You Have the Power Within, Part 2

Barefootin'
by Unita Blackwell, JoAnne Prichard Morris

(Page 2 of 2)

The men parked their pickups on the street around the courthouse, hemming us in. There were half a dozen trucks, as I recall. They hollered at us from inside their trucks: "Niggers, niggers. Go home, niggers." The sheriff came walking by again. By this time he had picked up his pace and was shouting at us: "Y'all go on home. Get on away from here." Preacher McGee kept walking around, twitching and pleading with us, "Come on, y'all, come on. They mad. Come on, come on. Y'all better come on now."

But we did not leave.

The men climbed out of their trucks and walked over to where we were standing. They brought their long hunting guns with them. I'd seen these men around town and knew who they were — farmers, most of them. They stopped right in front of us and stood there glaring. Nobody said a word. Their faces were bright red. I had never before seen that kind of rush of blood in a person's face. In those days a black person wasn't supposed to make eye contact with whites. But I looked right into the eyes of one of those white fellows. And he looked straight at me, and if eyes could have shot me down, they would have done it. Hate mooned out just like a picture.

I didn't know what was going to happen next or what I would do. I didn't have a gun or any other weapon to protect myself. None of us did. SNCC believed in nonviolence, and we were following SNCC. I was frozen with fear.

Pictures were flashing through my mind: the three civil rights workers who had gone missing in Neshoba County just the week before; Medgar Evers, murdered the previous summer, shot in the back while his wife and little children watched; Emmett Till at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck. I had learned about these violent acts soon after they happened, and others like them, and I knew they were true. But they had never seemed real to me until that day. I had never believed or accepted or understood that something like that could actually happen to me. From birth I'd been taught not to hate white people, or anyone, to work hard and treat people right, and to have faith that goodness would win out over evil and hatred. Even the undeniable reality of my own grandfather's horrendous death did not take hold of me until that day, although I had heard the story dozens of times and knew it well.

My granddaddy, Daddy's father, was working on a sugar plantation down in Louisiana, where he'd grown up and where his own mother had been a slave. One day the white man that owned the plantation accused my grandfather of something. I don't know what it was, whether it was trivial or serious, but, whatever it was, my grandfather was not at fault.

"I did not do that, boss."

"Nigger, are you 'sputing me?"

"No, sir, I ain't 'sputing you. I'm just telling you the truth: I didn't do it."

"No nigger of mine will 'spute me."

And the white man shot him. Killed him dead, right there in the cane field.

The horror of that story and everything came together for me the day those white men with guns surrounded me at the courthouse. I could taste and smell reality. These white men — people I saw around town, who sometimes even smiled and spoke to me — were so consumed with hatred for me that one of them might actually kill me just to keep me from registering to vote. If our first small step toward freedom — registering to vote — threatened white folks that much, I knew then that the right to vote must be a powerful thing. And that's the day I realized I was willing to die for the right to vote. I made up my mind: If I ain't got no freedom, I would rather be dead.

All my life I had known something was wrong with the way I lived. If God was good and loved all His people, as I'd been taught, why did white folks have everything and we got nothing? Didn't the white folks have the same God and read the same Bible? It's strange how you can know something or think you know something and then still really not know it. You know deep inside that most white people think you're not as good as they are, and that some of them, like the enraged men at the courthouse, actually hate you. They hate you just because of the color of your skin. There's no other reason. You've obeyed the law; you've worked their land; you've never done one thing to harm them. Yet you face this smoldering hatred every day, in big ways and small, and you don't understand.

We stayed all day, but I never got inside the courthouse. The clerk let in only two people, and then she didn't tell them whether they passed the registration test or not. But what happened outside the courthouse that day was the turning point of my life.

The gaze of that white man was burned into my consciousness. For days those cold eyes glared at me. Over and over I saw their festering violence and felt the hate in them. But why? Why were these white people, who had money and power, consumed with hatred for a bunch of poor, pitiful black folks? Did they have to hate us Nobodies to feel like they were Somebodies? What did they think we could do to hurt them? They couldn't have thought we were going to take their jobs and land. Were they afraid they couldn't function if they weren't in control of us? I was afraid of losing my life. But what were they afraid of? I was beginning to figure out that we were onto something bigger than I had ever dreamed.

People have said we were courageous to stand there in the face of that white rage. Younger blacks and whites from my state and all around the country have asked me, "Where did you get the courage, Unita?"

I don't know whether it was courage I had or not. But if it was courage, then this is what I know about courage: You don't have to think about courage to have it. You don't have to feel courageous to be courageous. You don't sit down and say you're going to be courageous. At the moment of action, you don't see it as a courageous act. Courage is the most hidden thing from your eye or mind until after it's done. There's some inner something that tells you what's right. You know you have to do it to survive as a human being. You have no choice.

Life had brought me to this moment of truth, and everything instilled in me had, without my knowing, commanded: Be strong. Make your life count for something.

Copyright © 2006 by Unita Blackwell. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Unita Blackwell is a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In the 1960s she served as a project director for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a member of the Freedom Democratic Party that crashed the 1964 Democratic convention. In 1976, she was elected mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi, becoming the first black woman mayor in the state; she served for twenty years and still resides there. At the age of fifty, she received a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts. In 1992, the MacArthur Foundation named her a fellow and recipient of its "genius" grant. Unita holds four honorary doctorates and has received numerous awards for her contributions to human rights.

JoAnne Prichard Morris is an editor, writer, and publisher. She worked closely with her late husband, Willie Morris, on many of his books, including My Dog Skip. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi.