Hello, my name is David Olds and welcome to Mississippi Happenings Podcast.
Joining me each week is my friend and co-host, Jim Newman.
Jim, talk to us.
I guess I'm the only one in this group that did not grow up in Mississippi.
So I'm going to get an education today.
Well, I grew up in Tennessee, but that's the same thing as pretty much, but good.
All right.
A few weeks ago, we had a discussion with Jack Reed Jr.
from Tupelo about desegregation in public schools.
His father was very active in civil rights and facilitating integration in the Mississippi public schools.
From that conversation, we heard
about individuals with both inspiring and sad stories.
It also made Jim and I more aware of the thousands of stories about segregation that needed and must be told.
Today we have two very successful women who lived, survived, and thrived during segregation.
First, I want to introduce Ms.
Lovie West.
uh Lovie grew up in
during the civil rights movement where she gained appreciation and a commitment to serve.
Although her father was in the military, she spent her childhood in central Mississippi, Holmes County to be exact.
Her childhood experiences followed her witness, allowed her to witness firsthand injustice that occurred to people of color, especially women and children.
Lovie has been involved with professional,
presidential campaign since the Jimmy Carter campaign.
She worked on grassroots level for Ann Richards, Bill Clinton, Barack campaign and 2018 Mike Espy's USA Senate campaign.
She also worked Hillary Clinton campaign and President Joe Biden and VP uh Kamala Harris campaign.
After the campaigns,
Lovie and other concerned DeSoto County women met and formed what is now known as the DeSoto Marshall County Federation of Democratic Women.
currently serves as the fourth Vice President National Federation Democratic Women and co-chair of the Political Education Committee.
She serves on the Executive Committee for the Mississippi Democratic Party, first congressional district and
DeSoto County Executive Committee.
Lovie is a political dynamo and a friend.
Lovie, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you and it's an honor to be here.
Our next guest is Miss Virginia Tolliver.
Miss Tolliver was born in rural Mississippi in the Tupelo area.
After positions at Alcorn State University and the University of Southern Mississippi, she was selected for prestigious Council of Library Resources Academic Library Management
Internship.
and was assigned to Washington University in St.
Louis in 1981.
She was the Associate University Librarian at Washington University and recently retired after more than 35 years at the university.
She also served for many years as an HIV AIDS support group facilitator.
She has taken many leadership positions at her local Presbyterian church.
She has served the larger church community in many capacities, including as chair of the Presbyterian Church USA National Committee on Self-Development of People, which is a
ministry that funds hundreds of projects around the world to promote human dignity, self-reliance, and community growth.
Virginia is also active in interfaith efforts
in the community and also served as chair of the Board Trustees for Eden Theological Seminary as both the first woman and the first African-American to do so.
Miss Virginia, thank you so much for being with us today.
I'm honored to be here.
I want to start out, uh and Lovie, let's start with you, and telling us a little bit about growing up uh in rural Mississippi.
Okay, thank you so much and thank you for this opportunity.
I grew up, as he has stated in the introduction, in Holmes County, which is in central Mississippi.
It is one of the poorest counties in the state of Mississippi.
the, back when I was growing up, the cheap.
chief profession for African American men was farming.
So my father grew up a farmer and later went into the military to escape having to live there and farm.
uh I'm dating myself now.
Of course, I graduated high school in 1968, which was right in the throw of the civil rights movement.
But prior to that time, I went through uh segregation.
and then um kind of transformed over into a DSEG program, if you will.
It was very difficult because of course that time we didn't have phones and you didn't have neighbors, you could go over to their house and get their homework together and that
kind of thing.
So we received the books from the white schools that were outdated books, some of the pages were missing and all of this.
So we had to figure out before we left school, whether or not we had all the pages that we could get our assignment done and then there would be arrangements made from that.
One of the things that I can say that took place during the segregation piece was we had teachers who cared.
And those of us that grew up very poor,
We can count on the teachers pulling us aside, checking on us, making sure everything's okay, making sure we had lunch and that kind of thing.
So I really appreciate that.
Versus today, uh many times we don't know who's teaching our children and we don't know what they're teaching our children.
And our children get the blunt end of this whole piece.
It is not an accident that we live in an era where we have a president who really doesn't care.
It's not an accident that we live in an era where we seem to be turning back the hands of time.
All of this is by design.
And ever since we had the DSEG of schools, there's been an effort to turn back to where we were.
It is no accident that the white South Africans were brought over to this country.
All of this again is a unique plan to take us back.
And when I say us back, I'm talking about people of color.
uh Back to my story in Mississippi, one of my first experiences with uh racial issues was when I had gone into a store to get an ice cream cone.
