By Clarence White
On the evening of Friday, April 19, a large crowd was gathered to hear civil rights icon Hollis Watkins speak. We listened to some of the samplings from his rich trove of oral history, the history that has defined much of the past century of life in North America. In 1961, at age 19, Hollis Watkins became the first Mississippian to join the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a voting-rights activist. Nineteen seems young, and it is. It is a young age for someone to experience the violence of the Jim Crow regime. It is young to have your life put in danger. It is also a young wisdom to know that justice is worth going to jail for.
As we listened to Watkins spin his real-life tales, I received a text from my son Sid. He is a second year student at Yale University. What he sent was a picture of a protest in which he was involved in response to the shooting of an unarmed 22-year-old Stephanie Washington by campus police. As he shared:
Though she survived, this incident was an extreme overreach of power for both the Yale PD and the department of a neighboring rich suburb, who were also present. We are calling for the officers to be fired and subsequently, I hope, going to call into question the role and policies of Yale police department. It is effectively a private army guarding Yale’s wealth, and is not at all subject to the will of the people of New Haven, or in all honesty, the people of Yale.
Though she survived, this incident was an extreme overreach of power for both the Yale PD and the department of a neighboring rich suburb, who were also present. We are calling for the officers to be fired and subsequently, I hope, going to call into question the role and policies of Yale police department. It is effectively a private army guarding Yale’s wealth, and is not at all subject to the will of the people of New Haven, or in all honesty, the people of Yale.My son is also 19.
I stood feet away from Hollis Watkins as he gave details of his experiences. The long treks on foot. Time spent in jail, the persistent threats he received for reminding the power structure of this thing called justice.
As I listened, I was struck by two things. One, we still have to speak. We have to demonstrate. We have to march. It is a sad truth, but we still have to deal with this in our culture. Two, I owe Hollis Watkins a great debt. He spent time in jail for showing up to protest the fact that Blacks were not allowed in the McComb public library. He spent 34 days in jail for walking into a lunch counter that would not serve African Americans. He was sent to the county work farm where he went on hunger strike. Labeled as a troublemaker, he was sent to the Mississippi State Prison in Parchman with death row inmates in a six by six cell for 55 days.
This was a rule of law joined by a colonial order of supremacy, enforced largely by vigilantes and a constant buzz in state-sponsored terror of a Jim Crow regime.
Sid will not have to spend any time in jail. His 35 hours of community service is his price for his civil disobedience. He was not beaten. He did not face the fate of the Black students who were killed in Baton Rouge at the Southern University massacre in 1972, a little more than a decade behind and some miles up the road from Sid’s grandfather’s college experience at Xavier University in New Orleans.
I am not living with the illusion that these things cannot happen to Sid. The reason they protested is a reminder of the daily terror we face from a culture that still feels free to police black, brown and female bodies with an entitlement that resists even debate, much less logic or justice. Even so, it is because of the work of people like Hollis Watkins that Sid was able to protest the actions of a racialized police state with the threat of violence greatly reduced. I was not worried–or at least not as worried as I would have been if we were living in a climate of 50 or 60 years ago.
It is not to say that our culture hasn’t been bending away from justice, the voting rights that Watkins fought so hard for, the desegregation of public spaces and access to vital components of living, and the basic expectation that we can live, walk and speak without the threat of violent retaliation or confinement. But the history of Watkins, of SNCC and many other activists from yesterday and today created a momentary space where Sid could join the chorus for justice. It created a space where a father could live with a little less worry for his son.
It should be noted that the first action in which Watkins participated was to protest the practice of the city of McComb, Mississippi that barred Blacks from the public library. That reminds me that our mission has a great center of gravity. Libraries are radical. Conspire with us at the East Side Freedom Library. You can see Hollis Watkins’ talk here on the East Side Freedom Library YouTube channel.