One day, an elderly Vietnamese man walked into the office of Người Việt Tây Bắc. He wanted to place a classified ad in the largest and oldest newspaper for Vietnamese immigrants in Washington.

Julie Pham, 33, remembers that day. She is the managing editor of Người Việt Tây Bắc, which literally translates to “Vietnamese People of the Northwest,” a Seattle-based biweekly that’s been in business for 25 years.

The man ran the ad only once. Pham remembers what it said: “Dear Mr. So-and-so, you left your luggage in my house for months now and I need you to remove it.”

Once the paper got into the hands of the Vietnamese community in Seattle, those who knew Mr. So-and-so kindly reminded him of his luggage.

“People are really hungry to feel connected,” Pham said. “I look around and I see that the need for news is growing. There are constant streams of immigration. And they turn to the newspaper to help them understand and acclimate to the world here.”

For Pham, her family’s newspaper stokes a sense of community for the third largest Asian population in the state. It also supported her and her brothers through college. Since Pham was 8 years old, her father, Kim, has been running Người Việt Tây Bắc, an offshoot of the national Người Việt newspaper headquartered in Orange County, Calif.

Pham is charming woman with a ready smile and a well-placed beauty mark. Her speech is thoughtful and her tone business-like. By her own description, she is a businesswoman first, a reporter second. Sitting down with her, it’s evident that economics are on her mind. She is conscious of the economy and the forcefulness of her words, as well as the profit margins of the newspaper. She says things like “capacity building,” “fruitful partnership” and “shoe-string budget.” Content must be “scalable,” business can be “slippery.”

Before all of this, when she was just two months old in 1979, her family decided to flee Vietnam. Pham’s parents tell her that she cried a lot during the escape, but other than the fact that they were hungry, thirsty and unsure of what was going to happen next, her parents never talked much about their experiences as boat people.

Her father delivered pizzas and her mother worked as a dental assistant for their first few years in Seattle. Her father eventually realized that he didn’t like working for other people and that he wanted to have his own business. With the influx of Vietnamese boat people in the Pacific Northwest, he had an idea.

“The Vietnamese community is the most linguistically isolated,” Pham said, “with the highest percentage of limited English proficiency. The newspaper links people with news of their homeland, of Vietnam, and also with local news, so they can understand their new homeland as well.”

Since 1986, Người Việt Tây Bắc has been serving that function, plying the community with everything from news of business openings to dentist recommendations to classified ads subtly asking for the removal of luggage.

The paper also helped shape Pham’s business acumen.

“I always say I got my real-life MBA by working at the newspaper,” Pham said.

Her educational pedigree doesn’t end there. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2001, Pham received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge in 2008, as a Gates scholar.

“I learned how American I was by being abroad,” Pham said. After moving to the UK for her doctorate degree, Pham spent time living in France, Germany and the country she left as an infant.

“When I lived in Vietnam, I was constantly getting stood up,” Pham said. “People would cancel last minute all the time and it was driving me crazy. I felt disrespected.”

Later Pham learned from a Vietnamese friend that they weren’t being rude, but that they just wanted her to think something came up at the last minute and they had no choice but to forgo meeting her.

In the UK, she noticed that Americans perceive distance differently than the British do. “When Americans ask how far it is from Seattle to Portland, I could say, ‘It’s a three-hour drive. It’s an hour flight.’ But in the rest of the world, they’ll actually tell you by distance. How many kilometers it is. And that means nothing to me.”

“It’s just different ideas of respect and time,” Pham said.

Pham is sympathetic to second-generation Vietnamese-Americans. In her own experience, she did not really start engaging with Vietnamese culture and understanding her parents on a deeper level until she learned Vietnamese after college. Hers is an American experience, more than it is an immigrant one. By anyone’s measure, Dr. Julie Pham has achieved something that is singly Western, though she acknowledges that it stems from her parents’ hard work and willingness to take risks.

“At the end of the day, ethnic media, they’re all businesspeople,” Pham said. “They’re all immigrant, refugee, minority entrepreneurs.”