And uh the store owner's daughter was waiting on me and she was not that much older than I was.
So I gave her my money and told her that I wanted a strawberry ice cream cone.
And she said strawberry, and I said yes.
She kept saying strawberry, and I kept saying yes.
What I did not realize was she was looking for me to say yes ma'am, and I had no idea what I had done wrong.
And so I heated up, and by that time my dad came in the store and removed me, and I understood then that I was different.
Going to school in Mississippi, rural Mississippi, we were all poor when we were at the all-black school.
And we didn't have issues where one person had on expensive pair of shoes and whatever, because we were all poor.
In fact, I didn't realize that I was poor until I was an adult, because we were all pretty much oh the same in that era.
And so...
Oftentimes when I'm speaking with young people, I try to share with them the opportunities they have that we did not have.
We had to really work to go to college.
We had to really work to survive in an era and in a space that we were not wanted.
Whereas there many opportunities now uh for children to get a good education, opportunities for adults even to go back and get a good education.
So I just appreciate so much this podcast that will allow me to share bits and pieces of my life story in hopes that someone else can identify with it and can appreciate where I'm
coming from.
Thank you.
Miss Virginia.
was the young lady serving the ice cream, um was she wanting you to say ma'am or was she, that was.
that was part of the culture in that area of Mississippi where you greeted all white people with yes ma'am and no ma'am.
And then all black people were boys.
know, none of them got to be an adult.
I don't care how old they got to be, they were still a boy.
Well, I've noticed since I've been here, it's hard for me to get any person of color to address me as just Jim.
It's always Mr.
Newman.
And it just boggles my mind.
ah I'm just Jim.
I'm not anything other than that.
So that's...
that was respect that was taught as well in terms of elders.
We were taught to say yes ma'am and no ma'am and we were not on equal terms with oh adults.
So we were taught to say yes sir, no sir, mister regardless of the color.
That was just part of the culture.
Miss Virginia, let's go ahead and hear from you and let's hear a little bit about your story.
OK.
Like, like, Lovie, I grew up in in the Palmetto community, which is the poor was the poorest community in the county.
But before I go into my story about me, you were talking about the yes, sir and no, sir.
The one thing I remember growing up in addition to the cotton fields, which I'll talk about later, my grandmother worked for the white families, you know, cleaning house,
cooking.
doing those kinds of any kind of menial tasks to do to get a 50 cents a week.
And the children of the white, she had to address the white children who were like four and five to six year old as Miss this, Miss Anne, Miss Julie, Master John, but they always
referred to her as Virgie.
She never got the title, oh that title of respect from.
hmm.
name.
So she's 60 years old and she can't be a miss, but she has to address them as Mr.
and Mrs.
And that used to really irritate me because the times that we go to their house, they would expect me, I'm 10 years old and they're five and six, but I had to call them Miss
and Mr.
as well.
but I could go through the back door because I never could go through the front door.
But I grew up, as I said, in Palmetto, which is a rural community.
And unlike Lovie, I didn't have the opportunity to attend a desegregated school because I graduated from high school in 1965.
So everything was totally segregated then.
And we also because in this community, most of us were there were either small black farmers or sharecroppers.
The school, even the school year was based on the white landowner, so we had to go and I don't know if you did that in in Holmes County and not, but we had a split sector.
We had to go to school in the summer.
know, June, July, I think, late June to September.
Each year.
so that we could be out in time to pick cotton from the September through the end of October.
And I don't think that it happened.
I know it didn't happen in the city schools, but I know that it happened in Pontiac County, which is where I went to school, that everything was based on the white
landowners.
I went to a totally, as I said, a totally segregated high school.
But also like Miss West said, one of the things that was important to all of us and that kept us grounded were our teachers, because they were dedicated, caring, committed to
having us learn more than what was in those used and thrown away textbooks.
Because they knew that they, having grown up in the segregated South, they knew what was going to be required, the challenges and obstacles that we were going to have to face.
as we grew older as black Americans, African Americans in still a segregated community.
And they wanted us to be prepared to meet those challenges and obstacles.
So fortunately for us, uh the teachers went beyond those outdated textbooks.
And we talked about current events that were going on.
What happened with Emmett Till, the Philadelphia murders, the lynchings and everything.
Yeah.
Diets, Look, Life, and those magazines.
But they encouraged us to go outside, to look outside the box and to really do research.
And those were skills that
really helped us as we helped us later on.
The schools actually integrated, like I said, after I left, first with the freedom of choice plan, and then after the Holmes versus County Board of Education Supreme Court
ruling that the schools must integrate immediately.
