[2 articles]
Civil rights focus of USM conference
http://www.necn.com/10/22/10/Civil-rights-focus-of-USM-conference/landing_politics.html
Oct 22, 2010
HATTIESBURG, Miss. (AP) From a Ku Klux Klan firebomb attack on a
black storeowner to frequent marches on Main Street by blacks pushing
for voting rights, the city of Hattiesburg was a pivotal scene of
racial unrest in the 1950s and 60s.
A University of Southern Mississippi conference this week has
highlighted the role of key activists and local foot soldiers who
helped change the racial landscape of the South during the civil
rights movement.
The academic conference, which began Thursday and concludes Saturday,
included panel discussions by many veteran activists, including
Lawrence Guyot, Marilyn Lowen and Martha Noonan, members of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Guyot said there were many developments in Hattiesburg that gave the
cause momentum, including the U.S. Justice Department's 1961 lawsuit
against Forrest County registrar Therron Lynd, who thwarted efforts
by blacks to vote.
"It's so central because SNCC was able to bring in the National
Conference of Churches and facilitate the Department of Justice in
finding witnesses in the lawsuit against Therron Lynd," Guyot said.
SNCC also began one of its first voter registration projects in
Hattiesburg in 1961.
Hollis Watkins, who now lives in Jackson and was a member of SNCC,
said Hattiesburg had the largest number of professional blacks who
attempted register to vote. She said that "dispelled the notion that
literacy tests were legitimate. The discretion was left solely with
the registrar who had less than an eighth-grade education."
Curtis Austin, director of USM's Center for Black Studies, said the
conference was years in the making and was scheduled to coincide with
the university's centennial celebration.
"It focuses on the lives of people who aren't ordinarily covered in
textbooks, newspapers and songs. Ordinary normal people are the foot
soldiers," Austin said.
One of those was Jeanette Smith who was a young, pregnant wife when
the SNCC members set up in Hattiesburg. Smith said because of her
condition she was limited in what she could do, but that didn't stop
her and other locals from helping.
"If they needed to buy gas ... we provided housing and food," Smith
said. "We were like mothers to them."
Robert Hodges, 23, a junior majoring in history education, said the
conference allowed him to meet many of the activists he had read
about in books, except one.
Hodges said he wrote a term paper on Vernon Dahmer, a black
storeowner who was targeted by the Klan for his voter registration
work. His store was fire-bombed in 1966. A murder conviction didn't
come in the case until 1998 when former Klan Imperial Wizard Sam
Bowers was found guilty by a Forrest County jury.
"How could the justice system in Mississippi be so corrupt?" Hodges
said referring to previous trials held in the case. "They're supposed
be judges and judge the facts, not the color of a person's skin. It
really broke my heart."
Austin said the conference will conclude with a session commemorating
Clyde Kennard, a black man who was wrongfully accused of a crime
after he attempted to enroll at USM in 1959, when the college was all-white.
Kennard, a Korean War veteran, died of colon cancer shortly after
being released from prison in 1963. A Forrest County judge threw out
his burglary conviction in 2006.
"Kennard was one of the early people who showed the rest of us that
there are things we must do knowing all the time it might be a risk
that would lead to us losing our lives," Watkins said. "But someone
had to take the risk."
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A look at civil rights issues at USM
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20101021/NEWS01/10210331/A-look-at-civil-rights-issues-at-USM
ED KEMP
[email protected]
October 21, 2010
Local civil rights activist Daisy Harris Wade, 79, remembers when her
son James Harris Jr. enrolled at the University of Southern
Mississippi in 1969 as one of a handful of black students.
The first morning that James, 17, and his roommate, also black,
opened the door of their Elam Arms apartment, they found a warning
note posted to it.
It read "Nigger go home" and was signed by the Ku Klux Klan.
The two students calmly turned the sheet over and wrote "Cracker go
home," signing it the NAACP, Wade recalls. Then they re-posted it on
their door.
Times have changed. Starting today, Southern Miss continues its
centennial commemoration with a civil rights conference that doesn't
shy away from exposing the blemishes in the school's long history.
The three-day conference titled "A Centennial Celebration of the
Civil Rights Movement" features activists and scholars ranging from
the University of South Alabama to Columbia University. All told, 59
people are slated to speak at the conference.
It's the largest civil rights conference the school has ever held,
according to Curtis Austin, Southern Miss' Director of Black Studies.
Planning started about three years ago and is "part and parcel" with
the school's other centennial events, Austin said.
"I think that hiding and shying from one's history causes more
problems than confronting it and learning from it," he explained.
Austin added the civil rights movement has had a profound effect in
shaping the university as it stands today.
"The University of Southern Mississippi went from a school that
prohibited black students from entering in the 1950s and '60s to
being the home of the largest black student population
(percentage-wise) of any traditionally white university in the
country," Austin said.
Highlights of the conference include speeches by Raylawni Branch and
Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong Chamberlain, the first two black students
to be admitted at Southern Miss.
Activists Ellie Dahmer, Dorie Ladner and Wade will lead a bus tour of
civil rights sites.
For Ladner, 68, who currently lives in Washington D.C., her return
home is "about taking inventory."
She graduated from Earl Travillion High School in 1960 and went to
Jackson State University, because black students were not allowed to
attend Southern Miss or even be on campus.
"I want to bear witness. All of this is new to me," said Ladner, a
retired clinical social worker, who was active with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
"We're holding an event in the Saenger Theater. When I left home, we
could only sit in the balcony," Ladner remembered.
The Saenger Theater event is a remembrance of Clyde Kennard, a
budding black student who attempted unsuccessfully to enroll at
Southern Miss on multiple occasions, before being framed and
imprisoned by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. He died in jail.
Registration for the conference is $35 for the public and $20 for
students. It includes lunch for Friday and Saturday.
Austin said that members of the public who wish to show up for
individual events will not be charged.
.
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