Wednesday, May 30, 2001

Each day, "Mississippi Journey" profiles someone the students met on their tour. Minnie Watson is assistant archivist at Tougaloo College, an historically black college in Jackson, Miss. The African-American woman was standing in the home of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers when she spoke of John F. Kennedy's integration efforts and his assassination to staff writer Teri Weaver of The Post-Standard.

I never will forget, when Kennedy was killed, I was working in a (white) home that day. And the daughter, the oldest daughter, came home from school to get the television set. And her mother said, "Why you want the TV?" "Mama, we in the cafeteria," she said. "The kids are just going crazy. They're dancing on top of the dining hall tables."

Well, to me, that was a sad thing. But they were just saying what their parents had taught them. That's why I say I could not hate them. And I don't hate them now. When you are taught for so long that you are superior, you think that way. So they teach you that you are inferior. It just so happened that some of us had strong parents. I had a strong mother who wanted us to get a good education, and she taught us you could be anything you want to be. She taught us how to survive. When our parents talked to the white man, they wouldn't look him in the eye. That was a tool, or a kit, for survival.

A lot of us were NAACP secret, card-carrying members. You have to think about it. I lived on a farm. My mother raised six kids by herself. When we participated in the movement, you couldn't let people know about it. If the white man learned...

I won't ever forget his name - the place we stayed on, his name was Frank Graves. Had he found out about our participating in civil rights, (my mother) would have been off the farm.

That's why a lot of people lost their jobs. If you participated in something, and somebody went home and told your mom about it, your mom, if she wasn't in her own home, she would have been out of that house the next day or the same day. And if she went to report for her job the next day, she wouldn't have had one.

We did the sit-in, well, a drink-in, at the (Jackson) zoo. The white (water fountain) had a nice clean slab of concrete; the colored-only was in the mud and bushes. They let you drink, and then they would arrest you. They let the young ladies go, and they carried the young men to jail. That was my one time sitting in.

Scary, scary, scary times. I had other sisters coming up behind me who had to go to school, and my mom was not on her own place. Here I am 17 years old, and to look at the policeman with fire hoses and to look at these vicious dogs.

I also know, many other kids had gone to jail and how they had treated them. Kids were arrested and taken down to what we call the fairgrounds, where they put them in with the animals. They were white and black kids. To hear those kids crying and to not know what was happening. They sprayed them with DDT. They were so full at the jail, they just carried another group down and enclosed them with a wire fence.

Those are the kinds of things they went through. And those are the kind of things you had to ask yourself, "Am I strong enough to stand that? Can I march and not turn around and hit somebody?"

Those were the times we lived in, and that was the time that Medgar lived in.