"ON NOT RUSTING OUT"

 “ON NOT RUSTING OUT – WE SHALL MAKE OURSELVES FREE”

To close out Women’s Herstory Month, I want to highlight a fellow Georgian, Lucy Craft Laney.  She was born on April 13, 1854, in Macon, Georgia, in the middle of the decade of struggle over slavery, in the same year that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in Congress.  Though born in the deep South, she was born as a free Black person, because her father Rev. David Laney had bought his freedom (and that of his wife Louisa) 20 years before Lucy was born. Rev. Laney was pastor of Washington Avenue Presbyterian Church in Macon.

Both her parents were strong believers in education, and they passed this belief on to their 10 children, including Lucy.  It was illegal to teach Black people to read throughout the South, including Georgia  – white oppressors still remembered that Nat Turner read the Bible and heard the message “Jesus means freedom” there.  Lucy’s mother, however, taught Lucy to read and by age 12, she was translating     from Latin, including Julius Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic War.”  Lucy attended a mission school in Macon, run by the American Missionary Association and graduated from high school there.  She enrolled in 1869 in the first class of Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a school where W.E.B. Dubois would later teach.  Dubois would become her lifelong friend and supporter.  Laney was miffed, however, that AU would not let her take courses in the classics because she was female.  She graduated in 1873 with a degree as a teacher.

Laney worked as a teacher for ten years in Macon, Milledgeville (home of Flannery O’Connor), and Savannah, before deciding to open her own school for Black girls in Augusta in 1883. She began her school in the basement of Christ Presbyterian Church in Augusta.   Her first class had 6 students, but the teaching was so excellent that word spread quickly, and by the end of the second year, the school had 234 students, including some Black boys who showed up.  She needed funding for this rapid expanse, and being a lifelong Presbyterian, she went to the Presbyterian General Assembly in Minneapolis in 1886 to ask for funding.  The Presbyterians turned her down – who wants to fund a hick school down in Georgia in the midst of neo-slavery?

One of the delegates to the Presbyterian assembly, however, was impressed with Laney’s work.  Francine E.H. Haines was president of Presbyterian Women’s Work, and she decided to make a substantial financial donation to the school, and in response to this generosity, Laney renamed the school to be “The Haines Normal Industrial Institute.”  Thanks to Haines’ support, the Presbyterians soon came on board.  The school grew to encompass an entire city block of buildings, and it was a viable alternative to the poor public education offered to people classified as “Black” in Augusta and in Georgia.  Mary McLeod Bethune began her teaching career at Haines, and Lucy Craft Laney became one of her mentors.  Because of its excellent reputation, the school’s enrollment grew to more than 900 students.  Among its many accomplishments were starting the first kindergarten for Black children in Georgia and one of the first in the South; starting the first Nurses’ Training School for Black girls and women;  starting the first football team from a Black high school in Georgia.  Laney served as principal of the school for over 50 years.

    Laney did not confine herself to the education world – she joined the Niagara Movement early on, and she helped to found the NAACP.  She fought for Black rights in Georgia and throughout the South as neo-slavery tore away at the rights won for Black people in the Civil War.  She was a strong voice for human rights and the need to educate all people, so that they would know the intellectual and political meaning of the self-evident truth “that all people are created equal.”  

    When her health began to fail, many of her friends and colleagues urged her to slow down, but her reply to them was “I don’t want to rust out; I intend to wear out – we shall make ourselves free.”  She died in 1933, and was buried on the grounds of the school.  The school remained in operation until 1949, when it merged with another high school to become Lucy Craft Laney High School, one of whose famous alumni is opera singer Jessye Norman.  Lucy Craft Laney became the first Black woman to have her portrait hung in the Georgia Capitol, joining Martin Luther King, Jr., and Henry McNeal Turner’s portraits, while Jimmy Carter was Governor.  The inscription under her portrait: “Mother of the people.”

