What's left of the old Bryant store in Money, Mississippi

We have stopped at what remains of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, Money, Mississippi, site of an incident that led to a brutal murder that helped kick-start the civil rights revolution.

On August 14, 1955, Emmett Till and his cousin, Wheeler Parker, who were visiting Money on vacation from Chicago, purchased candy at Bryant’s store. Apparently Till, 14 years old, whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the white store attendant.

Two weeks later Bryant’s husband, store owner Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped and killed Till. They used barbed wire to tie a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to his neck and tossed his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Twelve white men acquitted Bryant and Milam, who later confessed to the murder, after deliberating only 67 minutes; a juror said they would have taken less time if they had not stopped to drink sodas.

I am on the side of the road, writing about Bryant’s Grocery in my reporter’s notebook—fading white-washed brick, collapsing wooden roof, peeling white plaster—when a man slowly approaches in his white pickup. I smile and wave.

He smiles and waves back, gets out of his truck, and proceeds to introduce himself as Charlie Brunson, 70, from Philipp, 10 miles to the north on Rte. 8, He said he grew up in Payne, Mississippi: “I lived up in the hills. There was nobody up in there.”

What can Brunson tell me about Money? Well, he says, there used to be five or six stores to the east of Bryant’s Grocery, but they were torn down after the post office closed last year. As for the railroad building, now located behind Bryant’s, “all the old folks used to gamble in there,” and a man lost his 5,000-acre farm. The abandoned Bryant’s has been bought by Harry Tribble but nobody knows its future.

The building’s horrible past, however, is explained out front on a sign, “Marker No. 1 on the Mississippi Freedom Trail, dedicated May 18, 2011,” on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides.

I take that marker to be a sign of progress. At so many locations of horrific events of significance in U.S. history—the lynchings in Marion, Indiana, the torture-murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming—the community has chosen not to erect a sign, as if that will sanitize our history and help us forget how ugly we can be to each other.

Loren Ghiglione

David Beckley, president of Rust College, and Loren's former student

In traveling the country, I’m often impressed by those who do not travel—people who stay put and devote their lives to transforming institutions.

During my visit to Holly Springs, Mississippi, I visit David Beckley, in his nineteenth year as Rust College president. A native of nearby Shannon, Mississippi, Beckley graduated from Rust in three years (classmates recall Beckley saying he would someday head the college), served in Vietnam and earned his doctorate down the road at Ole Miss, when much of the university welcomed African Americans with unopen arms.

In the early 1960s—Beckley’s time as a Rust student—the college had lost accreditation and no Ph.D.’s remained on the faculty. Today 62 percent of Rust’s faculty have Ph.D.s and the college is regularly reaccredited. Rust’s endowment, once virtually nonexistent, now stands at $25 million, headed for $30 million, says Beckley.

Almost 70 percent of Rust’s students in the early 1960s came from Mississippi, the poorest and possibly the worst state in the country in terms of public school education. In local Marshall County, which was 70 percent black, “separate but equal” public schools operated on a reduced “split” schedule that encouraged students headed for Rust to pick and “chop”—weed with a hoe&mdas;cotton in season.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Rust’s average entering first-year student read at a level equivalent to that of an eighth or ninth grader. In a 1961 survey of the entering class, four times as many students read at a fifth to sixth grade level as read at a twelfth grade level or above.

International Rust College students Sandi Litia, 22, from Zambia; Nigel Chimbetete, 21, from Zimbabwe; and Omolola Dawodu, 25, from Nigeria;

Today, more than half of the college’s 900 students come from 26 states other than Mississippi. Rust also attracts 70-80 students from foreign countries. We interviewed three Rust students from Africa—Nigel Chimbetete, 21, from Zimbabwe; Omolola Dawodu, 25, from Nigeria; and Sandi Litia, 22, from Zambia.

Faced with few resources and isolation from much of the outside world, small, historically black colleges like Rust could have been satisfied to, in James Baldwin’s words, “make peace with mediocrity.” But, at least in the case of Rust under President Beckley, whom I’m proud to call a former student of mine, the goal is transformation with a transnational student body.