The integration took place in 19, it was supposed to happen, that law was passed October of 1965, 1969.
But the schools in Mississippi didn't actually integrate until 1970.
Now Brown versus Board of Education was in 1954, which mandated integration.
This is 16 years later.
But some of the students from my high school and from the school that I graduated from tried to follow that mandate and went to the White High School in September of 19...
and they actually left 10 days later and went back to the old school that had been reverted uh up to 10th grade because of the treatment they received from the white
teachers, the students, the constant use of the N-word, the refusal to allow them to participate in class and just normal mistreatment.
Mississippi had entered an agreement with Health Education and Welfare
.
then after Holmes versus
oh the homes ruling by 1970, of the schools at the schools, all, of the schools in Mississippi had integrated because some even did not integrate with homes.
They use other means to avoid integration.
So while we were not separate but equal like the place, the Plessy versus Ferguson ruling.
We had inadequate facilities.
We had wooden school with out...
we had the outdoor toilets for the boys and girls.
oh Nothing in the facilities was equal to what the white students had.
But the caring and compassionate teachers were what helped us to survive and make it educationally.
And one of the other things that happened after integration,
The black leaders, teachers, with whom we had the utmost respect and held in high esteem, actually were demoted in their positions.
They were no longer the principals.
When they went to the white schools, some were able to be assistant principals, but that was a disciplinary act.
And they wanted somebody to take control of these black students that were coming here.
The teachers who were devoted high school teachers, 11th 12th grade teachers, were teaching eighth grade, were putting in eighth grade, seventh grade.
They were all put in demeaning positions.
And that's the one thing that really hurt me.
One of the things that really hurt me about the whole integration, what happened to those, they remained my role models and the role models of the other students.
but the treatment of both students and teachers was very disturbing.
oh
the first generation to receive ah college educations?
No, my mother, my parents were college graduates.
My grandmother, who had no form of education, was determined that her children were going to get out of the cotton fields and were going to have oh an education.
so at that time, CME Church had Mississippi Industrial College in Hollis Springs, Mississippi, and they were both able to
you work that way through and go to college there.
So I was kind of first year college.
Lovie, how did you get a college education?
was a first generation college graduate.
My father had a fifth grade education.
They grew up farming and his dad taught all of them carpentry.
So he was very successful in that realm.
And like I said, he ended up going into the army just to make a better living and not to be confined to the farming industry.
My mother had a ninth grade education and back then,
ninth grade was as far as you could go unless you went off to high school.
It was kind of like going off to college now and only those that had income had had enough income could afford to send their kids off to this high school because they would have to
board with the family and pay, you know, for them to eat and pay their board and that kind of thing.
So she never made it farther than the ninth grade.
So, uh, it was a
period of time where we understood the importance of education.
I just want to interject if I can, the difference, and many people don't understand the difference between the Black sorority and fraternities and the White sorority and
fraternities.
In the White world, because of wealth and access to other material things and advantages,
There's not the need for these sorority and fraternities to play the role that is played in the black community.
ah We many times are the catalyst for those to be able to receive scholarships and go on to colleges.
You will find us in every industry.
uh I'm AKA and Ms.
Toliver is a Delta, but still we work together as sisters.
And you saw this come out.
when VP Harris ran for president, how the sororities and fraternities wrapped ourselves around her to support her because we understood what she was going through.
And so um many times you can see where this play a role in making us successful in business and so forth.
We have conventions every two years or so.
And during those conventions, oh we are taught skills that are not taught in many schools.
And leadership skills, leadership roles, and just things that may not be taught in schools, especially non-HBCU schools.
And so you'll find many of the students in Mississippi
leave and go to college and they don't know what they don't know and there's a need for etiquette training and those kinds of things and that's why HBCUs play such an important
role in the education of our students.
Not that they can't get an education elsewhere, not that they're not smart enough to get an education elsewhere, but that particular nurturing is uh rare on many occasions.
uh I also, go ahead.
I'm sorry, just a quick question.
Sorry to interrupt.
You said HBCU.
Historically black colleges and universities.
Thank you.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
for example in our area she have referred to the Rust campus.
We have Rust College, that's HBCU, Jackson State, Alcorn, so there are several in Mississippi.
And you will find in the southern area that there are more because there was such a need for more there than it was in the northern part of the United States.
uh Go ahead.
Yeah, was saying because one of the things that I didn't mention growing up is the Jim Crow laws were alive and well in the South and they were established to ensure that Blacks
remain second class citizens, that we had no access to public facilities were mandated and segregated.
They had to be segregated.
Even the retail, I mean the stores.
