SANDERS , Odell On May 4, 2012, Odell “Jimmy” Sanders, survived by family and friends. Memorial Service will be held Thursday, 11 AM at Transformation Church of Jesus Christ, 5150 Baltimore National Pike. Services entrusted to Redd Funeral Service.
Odell is a 1964 Graduate of Eva Harris High School, Brookhaven, MS.
I have researched the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and found documents that show all African-American Teachers, Preachers and many African-American people in Mississippi were investigated and/or recruited during the 1960′s by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.
Mrs. Ruby Larkin, Lincoln County Superintendent of Education in the 1960’s was a Sovereignty Commission contact in Brookhaven, MS and in one of the documents I’ve found, she recommended Mrs. Eva H Harris, the Principal of Eva H Harris, as a good prospective informant. She also requested that a confidential check be made of T. J. Rance who was a teacher at the Lincoln County Training Center in Bogue Chitto, MS in 1960. However, we must understand that during the civil rights struggle, you obeyed or pretended to obey the requests made by the people in control or suffer job lose, beatings, intimidation, false imprisonment, or death. I can remember instances where my parents would pretend to cooperate with authorities, but in fact, they were playing a game. My father taught me, to stay out of trouble; you must sometimes play games with “Mr. Charlie”. I have no idea if Mrs. Harris was actually contacted by the Sovereignty Commission to become an informant. I knew Mrs. Harris very well and I think that if she were contacted by the Sovereignty Commission, she would have accepted the request to become an informant but would have played the game my father talked about. Neither Mrs. Harris nor Mr. Rance earned their highly decorated careers in education by being unwise.
Other Sovereignty Commission contacts in Lincoln County, MS that were found in the documents were:
Sheriff Earl Smith
Royce R Hart, Chancery Clerk
Clark Earl H Burns, Circuit Clerk
Hugh T. Mitchell, Chairman of the White Citizens’ Council of Brookhaven, MS
S. E. Babbington, President of the Brookhaven, MS Chamber of Commerce
Judge Tom E. Brady
Senator W. M. Jones of Brookhaven, MS
Representative C. B. Holmes of Brookhaven, MS
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission investigator was A. L. Hopkins
After watching a TV show last night about the shooting death of the unarmed Florida teenager, Trayvon Martin, I was stunned at hearing some of the comments made by the commentator and his guests. After playing a recording made during the incident of a young voice screaming for help, the commentator said that it might have been Mr. Zimmerman screaming. When a shot was heard on one of the recordings while a homeowner was on the phone with a 911 operator, the commentator suggested that maybe Mr. Zimmerman saw the kid pull something from his pockets. The 911 operator suggested to Zimmerman that he not follow the young man and he continued to pursue the teenager. One of the guests on the show said that this incident could not be called a hate crime because both parties are minority.
I remember seeing an article on Wikipedia in the past on Racism subtitled Inter-minority variants. The Wikipedia article talks about racism among minorities. Racism is widespread within all races of people. In some societies, you are too tall, short, black, brown, yellow, white, pretty or whatever.
The kid is dead; Mr. Zimmerman shot him for reasons that cannot be explained logically. In my mind, he suffers from one of the most common racist diseases, a stereotypical view of other people. To a racist, all black men are drug-crazed, sex-crazed, unemployed, dishonest, armed, uneducated, dangerous, unmotivated and ugly.
I don’t care what race Mr. Zimmerman belongs, he shot and killed an innocent person and the incident is documented by witnesses and recordings. He should be tried and found guilty of murder.
The following article was copied from a part of a Wikipedia article on Racism.
Prejudiced thinking among and between minority groups does occur, for example conflicts between African Americans and Korean Americans (notably in the Los Angeles riots of 1992), by blacks towards Jews (such as the riots in Crown Heights in 1991), between new immigrant groups (such as Latinos), or towards whites.
There has been a long-running racial tension between African Americans and Mexican Americans. There have been several significant riots in California prisons in which Mexican American inmates and African Americans have specifically targeted each other based on racial reasons.There have been reports of racially motivated attacks against African Americans who have moved into neighborhoods occupied mostly by Mexican Americans, and vice versa. In the late 1920s in California, there was animosity between the Filipinos and the Mexicans and between European Americans and Filipino Americans since they competed for the same jobs. Recently, there has also been an increase in racial violence between African immigrants and Blacks who have already lived in the country for generations.
