Mississippi Shining

 

I was in Jackson, Mississippi, staying at the Holiday Inn Express on the night of Barack Obama’s 2008 election. We didn’t mention the election at check-in, and I went to my room while everything was still up in the air. The next morning, the mood was very different.

The difference wasn’t so much in the people staying at the hotel as in those working there. I remember getting on the elevator with the cleaning crew, and they were giddy with hope. They spoke to me first, looked me in the eye and said, “Good morning.”

I wish I could have been in Jackson to see those women’s faces this morning after Scott Colom was announced as the winner in his U.S. Senate race against Cindy Hyde-Smith. 

That morning in 2008, like last night’s televised celebration, took me back to 1968 in my hometown. So much anger and pain spread throughout the country, but it had already been a painful year, particularly for the young people at my high school. Adult leaders made decisions that impacted us in ways they never had to experience.

After school let out for the summer, the school board announced it was closing what was known as the county’s Black high school. Then they set up scenarios that weren’t good for any student at either school. 

Both schools had already elected their student government officers. But instead of holding new elections, they made our slate of officers the ruling slate and left Central’s elected officers with temporary titles and no power.

They fired most of Central’s faculty, who would have helped navigate the new system and advocated for the students. They brought their power plays and prejudices to the table without thinking about how it would play out in our halls—and that is a generous assumption.

We made national news when members of the Ku Klux Klan positioned themselves at the gates of the high school, armed with guns and wearing no masks. I saw a deacon from a church I used to attend standing there.

We were absent so often for bomb threats that it bit into our snow days. It escalated until we had a stabbing in the hallway with all of us trying to get to class. Through it all, the Black students were never the instigators.

Our lives were chaos.

Then came basketball season. We had always been a very mediocre sporting school, while Central had an amazing basketball team. With only three white players on the team, we were winning games. Not just winning, but winning big with high-flying rebounds and slam dunks that shook the goal.

We kept winning, the crowds kept growing, and we found ourselves playing for the state championship. The tournament was played in the next town over; the crowds were huge and we won.

After the game, a group of Black and white students gathered in the Hardee’s parking lot to celebrate. Police were called immediately when my friend took out her trumpet, stood on the hood of her car, and played “Taps.”

We heard them radio in that they had a potential racial situation where kids from Orange High were standing in the parking lot shouting at each other. Several of us tried to convince them we were all there together because we had won the state championship. But they couldn’t tell the difference between a celebration and a riot.

I have friends who want to tell this story differently, something about bad calls and missteps, but I do not care. Within one school year, many students went from being second-class citizens to having the center of the basketball team, Johnny Crump, elected student body president in one round of voting.

That was a miracle, and honestly, I didn’t care how it happened. We needed some hope.

I think that’s how it probably felt in Mississippi and beyond last night.