March to Marks

LAST Thursday the mayor of Marks, Mississippi faced national TV cameras with a furrowed brow. In Memphis, The Rev. Ralph Abernathy of SCLC was preparing to lead a contingent of poor people from the place where Martin Luther King was shot to Marks, a very small, very dusty Delta town, on the first leg of the Poor People's Campaign.

"Yes, I'm worried," the mayor told an NBC newsman. "I don't know how they can do this to us. We're such a small town, I just don't understand how they can do this to us. We've always had such good relations with our colored people."

But the local laundromat still bears a "whites-only" sign, and Marks, a hot dry Delta town, does no better getting along with its colored people than its neighbors.

My introduction to the town was in a federal court-room in Oxford, Mississippi. There, on a sticky August day, three lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had brought county officials to trial in a school desegregation case. First on the witness stand was Mrs. Lee Dora Collins, mother of nine and obviously pregnant, in her early thirties, she was well-built and looked strong. She unfolded her story without hesitation.

In the fall, Mrs. Collins decided to send her children to Mark's white school and filled out the recently instituted choice form accordingly. A few days later she received notice that the children had been assigned to the Negro school. The school board told her that they were honoring a choice form signed by Mr. Collins, her husband. Mrs. Collins had been been estranged from her husband for several years and never consulted him on the children's schooling. Mr. Collins was then casually employed by a Mr. Jackson, a good friend of Mr. Phelps, the Superintendent of Schools. On a trip to Marks, Mrs. Collins told me that Mr. Jackson had told her husband to sign a second choice form or else his children would be killed. Together Mrs. Collins and I spent the afternoon driving up and down Mark's streets, down the well-manicured streets lined with shiny white ranch-style homes and across the tracks through the unpaved roads on the Negro side of town. We could not find him, either in Mr. Jackson's garden where he finds casual employment or in the dark bar on the other side of town where he spends most of his time. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Phelps both denied they had pressured him into signing the papers.

SECOND witness for the prosecution in the Oxford courtroom on the second floor of the post-office overlooking a typical town square with the inevitable white courthouse and statute of a Civil War hero was Presley Franklin, the first Negro to integrate the eleventh grade at Marks' white high school. Slim and small for his age, he spoke quietly describing his school year. "They would call me 'walkin' talkin' tootsie-roll,' 'burrhead', and other things like that. They used to throw crayons and chalk at me during class discussion and say 'we're going to kill that nigger'. Miss Martin, one of my teachers, let them throw at me during class. Next year I am going to take up a policy of going out of the room with the teacher to stop the crayons and the chalk."

When I arrived in Marks a few days after the trial, Mrs. Collins dragged me along to a house around the corner, a dull grey frame woodshed. The one-room shed had been built by Presley Franklin's father and a few other people caught up in the "Movement," the atrophied remainder of the county's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the party that had elected black representatives from all over the state in 1964 and sent them to Atlantic City to challenge the all-white official delegation. The hut was to hold the weekly citizenship classes. It was built from the foundations of an old church. Now the benches had been moved out into the yard to make room for five beds and two families--nine children and three adults--who had just been kicked off their plantation.

Mrs. Staten, the mother of 10, so old and bent she seemed a midget, explained: "I attended this meeting here when I was able. I sent my children to Marks High School (the white high school). The agent kept pickin' on me. Last Tuesday, a week ago, I got a letter said we're going to have to move because they need the house by the 15th. It didn't say it was because of school, but I know the agent, Mr. Webbs. He always wanted to know what kind of meeting this was. 'You know enough already. You don't need to know no more,' he said. He told the boss-man. 'Why you goin' down to learn things?' he said. I told him I figured I was grown and didn't have to tell him why."

ONE of the agents for Mr. Henry Self, owner of the 2000 acre Posey Mound Plantation, explained to me that the families had been kicked off because "they didn't want to work. They seemed to be of the opinion that they could run the place." He pointed out that families had been leaving the plantation for years. In the early 1940's it had supported 50 families. Now 12 tractors worked the fields. Fewer than 15 families remained, many out of the charity of Mr. Self.

Mr. Staten, his head bowed over a piece of wood he was whittling in the darkness of the shed, told me that he was about to make another trip up to Chicago to see if he could find a job there.

Later that day Mrs. Collins took me around to talk to another neighbor, Mrs. Lillie Mae Common. She had recently quit a cooking job at one of the local eateries, a small room attached to the Pure Oil gas station just this side of the railway tracks that divides the town. The eatery is run by a tall woman, hair dyed an unnatural deep black, whose hips liked to brush against the hairy fingers of a customer. Sister of the gas-station's owner-manager, she was married and yet not married; some mystery surrounded her status.

Mrs. Common worked there one day and three hours. On her second day at work she had asked her daughter Mary to bring her an apron. Mary came down to the dinette with a friend, David Jones, about 20. "A man was putting a car into the garage as they drove up," Mrs. Common recalled.

THE man said, "Nigger's where in the hell are your going?"

"I was just going to the door to say hello to Mrs. Lillie Mae," David answered.

"I don't want you damn niggers in there," the gas-station owner said. "You make damn sure you don't go in there."

"Good," David said.

"What in the Hell did you say nigger?" the man began to yell. "Don't be getting smart. Don't be saying good to me. I'll beat your brains out."

"He picked up a wrench to hit David with," Mrs. Common continued. "I told him not to do it because he would hurt trade and wouldn't no one work for him. I took David across the street, 'cos you can walk away from trouble better than you can walk out. On my way back the man passed me running with a piece of iron, I said 'Look out, David'. When David turned to look round, the man met him with the piece of iron. David fell down and the man struck him again when he got up."

"The head-lady told me that I didn't have to leave, he just lost his temper. 'I'm goin,' I told her, 'he may lose his temper and hit me.'"

David Jones had 20 stitches. The next Thursday evening the sheriff arrested him. He said the owner of the gas station had asked for his arrest. The sheriff explained that David could also make out a warrant, but he knew that David would not make out a warrant once in jail. "He's afraid to." Mrs. Common explained.

We looked for him, first out at his home, a crumbling shack by the highway. His wife and his mother were there, but they did not know where he could be found. Then we looked along the main street in the Negro section of town. Mary Common went on ahead and disappeared into the dark of a pool-room. Inside were a number of young men, all very silent as I entered. David was wearing a straw-hat over a shaven head. By his side his mother and his wife, who had someway beaten us back into town. He smiled but would not speak. "He's afraid," Mrs. Common explained.