The Aztlan movement has been described as racist. The movement’s goal is repossession of the American southwest. It has also been called the Mexican “reconquista” (re-conquest) whose name was inspired by the Spanish reconquista, which led to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. According to gang experts and law enforcement agents, a longstanding race war between the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerilla family, a rival African American prison gang, has generated such intense racial hatred among Mexican Mafia leaders or shot callers, that they have issued a “green light” on all blacks. A sort of gang-life fatwa, this amounts to a standing authorization for Latino gang members to prove their mettle by terrorizing or even murdering any blacks sighted in a neighborhood claimed by a gang loyal to the Mexican Mafia.
In Britain, tensions between minority groups can be just as strong as those between minorities and the majority population. In Birmingham, there have been long-term divisions between the Black and South Asian communities, which were illustrated in the Handsworth riots and in the smaller 2005 Birmingham riots. In Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town with a relatively high Muslim population, there have been tensions and minor civil disturbances between Kurds and South Asians.
In France, home to Europe’s largest population of Muslims — about 6 million — as well as the continent’s largest community of Jews, about 600,000, anti-Jewish violence, property destruction, and racist language has been increasing over the last several years. Jewish leaders perceive the Muslim population as intensifying anti-Semitism in France, mainly among Muslims of Arab or African heritage, but also this anti-Semitism is perceived as also growing among Caribbean islanders from former colonies.
Article Copied from Wikipedia
I have noticed that over the years the memory of the Eva H Harris School, Brookhaven, MS has slowly faded. The building in which we traveled the halls back and forth to classes each day during our school days was allowed to deteriorate and has now been sold for other use. I have searched the Internet, Lincoln County Library in Brookhaven MS, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and found very few references to the Eva H Harris School. I contacted the Lincoln County School District in Brookhaven MS to find out if any Eva Harris memorabilia was saved after the school closed. The answer was, if anything was saved, it would be found at the Lincoln County Library. After checking the library, the only items found were several documents referring to the (then current) and a future Eva H. Harris principal; Mrs. Eva H. Harris and Mr. T. J. Rance and the 1961-62 Eva H Harris teacher roster compiled by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a 1987 copy of an interview of Mrs. Eva H. Harris and a copy of the Mississippi State Senate Resolution 6, Commending the Life and Public Service of Mr T. J. Rance.
I found that to keep the memory of the school, someone must donate memorabilia from the school to the Lincoln County Library or the State Archives. Therefore, to keep the memory of the Eva H Harris High School alive, I will submit a proposal to the 1964 class reunion committee to initiate an effort to collect memorabilia that will be donated to the Lincoln County Library in Brookhaven, MS to keep the memory of the Eva H Harris School. We hope that all former Eva H Harris students and teachers will join us in an effort to keep the memory of our high school alive.
We are looking for memorabilia; Yearbooks, Class Pictures, Classmate Pictures, Teacher Pictures, News Articles, Pictures or drawings of the school, etc. We will accept any items that can be linked to the Eva H Harris School. We will donate the items collected to the Lincoln County library in Brookhaven, MS so that the memory of our school will never die.
The address to send items to be donated is coming in near future.
Image via Wikipedia
While in a motel room flicking through cable channels after attending a function in Hattiesburg, MS that honored former NFL star Harold Jackson, I unexpectedly ran across a short film on Angela Davis. The film highlighted Angela’s and other activist’s roles during the 1960′s civil rights movement. Since it is February and black history month, I wondered why we do not honor or at least mention some of the African-Americans activists who did not fully agree with the more passive and nonviolent principles of the civil rights activists we honor every year. Some of the forgotten activists had a tremendous influence on my life as well as the lives of many other people during the civil rights movement.
I remember; Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey P Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, the Greensboro NC sit-ins where Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan and David Richmond made history, Fannie Lou Hamer and Vivian Malone Jones. History has become one-sided to the extent that one side of the story gets all the glory and the other side of the story goes into the toilet. In this case, it is because of the perception that most of the activists I have mentioned were considered subversives and allegedly encouraged violence. However, they were a part of the movement and should not be forgotten. No matter what the perception was back then, history is supposed to be a record of what actually took place in the past and should not be a sanitized version that most Americans today seem to prefer.