Dan Q. Tham

Giuseppe Tony Tran in New Orleans, Lousiana

On the fortieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, Vietnamese immigrants and their children gathered alongside Vietnam War veterans to reflect on the dramatic events that forever changed both of their destinies—the siege of South Vietnam’s capital, the evacuation of American soldiers returning home from intractable defeat, the Southeast Asian boat people fleeing communist takeover. In the Vietnamese diaspora, it’s referred to as Ngày Mất Nước, the day we lost our country.

But in New Orleans, the Vietnamese community commemorated forty years since April 30, 1975 a little differently.

“Everywhere else, they were mourning,” said Giuseppe Anthony Tran. “Here, we celebrated forty years of success.”

To hear Tran describe his experiences during those forty years is to witness breathtaking resilience, moxie, and a shining humor wholly unexpected given the circumstances. The combination has worked out quite nicely for the Vietnamese man with an Italian name. It’s kept him alive. It’s taken him from one delta to another, from fields of jasmine rice to fields of Jazzmen rice, a local variety of the aromatic grain that’s advertised as music for your mouth. “It tastes better than jasmine,” Tran said with a laugh.

He was born in the Year of the Dragon, 1964, to a family of rice farmers in Hà Tiên, a beach town at the southernmost tip of Vietnam.

During his childhood, an unexploded shell jutted out from the ground right in front of his house. Every day, the little boy, then known as Toan (Vietnamese for “safe, secure”), would touch the shell with wonder.

Tran didn’t know it would explode one day. “The war became something that was familiar to the people. To the point that we weren’t scared as much.” The soundtrack of “the bombing and the guns and everything” accompanied Tran’s entire childhood spent in wartime, until April 30, 1975, when a tenuous peace was reached.

At the age of 16, like a Vietnamese Huckleberry Finn, Tran decided to flee the country on a raft with eleven other young Vietnamese—total strangers, most of them teenagers. “My mom saved a lot to put me on board,” Tran said, “I would say equivalent to 400 dollars. That’s a lot in Vietnam in the 80s! We were poor as any other citizen.”

He was the youngest of seven siblings, just two years shy of military age. He would either leave the country now, or never have the chance again. “Living under the communists, you get the feeling that you don’t have another day to live,” he said. “Everything is controlled. That’s why I told my parents, I don’t see any future here.”

He left on the night of April 30, 1981, while the communists were celebrating six years since the end of the war.

“Officials and police and everyone in office were getting drunk and having a party. I used that moment to escape on a raft,” Tran said. He didn’t know whether he would ever see his mother again.

The plan was for the tiny, 25-foot raft to transport more than a hundred people to a bigger boat. Docking at the mouth of the Mekong River, a vital channel the color of caramel, they waited for the bigger boat to come and take the passengers away from Vietnam. But no boat ever showed up. As night gathered, so did a crowd of eager escapees. Finally, the twelve pulled anchor and left on the raft.

Tran saw many people pull up in smaller vessels to get onto theirs. “If we waited another second, we would have been overloaded with people,” Tran said. “The minute we started the engine, it made so much damn noise. Like a lawn mower. Officials heard it and started firing at us. On that night, the 30th, we left with eight big holes in the raft. We had to plug the holes with our shirts.”

Tran prayed that the raft would float in one direction: away.

It was everyone’s first time at sea. No one knew how to properly maneuver the raft. There was no compass, no map.

By night, they faced heavy storms. By day, the sun fried their skin into “rice paper,” Tran recalled.

Once in a while, they would see a boat in the distance, but the engine wasn’t strong enough to take them there in time.

Four times, Tran said, Thai pirates came, seeking women and valuables. A little girl, eleven or twelve years old as Tran remembers, was on board the raft. When the pirates first came, Tran knew they would be after her.

“To protect her, I took a big can of engine oil and dumped it on her,” Tran said. “She looked really filthy and so when the pirates looked at her, they said, ‘Just forget it.’”

He started fantasizing about land. “After a day or two on the vast ocean, you don’t see anything but the blue sky and the water. And the waves were so huge, you didn’t think you were going to survive,” he said. A devout Roman Catholic, Tran began reciting the last rites each night before sleeping.

Finally, early on the morning of May 5, 1981, their fifth day at sea, Tran saw a seagull in the open sky. He knew from his childhood spent by the sea that when you see birds, land is near. “I have never experienced that happiness when you see birds on the ocean. It was so wonderful.”