If you were able to go into that establishment, there was a separate instruments for blacks.
couldn't just go in the store and then go with the white people.
We had the Lyric Theater.
It was open.
We could go in, but we had to go up in the back, go around in there's a side entrance and then you have to go up to the balcony.
So the laws stipulated that we remain segregated.
And that was one of the things that, you know, Ms.
West mentioned the sorority of fraternities.
I mean, we're talking about
1908, 1913, going back to the 1900s.
And these sororities are fighting, have continued to fight against the same social injustices that existed back then, that still exist now and we're still in those fights.
So historically, they have played a significant role in education for Blacks and in enlightening for Blacks who are even those who are not members of the Sorority.
Mm-hmm.
in 1913.
We were the back of the line.
We were relegated to the back of the land.
there are organizations that have always been fighting for those in justice.
Do you feel that, go ahead.
just going to say another demeaning thing when we were growing up.
We were not allowed to go to the store and try on shoes.
They would take a piece of paper and draw our shoe size and take that into the store to get our shoes.
So there were many things that were just flat out dumb and wrong that was done to humiliate us and especially the man.
ah People don't understand a lot of times why our young black men are angry.
They're angry because they have seen and heard the stories about the injustice.
Many of them grow up in high school, and I know my sons did, thinking that slavery was over and thinking that everybody was equal because they would get to go to slumber parties
and so forth.
And then as an adult, when they realized that some of same treatment that was happening before to our generation is still there.
And that's what this fight is all about, the DEI fight, to remove our history so that we won't know our history and the proud things that we've done, but more importantly, so that
white America will not know our history and they can be taught that we were just a bunch of drug addicts and low IQ people and that kind of thing.
Go ahead, David.
I'm sorry about that.
When you come at that, maybe remind you of what I'm a Jim Crow laws.
I was I made a presentation with one of my colleagues at church and we were talking about it and I mentioned your own call.
I said, you need to explain what that is.
And so what do mean I need to explain this Mississippi?
I want to have to explain.
He said you would be surprised.
He said I asked my daughter.
She had never heard of Jim Crow laws and she's a young adult.
Mm-hmm.
it's just a confirmation that we are there are efforts on their efforts that underway and some succeeding in writing us out of history and erasing and erasing our black history.
And that's one of those things.
The other thing I thought about when you were talking about treatment.
When I moved up in the world, I was in high school then.
It was the summer that we, I didn't have to go to the cotton fields.
It was my sophomore year in college.
And I was hired at a white restaurant in Tupelo for the summer as a waitress.
Totally unheard of for me to be anything other than a dishwasher or a cook.
And I could do neither one of those very well.
But one of the,
One day I was waiting on this table and I walked up to the table and to the men sitting at the table and said, good morning, may I help you?
I was called every name, negative thing that a black person can be called.
I was invited to do things, this is here in Tupelo, that nobody should be invited to do.
I found out later and I was shocked.
I didn't know what was going on and why he was treating me.
Well, I knew why he would treat me like this, but I was amazed that it would still happen in this restaurant.
found out later that he came there purposefully to do that because he had found out that this white restaurant owner had hired a black girl.
And so we're going to take care of her and show her her place.
And I also found out later he was one of the leaders in the Krupa's clan, which was still in existence.
Now this is 67, you know, this is in the 60s.
And fortunately, the restaurant owner put him out, know, she put him out and then explained to him why she was putting him out.
But, you know, these are kind of things.
It I was most it mostly shocked than anything else, I think, to have someone talk, talk to me like that for no reason.
Now, I went to Jackson State, which is an HBCU.
So it was nothing for us to try to walk across the street and whites would be.
driving through because the industry was open and calling us all kinds of names and throwing at us and all of that.
But somehow I did not expect that kind of treatment.
And I don't know why I thought that it was over, but.
In doing some research, I did not know that Jim Crow is a derogatory term for African Americans.
Mm-hmm.
It's because you live in Mississippi.
And so it's keeping us in place.
But it wasn't just some other southern states had Jim Crow laws as well.
It was just Mississippi.
Right.
David, if I can, I just wanted to share, she was talking about treatment uh and how it was back then.
It is still there, but it's more subtle.
And one of the differences we have now, we knew who the KKK was.
Now we don't know.
It can be our doctor.
It can be the teachers of our kids.
And we, ah as a people,
still get the brunt of these experiences.
I worked as a hotel manager for Marriott.
And um I was very aggressive and I thought I was the sharpest thing.
And I found that they would give me the inner city hotels, the hotel with the problem.
But if they had a brand new hotel, they wouldn't give it to me, but they would allow me to go and train the person.
ah to be the manager.
And so these are some things that we have been confronted with today ah that is still on the shoulders of this Jim Crow law.
It sounds like that you almost had a double whammy, meaning you were African American and you were a woman.
Jim, you had some...
You
Jim, you had something.
I having not been raised in Mississippi, I was raised in Kansas City and I'm sure growing up that there was.
some segregation problems.
I was probably too young to realize it, but I grew up in a neighborhood where...
ah
I don't recall any.
Well, I started to say minorities, but ah my neighborhood had Italians.
It had Polish.
ah
I don't know, was a neighborhood of...
I don't know if God wanted to put together a patchwork of people that are not alike, other than just their color.
ah That's the neighborhood I grew up in.
ah And when you grow up in that kind of a neighborhood, ah there isn't really any segregation because...
I mean, who are you going to segregate against?
mean, your neighbors are all your neighbors and they're all for the most part, Amel Aminino, my next door neighbor.
ah I learned later in life, ah his wife, it was an arranged marriage and she was 14 when she came from Italy.
ah
the keggies that lived across the street.
He was German, ah worked for a meat packing company.
So...
ah
I just grew up in an integrated neighborhood other than the lack of ah black faces except on the baseball field.
And I loved the baseball field.
I always wanted to play professional baseball and I was fortunate.
Growing up to a.
being able to go see the, not only the Kansas City ah baseball team, which was a minor league team, but the Kansas City Monarchs, which was an all black baseball team.
And they played the leagues and everything.
just a few years ago, Satchel Paige was one of the great pitchers of all time.
.
found out reading his obituary that he lived not too far down the road from Tupelo.
And I so wished that I had realized that because I wanted to go talk to him about those.
minor league black baseball teams.
They were so wonderful.
And a lot of pro players when it finally baseball was finally integrated.
There were so many wonderful pro players that came out of those leagues.
ah But they had the same problems.
couldn't the team, the pro team would travel, but they couldn't go into the same hotel.
They couldn't go into the same restaurant and ah
I mean, these stories are important to understanding where we are today.
And I'm so grateful for you too.
to allow us the privilege of listening to your stories.
Did either of you have any, ah did any of you have any, I know the Klan existed.
I never met anybody with the Klan.
It just has always been in books and hearsay.
ah What was it like with, did the Klan, I know the Klan existed in Mississippi.
But did any of you have any, either of you have any experience with your family in the Klan or neighbors in the Klan?
Well, I mentioned my encounter with the, I don't know what the chief wizard or whatever you call them back then.
We knew the Klan existed.
And I know of people who were targeted by the Klan and they did not come out.
Well, some of them, didn't have to come out to our community because a lot of them already lived out here.
So we had those kind of inaction.
I didn't see any cross burnings.
I don't have that experience, but I know that they existed.
And also because we're in a rural area, back then the transportation was not, we didn't actually go into town all of the time.
Wagon and the horses would only go so far.
And even when we got cars, we still didn't go into town.
And when we did, we didn't go.
we've seldom went into the white section of town because we knew then you had to step off the street of a white person saying you couldn't look at a white person and now you
couldn't say anything.
And so we, I did, I personally did not see any claim mentions or anything like that, but I knew that they existed.
And as I got older, I knew who they were in the area where I lived.
in our area, go ahead.
Well, wasn't a matter, you you didn't have enough interaction to worry about whether you were being kind or not.
You just didn't, you know, stay away from them.
Yeah, okay.
were in fear.
And that was the culture and that was the intent was for us to be in fear.
And so like now, oh the young African-American males are having to be taught how to conduct themselves when they're in contact with the police and so forth.
Back then, they knew to be home by night because it was not safe for them to be out after dark.
And so there were many things that had to be done
just to survive.
And this goes back to our history doing slavery.
You can see the strength and the ah wisdom, if you will, of the African-American community of the things that they had to do to survive.
I want to mention, Jim, you had talked about being growing up in an integrated community.
uh From my viewpoint, a community is not integrated until you get some people of color there.
Because when you look at the Polish people and all the other people, uh they somehow, because of the color of their skin, can get by with being white and accepted as white.
But before I even get a chance to say anything, they automatically know who I am.
I don't have to say anything.
And so that made us be able to be prepared.
We knew we had to be better than in order to just compete because we only got a few seconds to prove who we were.
And, and lovey, you probably because you if you wouldn't had an integrated community, the share the white people and families who were sharecroppers.
And who had no more than we did treated us like dirt that they were much better than us, even though they were economically no better off than us.
But it was just the color of the skin that made the difference.
