Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 5 August 1999 — Page 10

The Muncie Times, August 5, 1999, page 10

RIGHTS JOURNAL

CIVIL

Freedom-loving spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer lives on in Mississippi

I knew I was standing on hallowed ground and that it would be one of those moments which I would ahvays remember. I was standing in front of the modest tombstone of one of the great “sheroes” of our time, Fannie Lou Hamer a woman I never met but have come to love. A fearless, truth-telling, powerful singing, unblinking, plain-spoken, justice-loving woman of God. An extraordinary human being whose force of personality threatened even the president of the United States. I knew I was standing on hallowed ground. The graves of Mrs. Hamer and her husband are in a small, unadorned public park. Nearby the boys from the neighborhood were playing ball. Here, in Sunflower County, Miss., there are moments when I felt like I had stepped into a time warp and that it could be 1969 or 1869. But, then I look down the street and see the cars and know that it really is 1999 and only a few months from the turn of the century. It was to this little, tiny town of Ruleville that Mrs. Hamer fled when she was forced off the plantation where she had lived and worked for 18 years, because she dared to try to register to vote. Within hours of her first attempt to register, she and her family were evicted with all their belongings. As I look around at the small, shotgun-style houses, I wonder at how much protection she could have found there. The Klan must have known where they were. That’s what else I notice here in the Mississippi Delta — it’s so flat that you can see for miles. No place to run, no place to hide. And between Yazoo City and Indianola, only small hamlets amidst the fields. Last year tire Commission for Racial Justice released a report on the rampant environmental racism which we found in Convent, La., a little town along the Mississippi, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. We titled it From Plantations to Plants because it seemed to us that area, which once was plantations where black people worked as slaves and then sharecroppers, now is being turned into plants, where black residents are being subjected to a new kind of oppression. The Mississippi Delta feels to me like plantations to plants all

Bernice Powell Jackson

over again. But this time, instead of chemical plants, it’s catfish farms. Driving on Highway 49, all I can see for miles in both directions are the pools where catfish are grown. There are still some cotton fields and now some soy fields, but many of the old plantations have been converted to catfish farms. Processing plants hate sprung up across the delta to package and ship catfish around the country. Not one is owned by an African American. And even the plantations wdiich do still exist, plantations which were built off of free labor and nearly free labor for 200 years, are still owned by w'hite families, mostly rich white families, many of whom now live in Texas or Florida or somewhere far away. We talk with a woman who has been trying to organize the workers in the catfish processing plants, which have grown astronomically over the past decade or so. Before the unions there were less than humane working conditions — few or no bathroom privileges for those working on the processing line and no bathroom doors in the women’s room, little job security, low wages, no pension plan, segregated work places (few or no African Americans working in the office jobs and few or no European Americans working on the lines, job safety issues on the line. With the unions, much of that has improved, but still no black workers in the offices and still no white workers on the lines. From plantations to plants. The more things change, the more they remain the same. But the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer lives in this woman and those who are standing with the poor and the workers in the delta. And then there are the schools in the delta. The city of

Metcalfe is in a nearby county. It’s a mostly African American city which has been incorporated for 20 years. Its mayor, Shirley Allen, is proud of their new sewer and water and gas lines and of the fact that they are now an Empowerment Zone and are building 500 new homes. Feisty, energetic, and

enthusiastic, she’s now challenging the schools, where black children still receive inferior education in inferior buildings and where there hasn’t been a school board election in 13 years. The spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer lives. We travel to another county and hear a similar story — this time from a black woman who sits on the school board in her county, where the public schools are just about 100 percent African American and the private schools are entirely European American. A county where double orders for supplies and equipment were mysteriously placed (with one set of publiclypaid materials going to the private school) until 1995 when the first African Americans were elected to the school board. A woman who herself ran for mayor only to have the election

stolen away from her and who has been watching the dilution of the Voting Rights Act as local towns build low income housing outside the town limits so that residents don’t have the right to vote in municipal elections. But she vows to be the mayor in 2001 and to welcome us to her town as Mayor Allen welcomed us to Metcalfe. The spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer lives. The Mississippi Delta was an incubator for race and racism in America in the 1960’s. It promises to be an incubator for racial justice and economic justice in the new millennium. But the good news is that Fannie Lou Hamer lives. (Bernice Poivell-Jackson is executive director of Cleveland-base United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.)

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