We arrived on the Tougaloo campus for the first time in the fateful summer of ’64. We weren’t there to register voters, but to interview for teaching jobs, which would begin the following January when we were done harvesting our degrees in Cambridge.
We were put up in the president’s house, the most modern building on campus, designed to accommodate and entertain visitors in an environment none too friendly to the needs of what was known locally as Cancer College for its integrated faculty and staff and for its history as a safe haven for civil rights activity.
Everything about being there was new to us – the Spanish moss hanging from virtually every branch, the sweltering heat, inevitably followed by a sudden summer thunderstorm, and most of all, the incredible tension that hung over the campus along with that ubiquitous moss. The three civil rights workers were missing. Everyone knew how that story would end, but it would be weeks before their bodies were found. Every car entering the campus caused a moment’s anxiety until it was clear whether it was friend or foe.
The only other buildings we visited on that trip were the administration building, a pre-Civil War structure that had been the main house of the plantation on whose land the campus was built – you were never too far from reminders of the history of your surroundings in the South – and a ramshackle building which housed what was known as the Social Science Lab. This was the lair of the man who was to be our mentor, Dr. Ernst Borinski, a German Jew who traded the swastika from the Jim Crow South. Although he had an apartment on campus, he virtually lived in the basement of that building, cooking his oddly exotic meals in the back – a lamb chop topped by a canned peach on our first visit – and entertaining guests for his weekly subversive forums featuring famous visitors – there were many in those years – speaking to integrated audiences, which we came to understand was wildly unprecedented and dangerous in that time and place.
Needless to say, we were sold on the place after that first visit. It was exactly the kind of engaged space we were hungry for after our detached years in academia while the outside world was burning. Our return in January to begin our teaching was the beginning of three years in and around the village of Tougaloo, then unincorporated, with unpaved roads, a few middle-class-looking homes outnumbered by much poorer dwellings. In the days when major state university campuses were not yet admitting Black students, we had an abundance of bright promising kids in our classes. We were surrounded by the occasional demonstrations and protests. There were occasional drive-by shootings from cars circling the campus, firebombsand,most important for the more hopeful future they augured, organizing efforts by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We were taking our students downtown to integrate churches and movie theaters while sending letters home to reassure our parents that we were staying out of trouble – just teaching. It was a period of unusually intense activity, both positive and negative that confirmed our sense that we were in the right place at the right time.
We’ve been back on campus several times in recent years. In 2014, the campus hosted the 50th anniversary celebration of Freedom Summer. By then Jackson, the state capital, was just another undistinguished small town, with the Movement years fading in the rearview mirror. A few years later we were back again for conferences in a city that now presented a Black mayor and a Civil Rights Museum that contains a prominent display about the Tougaloo students who were arrested integrating the Jackson Public Library in 1961, all neatly relegated to the category of history.
Last night our phones lit up with a text message from our Mississippi-born daughter: “Are you guys watching the live feed from Tougaloo on MSNOW? Oh my god. Turn it on! Tougaloo live! Ernst (our mentor and our daughter’s godfather) must be celebrating in his grave” (which is right there in the little cemetery on campus.) And there it was, Spanish moss and all, and there was Congressman Bennie Thompson who graduated from Tougaloo the year before we arrived and a legend in his own right, introducing Scott Colom, the new Senator-elect from Mississippi. Colom was invoking all the giants on whose back he stood, including the martyred Medgar Evers. On our last trip to Jackson a few years ago we had stood in Evers’s driveway where he was killed by the racist Byron Dela Beckwith as he was headed toward his front door.
It had taken his death and the sacrifices of many others to put Senator-to-be Colom in front of that celebrating crowd. And was it presumptuous of me to tear up thinking that maybe, just maybe we had contributed one teeny tiny bit to what it took for this victory to happen. It was insignificant compared to what thousands of local people had endured, but maybe it wasn’t nothing.
It was just a short while ago that the Supreme Court erased what was left of the Voting Rights Act, leaving me feeling that our work and the work of so many others had been for naught, but, forgive the cliché, the power of the people trumped even the court. The people, outraged by all the efforts to disappear them through gerrymandering and malicious efforts to limit their right to vote turned out in huge numbers. I felt like we were back in the day when Fannie Lou Hamer addressed a crowd gathered from across the state to protest the cut-off of funds to the statewide Head Start program I worked with. Her words — “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” — rang down through the decades to this joyous evening. How fortunate Rosellen and I are to witness that arc bending ever so slightly toward justice.
PS. The reference to Eagle Queen comes from the school song. I assume it refers to the meaning of the school’s name in the language of whichever indigenous population occupied the land on which the college sits.