Eventually, they landed at the border between Malaysia and Thailand. Although it was a poor village in the province of Narathiwat, it was not Vietnam.

For a month and a half, the twelve combed the beaches, caught any game they could find, begged villagers for food, and climbed fruit trees that Tran said were “high as hell, man! They took hours to climb.”

Once word spread that a group of Vietnamese refugees had arrived in the village, the government of Thailand took them in, placing the group in the Songkhla Refugee Camp. At this point, Tran had no shirt, no shoes, and no money.

UNICEF sheltered the tens of thousands of refugees at Songhkla and supplied them with barely enough food and water. Tran started craving meat and certain comfort foods.

“When you’re hungry, you come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. I dreamed that one day I would fry an egg as big as a blanket,” Tran said. “I would cover myself up and eat at the same time.”

Tran volunteered to work for the UNICEF office. One day when he was cleaning up, he found a magazine.

“I was so happy,” Tran said. “So I grabbed it. Actually I stole it.” In his hands, Tran held an older edition of a Vietnamese magazine from New Orleans.

Tran took the magazine back to his tent to show his friends. As he flipped through the pages, he happened upon the name of his older brother, Tuong, an ordained priest, who had fled Vietnam for the U.S. in 1975. Tran hadn’t heard from him in more than six years. As he held the magazine in his hands, Tran learned that his brother, Tuong Cao Tran, was the editor of Dân Chúa, which he had started in the late ‘70s to connect Vietnamese Catholics living in the U.S.

Not believing his luck (“Recognizing my own brother’s name in the magazine was like hitting a jackpot,” Tran said), he wanted to send his brother a letter, but he had no money for paper, stamps, or a telegram. “So I asked a priest for a small sheet of paper. I wrote, ‘Please help me’ and an address and that’s it.” The priest mailed the letter for him.

Within two months, Tran received a letter from his brother with a $20 bill enclosed. He learned that Tuong had served and helped settle the very first Vietnamese refugees to arrive in Louisiana. Tuong also assured Tran that he would contact their mother to let her know that her youngest son made it to safety.

“It was so huge,” Tran said. “My life started from there.” Wielding the American money with pride, Tran bought “a whole lot” of eggs. That night, for dinner, Tran fried all of the eggs but could eat only a quarter of them. “I couldn’t take it anymore, you know?” Tran laughed. “I choked on the eggs.”

After two years of statelessness, Tran immediately started making plans with his older brother to come to the United States. Tuong, however, was a priest, and wasn’t allowed to take in another person. He asked an Italian-American couple he knew through Catholic Charities to co-sponsor Tran.

Francisco Giovanni and his wife, Evelyn, who resided in Chicago, took Tran in, named him Giuseppe Anthony and put him through high school and college. “That’s why I’m in love with Italy,” Tran said. “I’m an Italian-Vietnamese living in America!”

“Coming to America was like a leap into heaven,” Tran said. Every day, in his new country, Tran took the bus to the library and borrowed an armload of books to read, even though he understood little at first. “Education is something that my parents and godparents wanted for me,” Tran said.

At first, learning English for Tran was the “most troublesome.” One day during his first winter, Tran took a walk around downtown Chicago. As he approached a pedestrian crossing, he couldn’t understand the “DON’T WALK” sign on the crosswalk signal. So he hopped on a bus and immediately asked to be dropped off as soon as the bus crossed the road. Looking back on that episode, Tran guessed that the bus driver probably “cursed me for such a stupid action.”

But he was determined. After Tran graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1984, he joined St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana, and earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. He moved on to Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and trained for the priesthood, which he would leave in order to focus on bringing his family over to the U.S. from Vietnam.

Tran eventually settled in Village de l’Est in New Orleans, a neighborhood known for its Vietnamese community. The river in the “Village of the East” is crowded with lily pads. The soupy air circulates languidly around the signs in Vietnamese for restaurants and grocery stores, attorneys and dentists, Catholic churches and Buddhist temples. Many of the men living there are fishermen or shrimpers by trade. In Village de l’Est, there’s the distinct feeling of quê hương. Homeland.

The immigrant population liked the area, because it so resembled the country they had left: the tight-knit community and the sub-tropical climate, the landforms and the faces, the familiar food and the language spoken.