I remember when they integrated school, there was a white family that lived near us and we played and we didn't have any idea about what was going on on the adult level as it
related to integration.
And my best friend name was Nancy.
And I mean, we just had the best of time, but I can remember when we started to mature as women, young women, we could no longer play with the white boys.
um And it hurt me so when they integrated the schools that their kids went to a private school.
And like she said, they were no better off than we were.
So they actually took the black school and sold it to the white private school for $1 and bused us over to the next city.
And so even the poor white kids were allowed to go to this private school.
And I want to reflect for a moment back on what Ms.
Tolliver had talked about the school year.
um You were fortunate in Tupelo.
In central Mississippi, the students started school, especially the boys, at the end of October, first of November.
So they missed all of that.
And then in the spring of the year, they had to leave early because they had to plant the crops.
And so...
It was not unheard of for the young men to drop out of school fifth, sixth, seventh grade because they would have missed so much they couldn't catch up.
And even now on many, go ahead.
No, I just wanted to correct.
I went to school in Pontotoc County.
Not too, you know, because I don't want to have...
I don't know what it was going to do below, but I remember the different periods for the boys because of the planning.
I was going to say it's not unusual now to meet a black man that is 70 that got very little schooling, barely know how to read and write.
I went to a hearing over in the Delta two, three years ago and a young man, Todd Pinkett, who was running for office, uh he had done the research on this lawsuit.
And at that time they brought in white South Africans on our dime to work the equipment.
And they used the black farmers uh to train them and then they would let them go.
And so one young man, one man talked about that the whites, they had water coolers for them.
But as a black, and I'm talking about now, present day, I'm not talking about.
back in the day.
The blacks had to bring their own water or drink out of the hydrant outside.
The whites could go to the bathroom and the blacks had to go out in the woods or whatever.
I'm talking about in the Delta, in Mississippi, current day.
And so that gets us back to, we see how fast things are turning.
Just think about how slow it was for us to get the civil rights movement and legislation through.
But look how quickly is he roading.
And we know that Trump is sick, but you have to question what's wrong with the rest of the people.
And there are different motives for people doing things.
They know he's wrong.
They know he's sick, but they chose him because he would do their bidding.
And he made it safe for people to come out of the covers and tell us who they really are.
and the elimination of the DEI things that's going on, all of the banned books.
Basically what that means is, whereas we had an opportunity to research whatever we could find at that time available, there was a proliferation of information about the
African-American history.
None of those things, and it still wasn't enough, but there is even less now.
with all of the book bannings that reflect our history, with the elimination of diversity in programs, inclusiveness.
Students won't have anything to research.
They won't have anywhere to go find it.
They will not be paid.
you share your stories and try to get your stories out as much as possible.
There was an article in, this is on Yahoo News, and it talks about, in a public memo issued by the GSA, General Services Administration, the federal government no longer
prohibits contractors from having
segregated waiting rooms, restaurants, and water fountains.
The memo specifically read, when issuing new solicitations or contracts, do not include any of the following provisions or clauses.
And it says, prohibitation of segregated facilities.
that fits right back into its segregation.
it appears that that's where we're going back to.
And all of the civil rights, you know, since the 50s and the 40s is being erased, erased.
that's, to me, it's frightening.
Jim?
Yes, um I don't know which one of you young ladies mentioned it, but we do have, in my opinion, an awful lot of angry young men.
Mm-hmm.
and there is racism.
And as Lovie said, it's under the surface.
You've got to kind of look to see it.
And.
How do we go about?
bringing that out of the shadows so that it's not under the surface.
It's out in the open and everybody knows that racism still exists and we need to work on changing it.
one of the things we have, we have the midterm coming up next year.
So it behooves all of us to get involved and do what we can to change the House and the Senate.
And it's going to take legislation to be able to roll back some of this uh craziness that's going on and give students an opportunity.
We look at Mississippi, how ah the numbers are eroding.
We went from five congressional districts to four.
Then they did this redistricting a couple of years ago because the students leave, go off to college if they're fortunate to, and they see what is going on and they're not about to
come back uh to Mississippi where there are no jobs, where all of this is going on.
And so uh Mississippi is getting to be in a dire situation because
We have so many young people that just will not come back.
And this is both, races.
Yeah, that's, that's true.
oh I remember now I'm just a little bit younger than, than you, you guys, this group.
I'm a little bit younger.
And my first experience of segregation, I grew up in Memphis and my mother and I, oh I was probably three or four years old.
And we had gotten on uh the bus and we were going from, we were going up downtown to the Memphis Public Library.
And it was my first time on the bus, I was excited and I'm at the front and I'm just taking all of this in.
And this black lady gets on the bus and.