"GAME OF CHANGE"

 “GAME OF CHANGE”

Sixty years ago in March, 1963, the Mississippi State University men’s basketball team snuck out of its home state in order to play in March Madness, the NCAA tournament.  They snuck out of Mississippi because its governor and legislators did not want the team to play any teams with Black players.  Awaiting them at the NCAA tournament in East Lansing, Michigan, was a team that had also broken the unwritten rules of college basketball:  Loyola University of Chicago.  The unwritten rule was that no team could start or ever play more than 2 Black players at one time in a game.

Loyola was founded by the Jesuits in 1870 as St. Ignatius University, and changed its name to Loyola in 1909.  It is one of the largest Catholic universities in the country.  In the 1962-63 basketball season, Loyola coach George Ireland had regularly broken the unwritten rule about the racial composition of his players on the floor, usually starting 3 Black players and sometimes 4.  Known as the Ramblers, they compiled a 24-2 record for the year and were ranked in the top five in the country.   They had endured their share of racial animosities, especially on trips to the South that season.  .

    Having a starting lineup of at least 3 Black players led to numerous issues – other coaches often mocked the Ramblers by saying that Coach Ireland went to Africa to recruit his players.  When the team traveled to New Orleans for a game in January, the Black and white players were forced to stay in segregated lodgings because of neo-slavery laws in Louisiana.  On another road game in Houston in February, crowd members shouted racial slurs and threw objects at the Loyola players.  They played through the adversity, however, and their record and their play led to an invitation to play in the NCAA national tournament.  Their first game in the tournament was against Tennessee Tech, and they defeated the Tennesseans 111-42, the largest margin of victory in the history of the tournament.

    Mississippi State’s subterfuge to sneak out of Mississippi had worked, and they arrived the day before the game with Loyola. They gathered to play on the evening of March 15, and the arena was sold out, with national press covering the game.  Indeed ,when Loyola player Jerry Harkness and Mississippi State player Joe Dan Gold shook hands before the opening tipoff, cameras went off everywhere.  Harkness remembers it this way:  "When those flashbulbs went off -- boom, boom, pop, pop -- you felt the history of it right there," Harkness said, "but I don't think many people even know about it now. That game, if you ask me, was key. I felt like it was the beginning of things turning around in college basketball.”

    Oh yes, Loyola went on to win the game 61-51, and the barriers of racial composition of college basketball teams had been broken.  Loyola went on the Final Four in Louisville that year, and in a thrilling final game, the Ramblers defeated two-time defending champion University of Cincinnati 61-60 in overtime to become the new national champions.  In the audience in Louisville that night was a young boxer who was a rising star – his name was Cassius Clay.  Three years later in 1966, a team with all Black starters – Texas Western – would play one of the premier white basketball programs in the country, the University of Kentucky in the NCAA tournament final.  Texas Western upset the Wildcats and turned college basketball upside down. 

     But, it began with a team of white players from Mississippi and their coach who had dared to break the rules to play basketball, and with a team from Chicago that also broke the rules, a team that endured racial hatred to go all the way to the national title.  The Loyola/MSU game became known as the “Game of Change.” Several documentaries have been made about this game and its background – check them out.

"MISSISSIPPI GOES NORTH"

 “MISSISSIPPI GOES NORTH”

When I was in junior high school, I was a basketball fan, but with my vertical challenges (5’3”), I could only play in pick-up games.  My favorite college player during those years was Bailey Howell, a 6’7” player at Mississippi State in Starkville. MSU at that time had all-white teams, and Howell was one of the best in the country.  The team won a couple of SEC conference titles, and because of that, they were eligible to participate in March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament, which would determine the national champion.  But, if MSU went to the tournament, they likely would have to play teams with Black players, so there was an informal Mississippi rule that MSU could not play any teams with Black players.  Even captive as I was to white supremacy, I wanted Howell and his MSU team to go play in the tournament.  Howell and his teammates wanted to play, too, but the university and the state of Mississippi would not permit it.

