what i'm reading: silver rights by constance curry

I recently started reading Silver Rights by Constance Curry. It's the (nonfiction) story of a family of African-American sharecroppers who pioneered desegregation in 1965, in the rural Mississippi Delta.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with the stories of the brave black Americans who desegregated Ole Miss and the high schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. They had enormous courage. They also had a supportive community, the protection of federal troops and national media coverage. The people of the deep rural south had none of this.

Mississippi had used a clever bit of fiction to skirt the desegregation order mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964: the "Freedom of Choice" law. All a Mississippi family had to do was sign a paper, and their children could attend any school they wanted. Naturally, it was a hoax. In a climate of lynchings, house burnings, midnight shootings and no end of physical and psychic harassment - that is, in a climate of terrorism - few African-American families could allow their children to attend "white" schools.

What were their options? In 1965 - 1965!! - public schools open to black children in the Mississippi Delta were one-room cabins. Children of all ages were taught at the same time. There was no running water; the restroom was an outhouse. There were little or no supplies. The teacher often had little more than a fourth-grade education herself. And - get this - school shut down during the cotton picking and planting seasons. Black children were supposed to be in the fields.

This falls against the backdrop of the sharecropping system, a modern feudal indenture. The sharecropping system was designed to keep labor tied to the land, constantly in debt, essentially working without pay. Slavery being illegal, families were technically free to leave - about as free as their children were to attend white schools.

Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter didn't want to be pioneers. But they wanted their children to have a shot at being something more than human cotton-picking machines. They wanted them to have an education.

On September 3, 1965, the seven Carter children who were old enough for school became the only African-Americans to attend the all-white public schools in Sunflower County, Mississippi.

Constance Curry was a civil-rights worker with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. Her job was to investigate reports of intimidation and reprisals against black families like the Carters that were attempting to exercise their rights.

Based on the evidence she collected, the AFSC and the NAACP were able to bring suit against the state of Mississippi. After a four-year court battle, they won. A U.S. District court threw out "freedom of choice" and order Mississippi to desegregate its public schools. The attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund was Marian Wright Edelman.

The Carter family's courage and determination is endlessly inspiring to me. This is true moral courage.

Mae Bertha Carter went one step further. Along with the encouragement and support she gave her brave children, she constantly counseled them against hate. Wright Edelman says in her introduction: "They only things she wouldn't let them say were that they hated all whites or that they wished they'd never been born. Ruth, the eldest daughter to desegregate the schools, said to Connie [the author], 'Mama was right about hate, because you don't feel good about yourself when you hate someone else.' Imagine all they were faced with, and imagine the strength it took not to hate."