I speak to her, she speaks to me, very nice, very friendly.
And then, and then she walks to the back of the bus.
And I'm kind of thinking, what did I do?
What did I say?
You know, why is she, why I wanted to talk to her.
Why was she not sitting by me?
And I asked my mother, I go, why didn't she sit with us?
And I remember my mother saying, she has to sit at the back of the bus.
Now,
At that time, I didn't comprehend what was going on, but I remember kind of, and even thinking about it today, I can kind of recall a sadness in her voice.
But being a three year old, yes, I like to talk and, but by the end somebody else
came down and sit by us.
So that's my first recollection of segregation.
uh
What was the em reason for the large number of Mississippians who went to Chicago?
They didn't want to work in the fields and they knew that's all that was for them.
So they went to Chicago, St.
Louis, uh Milwaukee, any northern city that they had relatives or could get away to so that they would not have to work in the fields.
The other thing that happened is those that had property, a lot of times would lose their property, not from a legal system standpoint,
but from all the torture and so forth.
if they got a cross burned in the front of their house, they already knew what that meant because the cross burned in the front of the church and the church got burned down.
And so they would flee oftentimes for their lives.
And if something happened to the male child, many times they would send them up North just to get them out of Mississippi and the Southern States to protect them legally.
And we were given the, when we would be in split session in school in the summer and our cousins from up north or religious from up north would come down and talk about life up
north being so much better than down here.
It became aspirational to manage.
I want to go Chicago, same, you know, the great migration place because
because of an aspiration and a desire to do better and improve.
that's what.
ah
African Americans felt they would get by participating in the Great Migration.
And I think Memphis is full of music.
stuff like that.
going to say I think Memphis is full of musicians.
Did I cut you off?
No, I was just thinking $2 an hour is better than $2 a day in the cotton field.
right.
And you get air conditioned.
Yeah.
Tell me.
uh
into being, I think, on some levels because you had uh musicians from Mississippi on their way to St.
Louis or on their way to Chicago and ran out of funds or whatever took place.
So they ended up stopping in Memphis on Beale Street.
And so you think of a lot of your blues players and all the people from back then that were musicians, uh they came out of Mississippi.
And uh Mississippi was rich with talented people, even though uh we were still looked upon as low IQ, lazy, and all of those kinds of things.
And the other thing I wanted to mention, I was talking about, uh Jim, your integrated neighborhood.
It was clear that the lighter you are, the better you'd be treated.
And so some of us have relatives that were very, very fair.
that actually passed for white because they didn't want people to know that they were black because of how they would be treated.
And there were stories where you would have, for example, a fair person that's married to a white person and the genes would skip a beat and the child would come out dark.
And then of course there would be all kind of chaos that would take place.
just because this person may not have known that this person had um Black roots.
And you just think about so many people have had to do what they had to do uh just to survive.
And so that message got out where the lighter you are, the better you are.
And there became racism in the Black community.
And this was born out when
The master could see his blood in his offsprings and bring them up to the house.
And then the darker slaves would have to work in the fields.
So that division was planted early on and it continues until today.
That's no, I don't.
and when it came back, I was 4 % African.
See.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's, that's what I can't understand.
We all come from, apparently, ah pretty close to the same place on Earth.
And there's...
some of that in all of us.
And I guess...
I so much for that.
What I did want to ask, Virginia had mentioned sharecropping.
Did your parents ever make any money sharecropping?
Because I've heard stories that you sharecropped.
we had a small farm, so we were not sharecroppers.
There were many around us that were.
But most sharecroppers...
did not make that much money because one of the things that happened was because you was the landowner provided the house and the seeds and all of that.
So after the crop, when the crops came in and also as Ms.
West mentioned, uh a lot of them didn't have formal education to know any difference.
So when landowner gave them the books to show that
Mm-hmm.
the most part, most sharecroppers did not make.
enough money to survive or exist on their own.
That was my experience with care-prifers and I don't know, I'm sure it was that way in the delts too.
But I'm going say that was a way of keeping them sharecroppers.
If they can keep them in debt, they can keep them sharecroppers.
And even when the blacks got to the point they could read and write and can understand what was going on, they were still enslaved on some levels because the only little store
was a store owned by the master.
And the master would bring the prices so high that they still could not ever break even.
And so it was a caste system where they would never ever be able to break even and leave on their own unless they went up north or something else into being.
They never could make it.
And that's why, you know, they moved a lot around a lot, too.
know, person, I go from this landowner to another landowner, but I'm still in the same situation.
And there was also a fear of rebuttal.
know, Jim Newman says I didn't make any money, but I know I should have ten dollars.