That would change in 1963, and as March Madness starts again this week, I want to give the background story to that 1963 decision.  The MSU team would again win the SEC Conference title in 1963 and were invited to the NCAA tournament.  They would be playing Loyola of Chicago in an early round of the NCAA tournament, and Loyola had Black players.  The legislature of Mississippi once again declined the invitation for MSU, but this time the coach (James “Babe” McCarthy),  the players, and even the president of MSU refused to submit to the legislative will.  That refusal began a chain of events and subterfuge which resulted in the MSU team going to play Loyola in the NCAA tournament in East Lansing, Michigan.  This week is the 60th anniversary of that “Game of Change,” as it came to be called.

It was a volatile time in the South, with many changes already coming, and many to come.  Only 7 months earlier, there had been a white race riot at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, in response to one of the citizens of Mississippi, James Meredith, wanting to attend school at his home university.  It took a host of US Marshals and US Army troops to put down the riot and to allow Meredith to attend Ole Miss.  Just one month after March Madness in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., would write his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in the midst of SCLC’s campaign for basic human rights for Black people in that city.  King would be the headline speaker only a few months later at the March on Washington, which drew 250,000 people to DC.  

In March of 1963, MSU president Dean W. Colvard announced that the MSU men’s basketball team would accept the invitation to participate in the NCAA tournament.   His decision sparked an immediate negative reaction from the Mississippi legislature, with one rep saying that “This action follows the Meredith incident as an admission that Mississippi State has capitulated and is willing for the Negroes to move into that school en masse.”  The state college board announced that it would hold a special session to review President Colvard’s decision, but in a surprise move, the board approved the decision by an 8-3 vote.  Governor Ross Barnett and the legislature opposed the decision.  On the afternoon of March 13, 1963, several Mississippi state legislators obtained an injunction from the county court forbidding the team from leaving the state to play in the game – it was issued two days before the game was scheduled to be played.

Coach McCarthy had been to this rodeo before, so he and President Colvard were ready. They left the state before the injunction could be served on them.  On March 14, the team sent the trainer and five reserve players to the Starkville airport to see if the sheriff’s office was guarding against their departure.  When they found no sheriff’s rep there, the rest of the MSU team quickly arrived to take a charter flight to Nashville, Tennessee, out of reach from the court injunction.  In Nashville they met Coach McCarthy and the rest of the staff, and from there they flew up to East Lansing to play Loyola of Chicago on March 15.  The governor and legislators were outraged, but the team was on its way to Michigan.  Later in the day, in no small irony, a justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court dissolved the injunction, saying that it had no basis in law.

All of this was covered heavily in the Southern and national media, and I was glad that MSU was on its way.  It was an historic game on March 15, 1963, and next week I’ll give some background to the MSU opponent Loyola of Chicago. They had their own difficult encounters with the demonic power of racism, but they persevered and ultimately prevailed.  College basketball began dramatic changes with that Game of Change.

"MEMORIES OF ANNE BRADEN" by David Billings

 “MEMORIES OF ANNE BRADEN” by David Billings

{Today’s Blog is an excerpt from a longer article written by my long-time friend David Billings.  As Managing Editor of Hospitality Newsletter, I had asked him to write about Anne Braden for us, and his original article appears in the March/April Hospitality, which can be found on the Facebook page of The Open Door Community.}

    I knew Anne Braden from the mid 1970’s until her death in March 2006.  She was an icon of the Civil Rights Movement  (CRM). I was aware she was mentioned by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” which was written in April, 1963. I had heard how she and her husband Carl Braden were from Louisville, Ky.  Both had been charged with sedition by the State of Kentucky. Their seditious activity? They bought a house in a segregated part of Louisville, and then sold it to a Black couple. The Bradens were convicted, and Carl served time. One of the things I never forgot about Anne is how throughout her life she stood by Carl. She would say “Carl and I were a team. I just happened to have lived a much longer life. But we were a team. I became better known. Had Carl lived as long as me, we would have both been well known.”

