi Delta; Civil Rights Cold Cases: Emmett Till eBook Price Now 99 Cents

"It's time for more people to know this inportant civil rights story," author Susan Klopfer says. The eBook price drop comes as the 56th anniversary of Till's death arrives in August.

Continued --

Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited

 

 

After 23 months of research and writing, Where Rebels Roost features --A Nine-page Selected Bibliography/Citations: 73 Books; 3 Dissertations; 47 Articles; 32 Collections, Interviews, Oral Histories --Twenty-pages/Lists of Dead/References 900+ names and information of African Americans lynched and murdered in Mississippi from 1870 to 1970 (references Southern Law & Poverty Center, NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, individual family and friends, personal research) --Sixteen-page/160+ Names of Emmett Till Principles/Names and biographies of people close to this case, from lawyers, witnesses, judges and jurors to police, politicians, friends and families.

 

Also, civil war stories of black heroism (spies and soldiers for the North)--And over one hundred specific Sovereignty Commission Documents, cited with references given (plus over 1,000 footnotes!), "But more important are the stories of some very unique, persevering and brave people -- all stories that deserve to be told," says author, Susan Klopfer, who says she dedicates her book to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

 

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/where-rebels-roost-mississippi-civil-rights-revisited/172718

 

Civil Rights Struggle Recalled by Mississippian

Silver Rights

By WES HELBLING
Published: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:27 PM CDT

Gloria [Carter] Dickerson was 12 years old when she paused from her back breaking labor in a Mississippi cotton field and questioned whether God had put her on the earth to do better things. Little did she know of the historic role her family was to play in the struggle for integration of southern schools.

Born into an impoverished, sharecropping family in Drew, Miss., Dickerson is now coordinator for the Mid South Delta Initiative (MSDI), which distributes grants fostering economic development in rural communities along the Mississippi River. Invited by the Morehouse Dream Pioneers and New Philadelphia Church to speak in Collinston on Saturday, the story Dickerson told is as inspiring as it is searing.

-----
Dickerson's family's historic struggle was told in the 1995 book "Silver Rights" by Constance Curry


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News Story Continued ..

Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Revisited

View Album

Get your own

For you to enjoy -- pictures of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from over the year. Susan

'Missing Pages' .. Pioneering Black Journalists of Modern America

NONFICTION
Pioneering black journalists tell of early days in history
Missing Pages Edited by Wallace Terry, Carroll and Graf, 375 pp., $16.95

Not so long ago, the American media carried the battle for a racially integrated South onto the front page and into America's living rooms.

Still, newspapers, television and radio in the North and South often were no more open to blacks in the 1950s than a whites-only Southern diner, according to "Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America, An Oral History."

With few exceptions, newsrooms and broadcast studios were resolutely white and male, and determined to stay that way. Max Robinson's television boss in Virginia refused to show his face while he read the news in 1959. He later became the first black anchorman at ABC.

Story Continued--

Striggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi: Dittmer, et. al.

Archives 1996
From the 1996 Archives of
Black Issues In Higher Education

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
- book reviews

by Julian Bond

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1994. $29.95 hard, $14.95 paper

These three excellent books represent a developing and welcome trend in civil rights historiography.

Previous histories have described the modern-day 20th-century civil rights movement from the top down -- as a story whose main characters are Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Most have also described the development of the movement within a restricted time line -- from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that introduced King and his espousal of nonviolent resistance to the passage of important civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

Under that time-bound restriction, the movement began suddenly out of nowhere in the middle 1950s; by the middle 1960s it had triumphed. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King and the active cooperation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, segregation had been vanquished. The battle had been won.

More ..

Blog Across the Mississippi Delta Civil Rights History Tour

AS FREEDOM VOLUNTEERS packed up and left Mississippi in 1964, brutality and murder kept going on. Some stories made it into the news and into later history books, but in smaller Delta towns several hundred miles north of Jackson, many incidents remain only as whispers among those who once picked the cotton ...


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Bloggers Set to Revisit Mississippi Delta Civil Rights People and Places

Mount. Pleasant, Iowa (USA), May 29, 2007--Two friends from Cleveland, Mississippi and Mount Pleasant, Iowa, are spending ten days roaming and blogging the Mississippi Delta while visiting civil rights people and places. Their pictures and stories will be placed daily at http://mississippimurders.com on the Internet. (Photo at left, courthouse in Belzoni, home of the Rev. George Lee who was murdered in 1955.)

Margaret Block, an early civil rights advocate, and Susan Klopfer, author of Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, plan to roam the Mississippi Delta starting June 1, visiting people and places of the modern civil rights movement. “We'll be traveling in and out of the Delta for ten days as we photograph important spots and talk about the region's history,” Klopfer said.

“We plan to visit the towns of Money, Drew, Glendora, Greenwood and other spots connected to the murders of Emmett Till, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett and Cleve McDowell, among others who were killed for their civil rights activities or just for being black.”

Block, an early SNCC volunteer, spent her first years out of high school in the small town of Charleston where they will kick off their blogging venture by attending a program June 1 honoring Keglar. The NAACP leader was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 on her way home from a Jackson meeting with Sen. Robert Kennedy. Keglar once saved Block’s life by moving her out of Charleston in a hearse from the funeral home that Keglar managed.

“We have very few scheduled stops, but we will also leave the Delta to attend the funeral of Mrs. Chaney, James Chaney's mother in Meridian,” Block said. The two also plan to visit with Unita Blackwell, Mississippi’s first black woman mayor, and will take pictures as they roam the historical Brooks Farm, Parchman penitentiary, and Clarksdale, home of Aaron Henry, an early civil rights leader who Block also knew.

The two women met when Klopfer was researching a book on the civil rights movement, “Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.” Klopfer was living on the grounds of Parchman at the time, where her husband was the chief psychologist.

...Contact:
Susan Klopfer
775-340-3585 (cell) sklopfer@gmail.com
http://mississippimurders.blogspot.com
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com

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