I remember growing up in the south and hearing many of my relatives as well as community leaders, all of whom were African-Americans, say what I considered negative things about Martin Luther King, who has become one of the most celebrated African-American civil rights icons. I heard them say; who does he think he is, he going to mess things up for us and he is going to cause some of us to be killed. Remember 1958, a black woman, Izola Ware Curry, stabbed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a 7″ letter opener at a book signing in Harlem, New York. I can remember that after the attack, MLK referenced the incident in some of his speeches by saying that if he would have sneezed while the letter opener was still embedded in his chest, it would have punctured a major artery and he would have died. I did not understand back then why my people wanted to continue living as second-class citizens.
The principles of nonviolence and passive resistance eventually won over the principles of “fighting fire with fire”. However, if it were not for the suggestion of the “fighting fire with fire” principles, I believe that many of us would not have survived the sixties.
Image via Wikipedia
If you are black and graduated from a high school in the southern US prior to 1970, you graduated from a historically black high school. I graduated from the historically black Eva H Harris High School in Brookhaven, MS in 1964. In 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of the United States Supreme Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision set forth a sudden futile effort by whites to keep segregated schools under the separate but equal legal doctrine by building new schools for blacks. I believe that Eva H Harris was built-in 1958, as were many other historically black southern schools, in a scheme to influence black leaders to stay segregated. The scheme was to build new upgraded schools for blacks, we will be overjoyed, and we will not want to go to school with white folks. Our goal was not to just go to school with white folks; we wanted an equal opportunity to live without fear of injury or death.
I will admit that the new schools that were built were better than the old schools. The curriculum was better than at the old one or two classroom schools that my older siblings graduated. My older siblings went to a one-room school that sat behind one of the churches in our community. The school went only to the eighth grade. If you wanted to continue your education past the eighth grade, you had to find a school outside of the community.
The new schools were beautiful brick buildings with a gymnasium that had a varnished hardwood floor, attached cafeteria, a biology lab and a modern high school shop with a few power tools. However, the new schools still did not equal white schools. We sometimes got used classroom desks, chairs and textbooks. Our Biology lab had a few test tubes and Bunsen burners that we shared but that did not compare to what the white kids had.
Most historically black high schools in the south are gone. They have either been torn down or converted to elementary or middle schools. In some cases, I can find no evidence that some of the schools ever existed.
Give a shout-out in the comments to your old historically black high school.
After World War II, Melton McMorris taught for 18 years in the segregated public schools of Lincoln County before he finally gave up on Mississippi and headed west. He got a job teaching high school social studies in Santa Maria, Calif. His wife, Mary, joined him there two years later, and taught home economics, science, and history in the same school system.
The people were great, she said. You had a variety of people – Chicanos, Mexicans, whites, all different races. They treated us superb.
Both of them loved the climate, the community’s racial diversity, the fact that the system gave them the tools to do their jobs. However, when they retired, they felt the tug of the South. In 1991, the McMorrises returned to Bogue Chitto, about 70 miles south of Jackson, to a four-bedroom, brick home they built on land adjoining his family’s old homestead.
They were pleasantly surprised at some of the social changes that almost three decades had etched on the face of their hometown.
There was a change in relations between whites and blacks when I got back here, Melton McMorris said. They would speak and socialize with each other. It was kind of a shock, to see them seated together at games and so on.
Vevelyn Foster, a professor of history at Jackson State University who was born in Lincoln County, agrees with the McMorrises – up to a point – about the changes.
It’s more open in terms of public facilities, she said. Economic opportunities are much more available to African Americans. Even, to a degree, social relationships are better. It’s not unusual to see interracial friendships, genuine friendships. But the subtle racism, the subtle discrimination is still here, she said. Black children are not graduating at the rates they should from high school. Some of the young parents are organizing now. They’re beginning to insist that the system provide what it should for their children.
For the McMorrises, who bought a little general store up the road from their new home, the test of Bogue Chitto’s racial progress was economic: Would white customers continue to patronize the store now that blacks owned it?
The town passed: When they sold McMorris’ Groceries in 1995, they estimate that about 40 percent of their customers were white.
Since we are not there anymore, they tell us how much they miss us and they want us to come by, Melton McMorris said.
In fact, Mary added, we’ve got lots of white friends. We might be sitting here, and they’ll knock on the door, bringing you vegetables or fruit, or inviting you over to see them. You wouldn’t have seen that before.
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