15 posts tagged “mississippi delta”
"The only way to be able to explain it would be to see a comprehensive picture and not just a little summary..."
An NPR article (hat tip to Pollack) about the film I mentioned in the previous post, "Prom Night in Mississippi:"
She describes one encounter in an African-American beauty parlor, in which an elderly woman who'd been part of the civil rights movement stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. The woman ended up giving an impromptu testimony about the history these young people were about to make. "It was almost like it didn't occur to a lot of the kids, until the day of the prom, how important what was going on really was," Farquharson reports.
Student Chasidy Buckley says that Charleston's first interracial prom made for a happy and comfortable night. Some white parents wouldn't let their kids go, and some insisted on holding a private prom for their kids. But mostly, Buckley says, students enjoyed themselves — even if they'd expected a boring formal.
Front-page Washington Post article (hat-tip to Big Country [read his excellent post on MAEP here]) about Hollandale, MS:
Article on CNN.com about James Presley, an African-American man from Sledge, Mississippi. Video here. Photo montage here:
As the nation prepares for Obama's inauguration on January 20, CNN.com traveled to Sledge, Mississippi, a forgotten town of about 500 people in the heart of the Mississippi Delta that some consider to be the birthplace of blues in America.
Nearly 20 percent of residents over the age of 60 live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 census. That number nearly doubles, to 37.5 percent, for residents under the age of 19. About three-quarters of the population are black. Two-thirds of the people here make less than $35,000 a year.
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When it comes to life as a black man -- a sharecropper -- in Mississippi, he says it's tough to explain how difficult it was. He points to a nearby bluff and says that when he was just a boy, a black man was lynched from a tree. "I never saw him hanging up there," he says. "All I seen was the tree."
Blacks were segregated from whites. They couldn't go to the same schools. They had separate water fountains. Blacks couldn't go in the front doors of businesses. And just about everywhere you went, he says, racism was rampant.
"You go into a place, and they say, 'Nigger, get outta here.' You don't want nobody telling you that. You're a citizen around town. If you're a citizen, I'm a citizen like you," he says. "It makes you feel mighty bad."
"When I was a young boy, they was bad about that, calling you that."
Sandra Knispel, a journalist for Mississippi Public Broadcasting, recently won the Mississippi AP Award for Best Documentary (Radio) for the following piece, featuring two Mississippi Teacher Corps teachers, Ashley Johnson and Elizabeth Savage:
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Mississippi Teacher Corps (host) Updated: Dec 16, 2009
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Mississippi Teacher Corps Updated: Oct 9, 2009
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Peace Corps Updated: Sep 16, 2009
