Having grown up in a small, dusty, cotton growing, mosquito infested, chemical polluted, segregated town in the center of the Mississippi Delta, I have faced more adverse circumstances.

When I was probably seven or eight years old, I attended summer Bible School, which was arranged and staffed by the community white Baptist Church from the other side of town.
       
Bible School occurred through the approval of the local school board and my father who was the school principal at the time. This was before the separation of church and school doctrine.

The irony of white Baptist staffing the bible school tended to infer that the colored churches must have not been doing a good job. It may have simply been a form of missionary work. No offense was taken and the school-church issue was not a problem then.

During the bible school, only the privileged of us was able to attend, since most of the children needed to work in the cotton fields. The summer break was when chopping cotton was the major source of employment of the local coloreds (paying two dollars per eight-hour day).

My teacher that summer was a young white girl, probably high school or college age, by the name of "Miss Ann". The rules of the south were that all whites were addressed with title but this was denied to Negroes, no matter what their level of education or financial success. Consequently a man of color was always a boy and never would be addressed as Mister. My father, who was the school principal was either called by his first name (in his case, his initials, T.R.) or surprisingly given a courtesy title of 'Fess', which was short for professor and probably was a better title than Mister Sanders by the town whites. I wonder if the lesser educated whites thought much of what was really being offered in the title 'Fess', one of educated being and teacher of all. Miss Ann wanted some supplies that were not available at the colored school (separate but equal, supposedly), where the summer bible school was allowed to take place.
Either it was my friendliness, or maybe because my father was the school principal led to me being chosen instead of the other students that volunteered to go to town.

The school was located in the middle of a cotton field outside the city  limits, which meant that it was a county school, which allowed students to be bussed up to thirty miles away to this school. Everyone was thankful for the busses but some of these kids were never able to enroll in extra curricular activities since the busses left at the end of classes. Usually the coloreds received the older busses, more prone to breaking down.
 
I was given a pass and allowed to go on an errand for Miss Ann to purchase supplies for summer bible school. I was to purchase some items from the local five-cent and dime store. The distance from the school was a half of a mile and I didn't mind walking.

I felt confident in my self, my olive skin was slightly tanned and clean, my hair was brushed, my seersucker shirt and short pants were clean and my sandals were polished and I wore a smile, surely I was somebody. I said "good morning", to an elderly white woman who was outside of one of the few stores of the main street. I had mustered-up those words in a very pleasant way, as I had been taught by both my parents and the colored schoolteachers.

This small town, with raised concrete sidewalks and a population of less than twenty five hundred had a racial division of 49% white and 49% colored. Colored was the term we people of color wished to be accepted as in those days. There were also four Chinese families, who owned the majority of the grocery stores in town. The response to my kind salutation was to be completely ignored by the elderly woman.

This to me in my young mind was not proper southern etiquette and so I repeated myself. The woman looked through me, as though I did not exist. It was as though I was a non-entity; it certainly wasn't anything glorious.

Was I an invisible person as seen in the movies?

Could this be a member of the same race that sent their missionaries across the tracks to help us colored children to understand Christianity?

This was one of many attempted good deeds on my part that has led to the belief that mankind has the ability to afflict punishment where rewards should be the results. A simple good morning would have made my day back then, but it burned into my soul the paranoia that persists to this day. The resulting struggle within me sadly questions everything that I do and increases my suspicions of others.

My father also felt the unwarranted wrath of society's cruelty. Once upon a time he had achieved the rank of the Local Colored Schools' Superintendent, since the State of Mississippi believed it needed completely separate systems, even if the pay was significantly different. However, after the ruling of the Brown vs. Board of Education by the US Supreme Court in the early 1950s, he was essentially demoted. He became the colored school principal of an institution that ranged from pre-primer (a form of kindergarten at tax payers' expense for the community) to twelfth grade.

He did his best to shield his sons from the racial prejudice that existed.

I have learned over the years that Mississippi did a much better job of inflicting the wrath of segregation on its citizens than other parts of the country.

In my father's inherent wisdom, he sometimes did as many colored fathers did in those days. He placed himself in the front of adverse situations and accepted demeaning tasks to protect his sons. He wanted more for us than he was allowed.

There were times when a local white family wanted to donate items. Old texts or magazines, especially old National Geographic magazines, were given to the school. Instead of one of his sons or teachers having to retrieve it, my father, the principal, would go himself or send a janitor so we would not have to be humiliated by going to the back door of their homes.

