Page 28 - WTP VOl. XII #1

It’s Time (continued from preceding page)
the Peace and Justice Memorial, also has a museum about a mile away. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration has many exhib- its that serve to draw a direct historical line from one to the other. It sits on the site where enslaved people were once warehoused. One of the exhibits that struck me viscerally was the re-creations of the “slave pens” in which Black people were kept before they were sold. When you stand before a particular pen, a hologram appears to tell you a little about who they are. The last pen that I went to was that
of a child, who cried, “Mama,” when I walked up to
it. I couldn’t stay. That was a bit too much to bear. Further along in the museum is a display of over eight hundred jars of soil in various shades of brown, red, and black, taken from known lynching sites—the lives of those murdered, honored and remembered with the soil where they died.
On the evening of the seventh day, we left Montgomery and headed west to Mississippi, where we would be for days eight and nine. Before this trip, Mississippi had always given me the heebie-jeebies. I envisioned
a state filled with fetid swamps and murder—Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. I did see some of those swamps, and bore witness to that murderous history, but Mississippi is also home to one of the most astonishing periods of organizing, direct action, and democracy.
Sitting in the former headquarters of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in Jackson, we listened to Garrad Lee, a white historian at Jackson State University, one of the Historically Black Colleg- es and Universities (HBCUs), talk about the role of COFO. From 1961-65, this alliance, in an unprec- edented fashion, brought together disparate, and sometimes rival, civil rights organizations in Missis- sippi, from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It was led by Bob Moses of SNCC, Aaron Henry of the NAACP, and Dave Dennis of CORE. Fannie Lou Hamer, a member of SNCC
and later vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, was an integral part of this work. Being in the room where the meetings happened that led to the Freedom Vote, Freedom Summer, Freedom Schools, and the Freedom Democratic Party was a thrill. I’m not much for believing in spirits residing in a build- ing, but I felt them there.
At Jackson State University, we were scheduled to meet with some students from the music program before we were to give a concert in the auditorium. When we arrived, the lobby was filled with young people carrying instruments in and out of the audi-
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torium. I hadn’t been in such a tightly-packed space since the onset of the pandemic. We found out later that there was some sort of band event going on, which would end up delaying our concert by about an hour. When we met with them, the students told us a little bit about what each of them was studying. Members of SANS shared their own relationships to music, from professional singers to people finding community with like-minded souls.
The students clearly didn’t know what to expect from a chorus largely made up of older white people. As we were singing, the students’ expressions went
from polite attentiveness to bright-eyed glee. They exchanged smiling glances, engaged in silent one- handed clapping, and stood for ovations. Phones went up to take videos.
This, our last concert, crackled with energy. It was as if we were all transported to some other place in the universe, where everything and everyone is in sync. For us, the singing was a release not only from the difficulties we had faced as a group, but also from the horrors of our nation’s history that we had just witnessed. Every note we sang sparked a reaction in the students which, in turn, reverberated joy in our direction. Joy—something we hadn’t felt in a while. As each song concluded, we turned to each other with broad smiles. This is clicking. We’re clicking. This is fun.
At the end, the students joined us onstage—a handful of young men joined me and my tenor section—to sing “Total Praise,” a gospel song that ends with a crescendo of “Amens.” Afterwards, many of us went out into the auditorium to tell the students what
a terrific audience they had been and how much energy they had given us. They, in turn, invari- ably responded, “You all were great.” The entire afternoon was an affirmation of the many power- ful roles that music can play, most importantly, as a means to connect across generations and among people of different races.
From Jackson, we headed to Indianola, the hometown of B.B. King. That night we had dinner at Club Ebony, which was established in 1948 as one of the Black night clubs, part of the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” that dotted the south during the Jim Crow era. Club Ebony was
a venue where the local, rural residents could go to eat, drink, and dance, while listening to such greats as Ray Charles, B.B. King, Count Basie, Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, Howlin’ Wolf, and Bobby Bland. The club was officially closed for renovations, but— thanks to Charles “Mac” McLaurin, who would lead us on a tornado-warning-foreshortened bus tour of the