“The unity is there,” Tran said. “It’s lovely.” He’s been to other Vietnamese communities in Texas and California, but nothing compared to Village de l’Est.

In 2000, Tony Tran went back to Vietnam for the first time in almost twenty years. His mission was to bring his mother back to Louisiana.

On the flight into Tan Son Nhat Airport, Tran noticed the yellow rooftops of Saigon. They looked rusty. The airport’s runway was overgrown with weeds. He found no attachment to the country of his birth.

“When the plane landed, my heart was pounding,” Tran said. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen next.”

He found out that every step to get to his mother was a paying process—bribe an official here, placate an officer there with cold, hard cash. Tran paid a couple authorities $200 each to accompany him on his mission. “They followed me like the FBI,” he said.

He had learned that his family now lived in Biên Hòa, just outside of Saigon. He walked into his mother’s house and surprised her. “It was quite an experience,” Tran recalled. “I’m glad that she didn’t faint!”

At the end of his one-week visit, Tran told his mother that he would do everything in his power to bring her over to the United States. And he did. In 2007, Tran went back to Vietnam again to bring back his father’s remains in a tiny basket that fit into his carry-on luggage.

At the time of the interview, his mother was 94 years old and lived in New Orleans’ West Bank and his father was buried there as well.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.

For the Vietnamese community that had gone through so many experiences of exodus and relocation—from north to south Vietnam, from Vietnam to refugee camps, from those camps to America—Katrina was yet another experience of moving from one place to another.

“The city was shut down,” Tran recalled. “This was not something that happened in Vietnam or in the refugee camps. It happened in New Orleans, in the United States of America.”

It took Tran 28 hours to reach Dallas, Texas from New Orleans. It’s a trip that normally takes eight hours.

As Tran told it, two weeks after the storm, the displaced Vietnamese “came right back and fixed their homes. We shoveled out the mud and picked up. Cleaned up. Came back strong.”

Tran served as the parish coordinator of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. He was a community leader and the assistant to Rev. Dominic Nghiem. His wife, whom he met in 1994 at the library, was a nurse. Together, they had two boys—Mark, a student at Loyola University, and Tri On (Vietnamese for “grateful”), a sophomore in high school.

As for his companions who fled Vietnam with him in 1981, Tran told me one lives in Norway, another in the Netherlands, and the rest live in the United States. The little girl is now a married woman living in California. She called Tran in 1992 and asked him if he remembered her.

There’s a plot of vacant land across the street from the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in Village de l’Est. Tran said the church has just broken ground there to build a cultural center and recreational park on the 28 acres. If all goes according to plan, it will be completed by 2017 and serve as a gathering place for the more than 10,000 Vietnamese living in New Orleans.

Over a meal of Vietnamese food at Ba Mien Restaurant, Tran said, “With my life, I feel I had more than I wished for. Looking back on the journey, everything was a blessing all along.”

On Thanksgiving Day in 2011, Tran found out he had spleen cancer.

“Kind of ridiculous, huh?” he said.

For the first eight months, he underwent “all sorts of treatment, testing, radiation, chemo, medical examinations,” he said, “now I’m on pills.”

Tran said the cancer caused a terrible growth on his skin. “It felt like leprosy. I was so worried,” he said. His doctor told him she had never seen anything like it.

Despite, or maybe because of, his experiences, from war to escape, cancer to Katrina, Tran insisted to me that there is nothing to be afraid of, that there are all sorts of reasons to be happy.

“I try not to take everything seriously,” he said. “It’s a life-changing experience. I’m taking it easy with everything, while I still have another day to live. So what the heck, this is just a little cancer, huh?”

Video and text by Dan Q. Tham

The Mormon temple in South Jordan, Utah

Of all the cities and towns on Mark Twain’s route west that we visited, Salt Lake City honors him least.

The city’s magnificent main library, a 240,000-sq.-ft., five-story-tall curved wedge-shaped beauty by Moshe Safdie and other distinguished architects, celebrates a variety of authors. Its café is named for Hemingway, its bookstore features Poe, its newsletter carries Shakespeare on its front page. But Twain is nowhere to be seen.

Am I surprised? No. In a city that invites humor (a local beer, Wasatch Polygamy Porter, advertises “Why have just one!”), Twain took aim at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormons. He questioned the Mormon Bible (“half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity”) and “valley tan,” a whiskey-like invention of Mormons, who were not supposed to drink.