I can recall one frightful situation when I was fifteen years old and in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The white citizenry of Mississippi was acting like an aroused hornet nest and were more vicious than ever.

I was allowed to drive the family's new Oldsmobile to the train station in Meridian, Mississippi, located near the Alabama-Mississippi border, where I was to board a train to attend a National Science Foundation summer program at Bennett College, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The program had resulted from President John F. Kennedy's pledge that the United States would do everything to guarantee the excellence of this country in mathematics and science after the USSR had taken a substantial lead in the space race with the launching of Sputnik.

This was to be my second summer at Bennett College. My participation in the program was not only an introduction to the scientific practice of research, but allowed me to meet high school students from other parts of the country and consequently able to advance my horizons. Since this was a federally financed program it was integrated.

Driving at the age of fifteen was allowed in Mississippi. However, getting my driving license was a feat in itself, since I was blind as a bat (extremely near-sighted) and knew it. My pride prevented me from being labeled as being visual impaired (or for the matter, any other from of physical incapacity). Not to mention the fact that it wasn't cool going on a date and having to deal with glasses, especially if you got lucky and were able to get a kiss or two. That was my problem, I have always been thinking too much, always inquiring into that which was not always spoken.

The only way to avoid being labeled as restricted to driving with glasses and dealing with the aforementioned "catastrophe" was to essentially memorize the responses to the eye exam while listening outside the window of the city jail where the driving exam was given. Consequently, I was able to drive without glasses.

On this particular day, I sat at a stop light in the city limits of Meridian feeling rushed because we were on a close schedule to catch the train, 'The Southern' that originated in New Orleans and continued up the Eastern Seaboard. After what seemed like an eternity waiting at a traffic light, I blew the auto's horn to speed the vehicle in the front of us.

After all, I was catching 'The Southern' and leaving Mississippi, even though it was only for a short time. The people in the other vehicle were two elderly white ladies and they drove off erratically. I certainly meant no harm. Certainly, I did not want to be caught by another stoplight because of their tardiness.

Shortly thereafter a white man in an old beat-up pickup truck passed me. He got in front of our vehicle and stopped at the next stoplight to harass me. Up until this time under my father's supervision, I was driving the speed limit and obeying all of the traffic signs. This vehicle stopped in front of me and would not move even when the light was green, so again I blew the horn. This white, dirty blond, unshaven redneck in blue jeans, wearing a white tee shirt and cowboy boots, rushed out of his truck and started cursing "You niggers! Wha' da hell you thank you do'in blow'en at those white women".

In my father's paternal instinct he said, "Yasssa mister, he's only a young'un and he meant no harm", while sitting over a thirty-two revolver he had grown accustomed to traveling with on those old roads of Mississippi. After cursing some more the man returned to his truck and sped off to a nearby filling station. In the meantime I pushed that Oldsmobile to get the hell away from those crazy white folks as soon as I could.

When I boarded the train I was fearful for my father having to travel the same road I had such a bad encounter on, but we never spoke of that incident again.

I had a tremendous feeling of guilt for placing us in a harmful situation.

But I also felt strange that my father had to give such a demeaning verbal response to this poorly educated person. Certainly that white boy was less fortunate than we were; after all we were the ones with a new car. It was an embarrassment to the both of us that a skinny, unclean redneck could reduce a strong, fear-producing man like my father, into a cowering, dialect-speaking 'Uncle Tom'.

Maybe he didn't speak of it because he was ashamed of the environment in which he had raised his family. I am not sure if things were really that much better anywhere else, as I later learned.

I did not know about the gun until we had left the site of the encounter.

As history would have it, this confrontation occurred in 1963 in an area close to where the three civil rights workers were killed in 1964. I have always wondered if that man had anything to do with the hate crimes in that area of Mississippi during that era.

When I arrived in North Carolina, I was assigned a white roommate. During my stay we developed a friendship, and I was able to bury the 'redneck' incident as isolated to the State of Mississippi.

I have tried this method of coping only to find out that racism comes in other forms than in your face confrontation, as has been the custom of the south.

There was an occasion in the fall of 1963 whenI visited my relatives in the small community of Tougaloo, Mississippi, where my mother and her family had lived for over a hundred years. It was a predominantly colored township on the outskirts of Jackson. The origin of the word Tougaloo is from the Native American word for "running water". My maternal grandmother was part Creek Indian. The only whites in the community lived and taught on the campus of the college.
The college was nestled on a hill amongst cypress and pines trees, which were draped with hanging moss, known to some as Spanish moss. The student enrollment was a total of nine hundred students. Some of the students were day students from Jackson and they arrived each school day by bus provided by the college.

