Sunday, June 3, 2001

By Teri Weaver

Jackson, Miss.

Everyone these Central New York teens meet has a civil rights story to tell.

Bennie Paige worked at a car wash 31 years ago with a youth named James Green. Although neither was a student at Jackson State University, they went down to the campus after work one night to see what was going on.

There had been protests at the black college, in Jackson, Miss., and that night, word was spreading that Medgar Evers, a black leader in the state, had been killed.

Paige made it home that night, and he graduated a few years later from Jackson State. Paige, who's black, went on to become a top lobbyist with Entergy, a growing power company in the south and northeast.

James Earl Green died that night.

Green, 17, and Phillip L. Gibbs, 21, were shot and killed during the protests the night of May 14, 1970. It was only 10 days after four students were killed at Kent State University. Mississippi law enforcement officials would later defend putting 275 bullet holes in a dormitory building. Claims of a sniper shooting from the dorms were never proven. Last week, a grand jury indicted two law enforcement officers in the fatal shooting of Ben Brown, who died in 1967 after an earlier protest at Jackson State.

Friday night, 16 high school students from Central New York met with Paige.

"It's made me think about a lot of things I haven't thought about in a long time," Paige told the group, after they told him the highlights of their weeklong civil rights tour through Mississippi. Entergy donated $10,000 for the trip and invited the group to dinner Friday night in the Capital Club, a private dining room in the Capital Towers.

The teens, told the Entergy officials they liked Thursday night's gospel concert at Anderson Methodist Church the best. It was the first time most of the white teens had been inside a black church.

"I wish we had churches like that at home," Meghan Stringer, a junior at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, told the Entergy executives.

"We do," answered Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, the New York state senator who has brought four other groups of teens to Mississippi to learn about civil rights.

"Really?" Stringer asked. "I never knew that."

Nicole Austin, a junior at Fayetteville-Manlius, sat next to Carl Crawford, who often speaks for the utility company. Entergy bought the James A. FitzPatrick nuclear power plant in Oswego County last year. Austin, 16, is opposed to nuclear power.

"We had a very respectful conversation," she said Saturday morning, her hair topped by an Entergy cap.

Many of the teens wore their caps that morning as they marched in the Medgar Evers Homecoming Parade. The procession started at Freedom Corner, where Medgar Evers Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive meet in Jackson.

Two markers stand on opposite corners to mark both men's contributions to civil rights. Evers, the first field representative for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi, was killed in his driveway in 1963. Five years later, King was assassinated on a balcony of a Memphis motel. The teens visited both spots last week.