Well, that mankind is placed on this earth by a deity that we all are
bound to respect. And that although we find ourselves to be the
grandsons of former slaves and the grandsons of former slave owners, but
neither of us had, really, anything to do with that period of our
nation's history. And it is our responsibility, because those scars
still remain, to bind up the wounds of that era. And that's what I think
I'm about every day and that's what I'd like to see everybody about
everyday, to help erase the years of
[unclear] dehumanization that has taken place in America for
some time. But you see, where some of us get lost in chronology . . .
many of us think that segregation has been with us for a long, long
time. Well, Mississippi didn't have segregation until 1890. From 1865 to
1876 was the freest period which blacks have ever witnessed in America
and particularly in
Page 6 Mississippi. It was after the
Tilden-Hayes compromise, the presidential race of 1876 where Rutherford
Hayes told the southerners that, "If you'll make me president, I'll
remove the troops from the South and turn the blacks back over into the
hands of the white landowners." Now between 1865 and 1876 Mississippi
sent two blacks to the Senate of the United States—Bruce and Revels. The
fact that the constitutional convention in Mississippi did not meet
until 1890 and it was in 1890 that the Jim Crow laws were written into
our structure. From 1865 until 1890—
[unclear]—you had black and white kids going to school together,
you had no segregation. Because the Thirteen, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Amendments had just passed and all of these were about black rights in
the black community. And it was really 1890 when we finally got around
to making segregation legal. It was really 1896 before the Supreme Court
took a position on separate and equal. That was in the
Plessy v. Ferguson case that grew out of Louisiana in regard
to a dining room car on a train where a black refused to sit behind a
curtain. And this case came before the United States Supreme Court and
it there ruled that separate but equal was legal. And from 1896 until
1954 we lived with that doctrine in this country.