Loren Ghiglione

We discover Baby Steps, a nonprofit founded in 2003 by William Raspberry, a retired Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post syndicated columnist, in his hometown of Okolona, Mississippi, which is mostly black and mostly poor.

We interview Carla James, the Baby Steps site director in Okolona, who requires more than a half hour to describe all of the Baby Steps projects and programs. Baby Steps annually teaches more than 250 parents and children, in a town of 3,500, how to prepare for the first years of school.

But Baby Steps goes beyond early-education home visits and counseling that help parents improve their children’s reading and other skills. Through partnerships with the Okolona School District, three early childcare centers, community service agencies, the National Council of Negro Women and other organizations, Baby Steps provides holistic help.

James describes tax services for low-income families, advice on social security and Medicaid, and dental, medical and pharmacy programs. She almost frowns as she struggles to remember every service that Baby Steps provides.

But she brightens as she recalls individual cases of black, white and Hispanic children she has helped. “It’s not just a job, it’s a life to me,” she says.

Loren Ghiglione

David Beckley, president of Rust College, and Loren's former student

In 1998, while directing the journalism program at Emory University, I received a chilling telephone call from Emory law professor David J. Garrow.

Garrow said that my name showed up in the recently released, 134,000-page file of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a secret espionage network started in 1956 by the state of Mississippi to save segregation.

I was surprised. I had merely taught English and edited the college newspaper at Rust, a historically black college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the summer of 1964, called Freedom Summer.

Though I had come to Mississippi from New York, I had not been a civil rights worker from New York, like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who had been murdered in Mississippi at the beginning of the summer by Ku Klux Klan members.

I had not felt that Dick Gregory’s joke about traveling south that summer applied to me. He said he would have gone south then but his Blue Cross had expired. “Then again,” Gregory said, “better it than me!”

But Holly Springs, like much of Mississippi, seemed determined that summer to remain segregated. The owner of the movie theater closed it and announced plans to reopen as a private-membership “recreation club.” The local 12-page weekly put news of African Americans, except for crime news, on page 8, devoted to “News of Interest to Colored Readers.”

The public library removed its tables and chairs and, according to Rust students, transferred all of its good books to a private collection. Marshall County Sheriff J.M. “Flick” Ash and his deputies closely monitored civil rights workers who were trying to register voters, and Sam Coopwood, Holly Springs mayor, city judge, clothing store owner and former police chief, oozed a paternalism perhaps as insidious as intimidation.

“Last Saturday this colored man backed out into traffic,” Coopwood said. “He couldn’t pay the $7 fine so I told him to come back when he could. I don’t know anywhere in the world where they turn a man out to get money.”

Rust was at the center of the civil rights opposition in northern Mississippi to the paternalism and discrimination. So I did try to make sure David Beckley, William D. Scott III and the other Rust students who staffed The Bearcat reported on the local voter registration drive, the Freedom School across the street and all of the area’s other civil right activities.

William D. Scott III, a former Rust College student

A front-page Bearcat story described the effort of the Council of Federated Organizations to present the new Freedom Democratic Party, open to blacks as well as whites, to Mississippians. A student editorial proclaimed: “There shall be nothing too great for the cause and the cause is freedom, not in the years to come, but now.”

Presented with the opportunity to interview Beckley and Scott, my students from almost a half-century earlier, I asked who spied on us during the summer of 1964. Beckley, who is in his nineteenth year as Rust’s president, fingered George Clark, the African-American owner of a dairy bar, motel and taxi business that served Rust students and other black residents.

Scott, who was active in the 1960s civil rights movement in Holly Springs, now teaches at Rust. He said the activities of Clark and other spies sometimes, ironically, proved helpful. The civil rights movement often wanted to spread the word about its activities, Scott said. The spies, he added, “were useful and they didn’t know they were being useful.” But Scott criticized Clark’s persistent bad-mouthing of Rust and its students.

In Dan Tham’s video excerpt, Scott recalled the threat he faced when, while handing out voter-registration leaflets, he got to Clark’s house and was greeted with a gun…and then the threat that Clark’s businesses faced.

Loren Ghiglione