A long time coming (Wallace Roberts / Rutledge VT Herald)

[struggle4progress]

November 16, 2008
By Wallace Roberts, community activist

... In June 1964, I was briefly a guest of Perry and Fannie Lou Hamer in their home in Ruleville, Miss. Hamer was a leader of the Mississippi Civil Rights movement who later that summer would testify before the Democratic National Convention and touch the hearts of millions of Americans with her description of a beating by police the previous year in retaliation for her voter registration work ...

Murder had been the de facto state policy in Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South since Reconstruction for dealing with blacks seeking political power. Bob Moses, the director of the Summer Project, testified last year before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 50th anniversary of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and described an attack on him and two other SNCC workers in February, 1963: "Jimmy Travis slipped behind the wheel and Randolph Blackwell crowded me beside him in a Snick Chevy in front of the Voter Registration Office in Greenwood, Mississippi… Jimmy zigzagged out of town to escape an unmarked car, but as we headed west 8, it trailed us and swept past, firing automatic weapons pitting the Chevy with bullets. Jimmy cried out and slumped; I reached over to grab the wheel and fumbled for the brakes as we glided off into the ditch, our windows blown out, a bullet caught in Jimmy's neck" ...

Moses told the Senate committee last year that sanctioned murder to intimidate black voters in the Deep South got its start with the weak federal response to the Colfax (Louisiana) Massacre on Easter Sunday in 1873 when at least 70 and perhaps as many as 280 blacks were killed by a white mob in the wake of a disputed election. Most members of the white mob fled to Texas, but nine were tried and three found guilty of violations of the U.S. Enforcement Act of 1870 which had been designed to provide federal protection for the civil rights of blacks ...

The Hamers are gone now. Mrs. Hamer died in 1977 after a run for Congress and years of building community organizations in the state, and Mr. Hamer passed on a few years ago after a second career as a bus driver for the Sunflower County Head Start Center. I still think of them and how they changed my life, these two brave grandchildren of slaves who died trying to lift the terrible legacy of institutionalized racism off their own backs. I know they would have rejoiced with me in the election of Barack Obama.

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081116/FEATURES15/811160318/1030/FEATURES15