Thursday- Medgar Evers, Emmett Till & Fannie Lou Hamer

This Civil Rights Journey has been a journey of pain and tears for the inhumane actions of so many against so many of God's children and in the many ways it is continuing today. It will take a long time to fully unpack this experience yet these stark realities shake me to my core as I hope it does you and the young people I'm traveling with. 

We met with Angela Steward the archivist at the COFO Education Center for the last 20 years. She is a living encyclopedia of the Civil Rights Movement, I could not write fast enough to gather all that she was telling us.

One person she spoke of was Margaret Walker, who the center is named for. She lived on the same street as Medgar Evers here in Jackson, she compared Medgar to Micah as a prophetic voice.

She read us her poem, Jubilee, and encouraged us to know and read her book of poetry, Prophets for a New Day.

Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist and soldier who was the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. Evers, a United States Army veteran who served in World War II, was engaged in efforts to overturn racial segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, including the enforcement of voting rights when he was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963 at his home in front of his family. 

Our next stop was Glendora, MS where Emmett Louis Till a 14-year-old African American youth was abducted and brutally murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

We visited Ruleville, MS, the home of Fannie Lou Hamer.

She was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was the vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.