Though he praised the industriousness of Latter-day Saints (“no loafers perceptible”) and their extraordinary health (the town’s lone doctor had few customers), Twain joked about planning to lead a great reform to end polygamy, until he saw Mormon women.

“The man who marries sixty of them,” Twain wrote, “has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

Twain also observed that Utah locals, not just Mormons, despised outsider “emigrants” such as Twain—“low and inferior sort of creatures.” As attractive as Salt Lake City is today, even a white Protestant male feels he is an outsider amidst all of the suit-and-tied, fresh-faced, wrinkle-challenged Mormons (in 2007, Forbes ranked Salt Lake the most vain U.S. city, based on cosmetics sales and number of plastic surgeons per 100,000).

In fairness, though, while Utah is 62 percent Mormon, Salt Lake is minority Mormon, with Hispanics (22 percent), Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans African Americans and gays a presence (Salt Lake ranks third nationally among mid-size cities for gay and lesbian couples).

But the Salt Lake area does not feel like it’s the tolerant New York or New Orleans of the West, as I am reminded during an interview with Natalie P. Sheppard, 54, a black Mormon whom Twain would have enjoyed had he lived into the 21st century.

Mormon Natalie Sheppard

Twain’s memorable “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” captures the voice of a feisty, Sheppard-like black woman, introduced as 60-year-old Aunt Rachel. The tale reportedly reproduces the dialect of Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, born a slave in 1798, who became a cook at the Elmira, New York, farm where Twain wrote many of his most important books.

Making kitchen small talk, Twain asks, “How is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?” The black woman answers by recalling her husband and seven children being taken from her by slave owners, her years of loneliness and longing for them, and her reconciliation with her youngest child 13 years later. She ends with bitingly ironic words: “I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”

Twain’s “True Story” comes to mind as I interview Sheppard, a black Mormon family therapist for Utah’s Department of Human Services and mother of six children (including three from a 23-year-long second marriage). Sheppard has her own true-story tales of trouble.

Long before Sheppard became a Mormon, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discriminated against blacks. A few African-American men were ordained as Mormon priests in the 1830s and 1840s (ordination normally occurs as a matter of course when boys reach age 12, as long as they meet “worthiness” standards). But the teachings of Brigham Young kept African-American men out of the priesthood from the mid-19th century until 1978. Sheppard’s troubles, however, have gone beyond the church’s history of discrimination.

Not long after moving from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City, she drove with Ronnie, her seven-year-old son, to a gas station. While he stayed in the car she prepared to pump gas. A car filled with young white men in tuxedos arrived on the other side of the pump. One of the men, Sheppard recalls, “tried to take the pump out of my hand and I said, ‘Really? Seriously?’”

“He said, ‘You dumb little black nigger, give me the pump,’” Sheppard recalls. “And so I took the pump and I squirted him. I squirted the gasoline all over him. And his friend started getting out of his car—and I squirted him too. And they just kept using the N-word.”

Sheppard returned the nozzle and hose to the pump stand, got back into her car and, as she was about to drive away, shouted, “You just better be glad I don’t have a match.”

Other tales of trouble involve her children. Natalie J. Sheppard, her daughter, “a straight A student,” experienced racism at Utah State University. As a black Mormon, Natalie J. “is struggling with the church,” her mother says. “People treated her bad.”

Natalie P. Sheppard’s son Ronnie was told by a seminary teacher that, as a black Mormon, he would “never be anything in this church.” His mother consulted leaders in Genesis, an organization of black Latter-day Saints, who helped her confront the seminary’s leadership. The teacher was fired. Sheppard says her son has abandoned the church. “And his family isn’t LDS,” she adds.

But Sheppard remains a committed Mormon. And she has adopted less confrontational ways of dealing with racism. She came to the church, she says, as an angry black woman from the ‘hood. “I was ghetto. I recognized that I needed to learn and that there were changes that needed to occur in my life.” She earned a university degree and became a licensed clinical social worker.

She remembers, as a therapist for Child and Family Services, calling on a dysfunctional white family for a court-ordered family therapy session. The husband told her, as she stood without an umbrella in heavy rain at his front door, “I don’t let your kind in my house.” Sheppard quietly talked herself inside and, over time, helped the husband and his wife regain their children from foster care.