My great-grandparents helped financially and physically build the college. Tougaloo College was founded in the post-Civil War era by northern missionaries and was consequently named "Tougaloo Southern Christian College." The college retained that name until it was necessary to drop the religious affiliation so federal funds would be allowed.

One Saturday evening while I was in town, I set off to visit a high school friend who had recently started college at Tougaloo. While walking back to my uncle's home, which was about one-half mile from the campus gates, I saw a burning cross at the campus entrance.

Fear grasped me since this was a dimly lit area and my mind raced in all directions. Were there Klansmen in the surrounding woods and were they looking for a Saturday night victim to lynch? After all, Tougaloo College was the only voluntarily integrated school (both instructors and students) in the State of Mississippi at the time. It was a refuge for the 'northern instigators'. And it was not financially dependent on the State of Mississippi, or the white citizenry.

My heart was racing and I sought shelter in a small café across the road from the burning cross where there were other college students. I waited and watched for a long time (whether this was a few minutes or an hour, time tended to past very slowly). When the cross stopped burning and there were no signs of any vehicles passing on this two lane county road, I summoned the courage to venture out of the small smoky juke joint. There was no telephone in the place. I felt strange asking someone else to risk walking with me to my uncle's house so I, with much trepidation, walked and ran to the safety of my relatives' home.

It would have been nice to have had my father's gun that night.

After these encounters there were times I felt that our state and federal justice system would not prevail under the present laws. I tended to listen to the likes of H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and my radical relatives who were on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement. These folks were often hauled off in the back of garbage trucks to holding areas or jails after protest demonstrations.

Since my father was a state employee, there was no question that the radical approach was out for me with the hot summer of 1964 approaching. I graduated valedictorian of my high school class and I was sent to spend the summer in Chicago with my brother. My brother was a surgical resident at Cook County Hospital, one the most sought-after surgical residences in the country, I think this trip was my father's way of protecting me.

My most radical venture in the summer of 1964 was to attend a rally and speech in the nearly empty Soldier's Field in Chicago. Neither my brother nor my sister-in-law considered the presence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. nor his speaking of major significance.

Now that I was not in Mississippi, I felt more liberated to make decisions for myself. I have chosen to do so since. In retrospect it was embarrassing to attend a rally in Chicago's Soldier's Field with less than a fifth filled stadium. This was the same Martin Luther King, Jr. who commanded the attention of not only the people of the United States but the world. This was the same man who addressed hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington in 1963, and here he was speaking to a nearly empty arena in a city that had been known for its prejudice. Was this a time of apathy or later to be learned a deep festering anger that prevented these people from believing in a non-violent approach to solving segregation?

My brother lived in Lake Meadows, a mixed but predominately colored middle class apartment complex on Lake Michigan. It was within walking distance of Soldier's Field and so I trekked off for this event that Sunday afternoon.

Looking back on what was happening, it was probably the reason Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa was the designated school to attend for my freshman year instead of Tougaloo College (my parents' alma mater). Tougaloo served as a staging ground for many of the Freedom Riders that came to Mississippi and a place where many decisions in the voter registration drives in Mississippi were made. One of Dr. King's voter registration marches ended at Tougaloo College and was attended by several movie stars, including the late Sammy Davis, Jr. in the mid 60's.

I was disappointed not being at the center of the civil rights action. I would have been proud to have the chance to be on 'The Education Block', where the liberal schools of the East were extending their staff to work at Tougaloo. These schools also provided a modern "Underground Railroad" to the North through scholarships and acceptances in some of the more prestigious schools. These same schools normally only accepted those with an "Ivy League" preparatory school education. There were no such prep schools in Mississippi for colored children. Unfortunately a number of those students who did transfer to the northeast schools did not remember, as they should have, their roots and point of origin. I wonder if the well-intentioned people and institutions did not do harm in seducing native southern sons and daughters from their homes. By presenting them with now obtainable goals may not have been a blessing. For some, i.e. a Supreme Court Justice, did not help with the original conceived purposes of helping their community of origin. Indeed, many turned their backs on their homes, their families, and on the goal of building a truly integrated and prosperous community.

But destiny meant for me to exit the valley of the shadow of death in another way.

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