But I'm not going to get into an argument with Jim Newman, who's the white landowner, about the fact that I didn't break even.
Because that, as Mrs.
West said, that affects my survival.
Because I know that when I say something to this white man, then the guns are coming next, or the Klan is coming next, or somebody's coming next to take care of me, because I think
I can talk to you like that?
No way.
So sharecropping was not a way of acquiring property ownership.
No, no, it was just a way of surviving, a way to house me and my children and get back from one period to the next.
And she has spoken of housing.
The housing were in poor condition.
I mean, it leaks.
It did not have insulation for the winter.
You know, it was just a poor situation.
And so here's the man that got to go to work.
The woman has to not only cook and do all of this to get her family situated in the morning, but
pregnant or not, she still had to go to field and work that day and then come home and paw bar greens or whatever it was she had to do to get dinner for her family.
And even when she had the child, she didn't have time to heal and nurture herself.
She had to get back in the field or go up to the master's house or wherever it was.
She had to still pull her duty.
And I think a lot of this is what has made Black women as strong as we are.
because we've had to do what we had to do to make it.
I can tell you that.
If I need a job done, I know who to go to ah to get it done.
ah
the women and in particular the black women.
You are such marvelous creatures.
I don't know how you survived.
And I honestly, I don't know how you.
still love Mississippi.
When I first moved down here, one of the first things when I first got into Mississippi, I don't know, it was in 78 or 79 or so, the legislature changed a law that said uh up until
then it was okay for a white person to discipline his manservant.
And if in the process he killed him, it was okay.
Mm-hmm.
I could not believe it.
It was just so startling because I knew exactly what it was.
It was out and out.
some of those laws still on the books.
Yes, yes.
racial disparities were not just in Mississippi.
That was universal for Black.
Mm-hmm.
Do you think in our lives we'll ever see it get to that point?
get to what point?
The equality, racial equality?
some equality.
No.
don't think so.
Because we're going backwards.
As Ms.
mentioned, we're going backwards instead of, you know, we always thought that we push forward because we want to, I want a better life for my child and my grandchildren than I
had.
But a lot of the strides that we've made are being abolished.
We're not going forward.
And it used to be each generation, and this is not just with the Blacks, each generation did better than their parents.
But in the Black community, uh when that child did go off to school or whatever, they would reach back and help their siblings or they would reach back and help their parents.
And now we're in a situation where the children are not doing as well as we did.
And so this going backwards is much bigger for the African-American community.
than it is from some of the other communities because you have children now that are adults and they have children and families and so forth and having to move in with their
parents.
David, I know we're running out of time, but I think this is the subject that we need to continue talking about.
And I think we need to have these two lovely ladies back again.
And let's continue this.
I totally agree.
This has been eye opening and oh Gemini both are in awe of you two ladies and your strength and what you have endured.
uh
Thank you for sharing your stories with us.
oh Lovie, I'll ask you anything, any last words for us and then I'll ask, excuse me, Virginia, any last words from her too.
So Lovie, you first.
I just want to say thank you to the two of you for having us to share this portion of our lives and hopefully it will be an educational process for all of those that are listening,
even those of color that may not understand what it was like in years before.
So thank you so much for the opportunity.
And as long as I'm able and in my right mind, I will continue to work ah for the good.
Just that you're still in Mississippi, I question your right mind.
Miss Virginia.
I'd like to echo Ms.
West's sentiments, but also, and your statement, Jim, just reinforces, it's not just Mississippi.
I mean, this is a universal problem.
And racism is a universal problem.
Denial of racism is one of the major causes of all of the problems that we have, because you have to...
In order to solve a problem, have to acknowledge that it exists.
And there are both sides of the spectrum are really disowning the concept that it still exists.
until we accept that it's important that it be eradicated, we will never be able to overcome it.
So that's my
was a book written a couple of years back and I'm sure I have the wrong title, it was Project, help me out ladies, Project, New York Times.
It was about...
slavery in this country project, I want to say 2016.
I don't recall.
I, it slips my mind, ah but I'll get it out.
I read it and we'll get back on and get together ah and continue this conversation because racism's not going away and I don't think we should either.
Right.
Jim, I was trying to find that book that you mentioned, but I couldn't find it.
Yes, thank you guys so much for being with us.
uh Thank you, ladies.
This has been an eye-opening experience.
And yes, we know that it's up to you guys to share your story, and it's up to us to make sure that those stories get out.
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if you have any questions, comments, or issues that you would like to talk about, please contact us at mississippyehappeningsofone.com.
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May we never become indifferent to the suffering of others.
Thank you.