  I first met Anne at S.O.C. meetings. “SOC” was how everyone referred to the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice, which Anne helped found in the 1970’s, along with Rev. C.T. Vivian and other organizers who had been leaders in the CRM. SOC’s purpose was to stress organizing as a fundamental principle of social change. The founders of SOC urged activists not to succumb to quick programmatic temptations as the obvious “next steps” to the incredible victories that organizing had brought about in the aftermath of Brown v. Board in 1954. They knew it was mass-based organizing that had made the CRM happen, and that it was such organizing that would continue to be the necessary foundation for any future victories. They wanted to train organizers who could move about the South and keep the Movement going.  Anne always had a strong cadre of local organizers who worked with her in different towns and cities across the South. She did not want to be seen as what would become known as a public intellectual. 

    I was not a seasoned organizer in the mid 1970’s. I was just beginning my work at St. Mark’s Community Center in New Orleans,  where I was hired as part of a recreation program serving neighborhood youth from “Treme,” one of the oldest African American communities in the United States. It was in Treme that I first heard of a group of neighborhood residents who were forming an organization to address issues of housing, jobs, and constant police harassment. I knew I wanted to be a part of that effort.

    I began to travel to Birmingham to SOC meetings. It was like going to school. It was definitely an education. SOC was a classroom, and the teachers were legendary. People would come from all over to SOC meetings. Dr. Jim Dunn from Yellow Springs, Ohio came to SOC meetings. So did C.T. Vivian from Atlanta SCLC , Anne Romaine, an organizer working among coal miners in Appalachia, Lynn Wells with the National Anti-Klan Network, and such luminaries as Hosea Williams, Modjeska Simpkins, and Rev. Fred Taylor from Atlanta. But the prime mover behind SOC’s influence was the example and charisma of Anne Braden. Because it was Anne who founded SOC, others wanted to be a part of it. Because Anne believed, you believed. Or you believed in Anne.

    I asked Ron Chisom once what was it about Anne Braden that stood out in his mind. He said “because she never threw anybody away.” “Anne worked with everybody.” “I try to follow that principle in my own work.”

    Anne struggled with the current emphasis on Affinity Groups. It was a new notion to her. She resisted being slotted into the white group. “You mean after spending my whole life organizing white and black people to learn how to come together, I now have to meet with just white people?” We assured her that is not what was meant, but people of color, especially Black people, were saying that they needed spaces where whites were not present, to discuss dynamics not meant for white people to hear. And they went on to say “and whites need to do the same.” Thus was born European Dissent” in 1986. The idea was when we did come back together, we would be stronger. Maybe Anne was right.  Today, Affinity Groups are in danger of becoming an end in themselves. This at the expense of movement building and community based organizing.

    I remember an evening in the early 2000’s after an Undoing Racism workshop in New Orleans at Margery Freeman in our home in New Orleans, with Anne and Rev. C.T. Vivian present. Others were also there from The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. We began to tell stories, one of which, was how The Institute was formed at C.T.’s home in Atlanta with Anne present. As the night wore on, Anne and C.T. began to reminisce about their history together, working with Dr. King and other heroes of the CRM. Alcohol flowed freely amongst us, and inhibitions loosened.  At some point, I chose to just squeeze down into a corner and listen. What a rare and, in retrospect, cherished evening. Thinking of my upbringing in segregated portions of McComb, Mississippi and Helena, Arkansas in the 1950’s and 60’s, I thought: “what a blessing to have such a twosome in our house.”

    Anne had certain principles of organizing that are important to understand and live by. She called them her 5 Essentials. (1) You must understand racism. It is not just another issue nor just one among many “isms”. Racism destroys democracy, and this is a race constructed nation. (2) Change comes as oppressed peoples organize for change. You can’t legislate racism away. You can’t educate it away. (3) When African American communities organize, the nation trembles. (4) No one group can do it alone, but a coalition of groups working together in order to build a movement is necessary. (5) We must regain the audacity of the ‘60s and dream the dream. 

     If there is an Organizers Hall of Fame, Anne Braden belongs in it. If there are those whose names we must not forget, hers is one of them.  Find her story and learn more about this remarkable woman, and then let us walk in the path that she forged for us.