The Broken Child - Chapter Six
A world afire
Mine are an ancient and sometimes brutal people. We go to war to the sound of pipes and drums to motivate those about to die. Many of the events I list here resolve themselves in the years that follow, but many are still waiting. The month and the day a man was born can’t tell you much about his future, but the year and the place can tell you a great deal.
I was just a baby. An infant is a tiny thing. His entire universe is the eight or nine feet around him. Mother’s milk, father’s voice, the smell of powder–a baby’s world is very small. Scientists say that we come into the world with undeveloped eyes that mostly detect black and red and light and dark values. All we really understand is the hands that hold us.
My entire world was a tiny bedroom in a tiny house I shared with my grandmother on Northside Drive in Jackson, Mississippi, in nineteen sixty-three. This part of the story bothers me a great deal. It doesn’t bother me because I remember it, but because I don’t.
Nearly all of these things would appear in the Clarion Ledger daily newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. Many of them appear in the Washington Post and other papers around the world but happen just a short bus ride from our little house.
These people are my tribe: my family, my neighbors, my church, my kinsmen. They were suffering. A babe in arms, I could do nothing to help them. I didn’t even know these things happened until many years later.
September 30, 1962: riots broke out in Oxford, Mississippi, to protest James Meridith's enrollment as a student at the University of Mississippi. President John F Kennedy sends three thousand troops to the small Mississippi town to quell the violence. There were two deaths, twenty-eight gunshot wounds, and two hundred injuries.
October 16, 1962: I was conceived at the Broadwater Beach Hotel in Biloxi, Mississippi. Having miscarried twin boys just months before, my mother prays for a girl.
January 2, 1963: twenty-eight young pastors signed a petition titled “Born Of Conviction” in the Mississippi Methodist Advocate magazine. Responding to “the grave crises precipitated by racial discord within our state in recent months,” the statement calls for “freedom of the pulpit–without reprisals,” an end to segregation within the church, and an avowed dedication to the Mississippi Public School system, which Governor Barnett had threatened to close rather than integrate.
February 20, 1963: Boyd Campbell, founder and chairman of Mississippi School Supply Company, treasurer of Millsaps College, and president of the US Chamber of Commerce, dies in Jackson, Mississippi.
April 1, 1963: Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Alan C Thompson closes all public pools rather than integrate them, including Lake Hico and Livingston Lake at the Jackson Zoo.
April 14, 1963: At the Southern Literary Festival at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty quietly invited black students from Tougaloo to attend her lecture, the first integrated audience in Mississippi's history.
April 16, 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. writes “A Letter from The Birmingham Jail.” The New York Times discusses publishing it but decides it would be too incendiary. It is ultimately published as “The Negro Is Your Brother” in The Atlantic Monthly.
May 26, 1963: 600 African citizens of Jackson, MS, attempt to meet with Mayor Thompson to discuss the hiring of black police officers, the voluntary desegregation of Jackson Public Schools, the voluntary desegregation of public places in Jackson, and the removal of all “White’s Only” signs. Thompson refuses.
May 27, 1963: The US Justice Department announces their plan to enact the Brown v Board of Education ruling “with all deliberate speed.” In response, the Superintendent of Jackson Public Schools plans to have at least one black student in every public school.
May 28, 1963: In response to Mayor Thompson refusing to meet with African citizens over segregation issues, white and black students stage a “sit-in” at the Woolworth department store in Jackson, Mississippi. White Tougaloo Methodist chaplain Ed King and sociology professor John Salter participated in the protests. More than 50 college and high school students were arrested. Photographs of an angry mob pouring mustard and ketchup on the protestors are printed in newspapers and magazines worldwide.
May 31, 1963: The Mississippi Methodist Conference severs all ties with Reverand Ed King in response to his efforts to desegregate public places.
June 9, 1963: Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church in Jackson, MS, turns away 5 Tougaloo students trying to enter. Rev. William B Selah resigns his post from the pulpit.
June 12, 1963: Medgar Evers is shot at his home in Jackson, MS. His wife drives him to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, constructed just eight years earlier. He dies during attempts to save him.
June 16, 1963: I was born at Mississippi Baptist Hospital, Jackson, MS, Less than a mile from where Medgar Evers died four days before.
June 18, 1963: Men force Rev. Ed King off the road. Emergency room doctors will not treat him. Plastic surgeons will not repair the damage to his face.
June 18, 1963: Eudora Welty writes, “Where is that Voice Coming From” in response to the assassination of Medgar Evers, a piece she claims is the only thing she ever wrote in anger. It’s published in The New Yorker magazine.
July 1, 1963: Rev. William B Selah asks Bishop Marvin Franklin for a transfer. The ministerial staff at Capitol Street Methodist Church soon copies this move.
August 18, 1963: James Meridith graduates from the University of Mississippi.
August 28, 1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his “I Have A Dream” speech at the March On Washington.
September 1, 1963: Bishop Marvin Franklin appoints WJ Cunningham to fill the vacant pastoral seat left by William Selah at Galloway Memorial Methodist Church.
September 12, 1963: Marvel Comics Publishes “Avengers” Issue 1, featuring Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man and Wasp Woman.
September 15, 1963: A bombing by the Klu Klux Klan at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, kills four little girls and injures twenty-two.
October 1, 1963: Students from Tougaloo are arrested trying to attend Sunday Services at Galloway Memorial Methodist Church. WJ Cunningham refuses to file charges, but the police arrest them on a “city ordinance.”
November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
November 24, 1963: Accused of shooting President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald is murdered by Jack Ruby.
December 29, 1963: I was baptized by Rev WJ Cunningham and associate Pastor Clay Lee at Galloway Memorial Methodist Church in Jackson, MS.
Held and loved by a family determined to make me feel safe and loved, I was born into a world afire.
