Sunday, May 27, 2001

By Teri Weaver

Adrienne Wilson is worried that Mississippi will be country. She means no insult to what, by many accounts, is the nation's poorest state. She just wonders how different the dusty, brown fields in the South will be from the lush green hills in eastern Madison County.

"From the pictures, it looks country," the 16-year-old said last week, remembering movies she's seen about Mississippi while looking out of her mobile home in Stockbridge to the dairy farm where her family milks about 100 cows each day.

On an evening a couple of months ago, Adrienne found the front two legs of a newborn calf sticking out of a cow. She and her younger brother, Logan, spent the next hour with the animals and a piece of rope, easing the calf out of its mother.

Wilson is less confident as she boards her first plane this morning. She'll land first in Memphis, Tenn., then in Jackson, Miss., in the midst of humidity and history that will consume her and 15 other Central New York teens for the next week.

"What they'll realize is this was ordinary people that did extraordinary things over a long period of time," said Sen. Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, who went to Mississippi in the early 1970s to help register black voters and set up family planning clinics in rural parts of the state.

This is the fifth year Hoffmann has taken Central New York students like Adrienne to the South to meet with the people who changed the state and the nation. She picks students from high schools in her district - Syracuse, and parts of Oneida, Onondaga and Madison counties - who are nominated by their teachers and guidance counselors.

The teens know about Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but for most, their knowledge of the civil-rights movement stops there.

They want to "walk in the places where the major events from the movement happened," said Jareau Hall, a 16-year-old junior at Corcoran High School. They want to hear the stories, and the accents, of Mississippi, a state which Medgar Evers once said would be the best place in the world to live if "everything got straight here."

Evers, a black veteran of World War II, returned to his home in Jackson to lead voter registration efforts and the NAACP in Mississippi. He was fatally shot in front of his family in the summer of 1963. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was convicted in his third trial 21 years later by eight black and four white jurors.

The trip revolves around Evers. The teens will visit his home and driveway where he was gunned down. They'll meet his brother, Charles, who also led the NAACP in the state and is now on the Board of Supervisors in Jefferson County, Miss. They'll march in a parade that honors the man who wasn't admitted to the University of Mississippi law school because of the color of his skin.

Skin color is the reason these teens want to go to Mississippi. Some of them are of mixed race; others have never had a close friend outside of their own color.

Andre Parks has one parent who is black and one who is white. When the 16-year-old fills out surveys or standardized test forms at Henninger High School, he looks at the race categories with frustration.

"I'm not really sure what those mean," he says of black and white. "Usually I just put 'other.' "

Charla Harlow, also a junior, does the same thing.

"I'm human," she said bluntly last week in between practice jumps at the high bar at Henninger's track. After clearing the bar at 4 feet 8 inches, she stopped to rest and explain her family. "From what we know," she begins, and goes on to talk of her Italian, French Canadian, Panamanian and African lineage.

Despite her own diversity, she said most of her friends are black.

"When you're younger, color doesn't matter," she said. "But when you get into middle school or high school, you go with your own. I'm not comfortable with that, but it just happens."

The trip, Hoffmann said, helps to dispel that. She purposefully picks a group of teens from different racial, ethnic, economic and social backgrounds. The kids learn as much about race and class from each other, she said, as they do from Mississippians.

Steven Lickstein, a 17-year-old junior at Jamesville-DeWitt High School, wants to learn more about the nonviolence techniques used during the movement. He volunteers in Mentors for Jenna, a group named after Jenna Grieshaber Honis, the Camillus native who was killed in Albany. The group teaches middle-school children about choosing their words carefully.

Lickstein is half-Jewish but a confirmed Catholic. Religion isn't so important to him right now; learning is. He talks quickly, rattling off his past family trips. "We went to Spain last summer. Canada, Mexico, France for a couple of days. I don't know if that counts," he laughs. "Florida and Virginia. My grandparents live in Florida like everyone's grandparents do."

Dennis Price's grandmother, Gladys Price, once bought her groceries in Brandon, Miss., a tiny town outside of Jackson and now a growing white suburb to the state's capital.

"Charles Evers is about the same age" as his grandmother, who now lives in Syracuse, Price said. "I want to see the people she was growing up with."

Price, 16, is working on a comic strip about his brother, 14-year-old Asif.

"All I think about is drawing," he said. "For one time, I want to make my own comic book. After that, it really gets hazy," he said of his dreams.

Most of Price's drawing pad is full of copies of Japanese comic characters. He buys his pens at the Rite-Aid on West Onondaga Street, laying out $2.25 for a small-tipped, black pen that lasts one to three months.

Price likes Syracuse, but he finds little beauty in it.

"It looks all decrepit," he said from the stoop of his home on Hudson Avenue, one block from the Southwest Community Center. "It looks all beat up." A pigeon peers out of a broken window above his apartment. Paint is peeling from most of the houses on his block; one is boarded up. The lawns are freshly cut, and neighbors up and down the street have pots full of flowering plants.

"We don't have a lot of things that people have. No Internet, no phone, no cable," he said.

Eric Bailey knows pairing kids from different backgrounds works. He went on the trip last year and is returning this year as the only high school senior in the group. Bailey is white and grew up in Fremont, an area in northwest Manlius. He's kept in touch with the kids who went last year, although he admits it can be tough to get together even when most live in the same county.

Bailey, 17, grew closest with the students and chaperones who rode in the same van between the state's capital, Jackson, to the southwestern part of the state to visit former civil-rights workers in Port Gibson and Natchez. Along the way, a hand-painted sign caught their eyes. It was an invitation to a Ku Klux Klan meeting.

"One of the kids in the van said, 'Is that what I think it is?' " Bailey remembered.

But Bailey was also surprised by the lack of racial tension among the people he met. "It opens your eyes to what's going on," he said, thinking of the thousands - black and white - who came to Medgar Evers' parade last year.

Hoffmann expects the trip to cost around $26,000 as it did last year. Part of the money comes from donations: $10,000 from Entergy Nuclear, the utility company based in Jackson that bought the James A. FitzPatrick nuclear power plant in Oswego County last year; $1,000 from the Metropolitan Development Association of Syracuse and Central New York; $500 each from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the International Union of Operating Engineers.

But the largest chunk comes from state taxpayers. Last year, Hoffmann secured $30,000 to help pay for last summer's trip and a second one this winter to New Orleans. She's asking for the same amount now in budget negotiations.

Along the way the teens stay at some of the state's historically black colleges and with families who open up their homes and kitchens to strangers.

Abdullah Alnouri knows about Southern hospitality. When he lived in Stanton, Va., during his fifth- and sixth-grade years, his skin drew attention among blacks and whites.

"I was teased and taunted by being called Mexican boy, a Yankee Mexican," said Alnouri, who is Arab-American. His father still lives in Kuwait, where Alnouri lived until he was 5.

Now, at 17, Alnouri draws attention to himself. He works with college and high school students to promote diversity and discussion of racism. On Halloween, he wore a tight, black tank top and skirt to Corcoran to "confront the issue of homosexuality and see what would happen." School officials gave him a one-day suspension.

"Southern hospitality, from my experience, is a front," said Alnouri. "I think that's part of the reason I'm going. I'd love to be proven wrong."