Thursday, May 31, 2001

By Teri Weaver

Jackson, Miss.

The teens rode down the winding Natchez Trace Parkway Tuesday morning, passing Mississippi farmland, dense forests and occasional creeks that held only a trickle.

The Central New York high school students compared high school programs, school buses and SAT scores. Some slept on the hour-long ride from Jackson to Port Gibson. Others played cards.

The only moment of tension on the road would come later in the afternoon. The chaperones - who are overseeing the kids on a week-long tour of the civil rights movement in Mississippi - couldn't find a bathroom fast enough.

Forty years ago, the Rev. James Dorsey would have never ridden on the Trace. He only took the main highway between Port Gibson, a town about five miles from the Mississippi River,

and Jackson, the state's capital, more than 60 miles away.

Back then, the Trace was an old wooded dirt road that was too dark, too dense and too dangerous.

"They always knew if I was going to Jackson that day," James Dorsey told the 16 teens. "I would have to give myself about an hour extra to make it."

"There's a story behind everything," said Charla Harlow, a 17-year-old junior at Henninger High School.

Dorsey has been the pastor at First Baptist Church in Port Gibson since 1965, back when he was president of the Claiborne County NAACP. That title made him a target in town, and because he would let the NAACP, Medgar Evers and other civil rights leaders meet in his church. The sanctuary became a target, too.

"I remember when this place was surrounded with highway patrolmen," said Ronnie Thompson, who was about 12 or 13 when the movement gained momentum in Port Gibson, a town recently informed by the U.S. Census that it has 1,840 residents, more than three-fourths of whom are black.

The church is brick, one-story. The stained-glass windows are panes of blue, green, gold and purple, with no illustration or story pieced out of them. In the fellowship hall, where the teens had lunch delivered from the Piggly Wiggly grocery store, the panes of "stained glass" are clear glass covered by thin strips of colored plastic.

Steven Lickstein, a junior from Jamesville-DeWitt, was the

only teen who helped the church members put out the lunch. The night before, he and Jareau Hall, a junior at Corcoran High School in Syracuse, had stayed up talking.

Hall, who is black, talked about what he thought the sub

urbs were like: white, rich and safe. Lickstein, who is white, had different thoughts about the city: black, poor and, at times, dangerous.

"We were totally wrong," Lickstein said later.

"People just assume," said Dennis Price, 16, who also lives on the South Side and goes to Henninger High School.

Hall, 16, lives on Colvin Street, "between gangsters on one corner and drug dealers on the other." He hears gunshots on summer nights. He said the drugs, guns and thugs don't scare him. He just minds his own business.

Lickstein, 17, has traveled to Europe. He's a lifeguard at Drumlins Country Club and for the town of DeWitt. He's bummed when, on vacation days from school, his parents take both cars and he has nowhere to go. He's given a bear hug to everyone he had met so far on the trip.

The two sat on either side of Marguerite Thompson at dinner in the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians, a former Indian meeting place. Thompson, born in 1915, had answered their questions about race comfortably. Hearing of the previous night's conversations, she grasped her walker and turned to Lickstein.

"Are you rich?" she asked.

He looked at his feet and laughed nervously. "I don't know. We have two cars and a house," he offered.

Thompson smiled. Thompson calls herself black. She is light-skinned and has flaxen, salt-and-pepper hair, "not so unusual for Natchez," she said.

In 1967, she bought eight shares for $25 each in "Our Mart," the cooperative store that allowed African-Americans to boycott white businesses in Port Gibson. About 40 people put up their money, and Thompson was the first president of the board. The boycott lasted about three years, and some of the white store owners sued the NAACP for their losses. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the boycott had been legal.

Before dinner, the teens had split up, with eight staying at Alcorn State University about 15 miles inland. Alcorn is one of the state's historically black colleges. The other eight teens went on to Natchez to stay with host families. The city is on the Mississippi River.

Tuesday's dinner at the Grand Village was outside; when the group had driven into Natchez at 6:15 p.m., the sign at the United Mississippi Bank said it was 94 degrees.

While the teens swatted bugs, Thompson relived the days of Our Mart. The blacks had given the whites a list of requests to be met by April 1, 1967. They requested the right to vote, to be waited on in turn at white businesses, to be able to apply for better jobs in town.

When the requests were ignored, the black people pooled their money and opened the store. They bought groceries, a few pots and pans and meat from white wholesalers in Jackson. Over the years, tiny dividends trickled in. The store just closed a few months ago.