Destinae, a younger Sheppard daughter who was 4 or 5 at the time, was playing with a girlfriend when a girl new to the neighborhood joined them and said to Destinae’s friend, “If you’re going to play with her I can’t play with you because she’s just a little black nigger.” A neighbor suggested that Sheppard visit the new girl’s parents to confront them.

“I’m not going to do that,” Sheppard said. The next Sunday she spoke at the local Mormon church’s testimony meeting: “I talked about what had happened to my daughter and how sad it was to me because I had a son who was very inactive in this church due to the same behaviors that happened 20 years ago. If you’re all who you say you are and you’re walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, none of my children should ever have to experience that again.”

After the meeting, a man came up to Sheppard with his daughter. Sheppard recalls: “He said, ‘This is my daughter Izzie and she is the one who offended your daughter and she really doesn’t know what that means. And we really wanted to come to your house to talk to you and Destinae and straighten it out.” The father and daughter did visit, Sheppard says. “She and Destinae are friends off and on now.”

Racism is alive everywhere, though more subtle among Utahns, Sheppard says. “They will smile and grin at you, and you may learn later that they called you some kind of name. But you have to be a better person. In order for that mindset to change, in order for things to be better for your children, you have to learn how to act in a situation instead of reacting to it. And that’s the reality.”

Loren Ghiglione

A plaque dedicated to the Japanese imprisoned Arkansas during World War II

After a full day of interviewing at Louisiana State Penitentiary, we shot north toward Arkansas through Louisiana towns with memorable monikers: Tallulah (not named for the actress), Water Proof and Transylvania (an enormous black bat adorns its water tower).

We took a left off Route 65 on S. First Street in McGeehee, Arkanas, to see a tiny reminder of a gargantuan failure in U.S. history. For a year during World War II tens of thousands of law-abiding, Japanese-American U.S. citizens were rounded up on the West Coast and imprisoned at camps near McGehee and Jerome, Ark.

Three enormous billboards, huge white letters on black background, greet us along First Street. The first: Jesus is coming soon. The second: Jesus IS coming soon! The third: Are you ready to meet Jesus?

I suspect not, but I was ready for a city park that houses a large human sun dial, an even larger monument to U.S. war veterans and a small memorial plaque that explains the presence of a Japanese water garden. The plaque euphemistically describes the thousands of Japanese Americans’ imprisonment as a relocation.

In Pine Bluff, Ark., we visited briefly with a friend of mine from 1986, Bobbie Harville Crockett, a communications specialist at the agriculture school of the historically black University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. We reminisced about the six African Americans who made up almost half of the reporting staff of the Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News, during Crockett’s time there.

Three of the six still work at newspapers. But Crockett traded in long, irregular night-and-day newsroom hours for a regular schedule that made it easier for her to raise her son, who is now 14.

We push on to Little Rock to make a late-afternoon interview that will help us understand race in a city made famous in the fall of 1957 for the integration by nine black students, under escort of armed troops, of Central High School. We had hoped to video interview Spirit Trickey, daughter of Minniejean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine, but Trickey is road-tripping through Canada; we arrange to interview her by telephone about her play on the school’s desegregation when she returns to Little Rock.

But we were lucky on short notice to land an interview with Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, director of the new Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She described the Institute’s plans, including an ambitious research project on institutional racism in the Arkansas legal system.

Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, director of the new Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

After our interview, Aiyetoro showed us what she called a “graffiti board.” More than 200 students had stuck favorite quotes about addressing racism and other challenges on the board, which is titled “Face It To Fix It.” Mark Twain joins Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, Abraham Lincoln and Muhammad Ali among the most quoted.

Many quotes encourage action. Ali: “Don’t count the days, make the days count.” Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

But Margaret Atwood is the most quoted for these words: “I hope people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’—the human race—and that we are all members of it.”

Loren Ghiglione

Ben Jaffe, creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans

I am listening to an intense, muscular Ben Jaffe, 40, creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band, talk slowly and thoughtfully about his New Orleans, his brow furrowed, his sprouting Jewfro tied behind his head. But my eyes see Allan and Sandy Jaffe, his father and mother, who moved to New Orleans in 1961 and founded Preservation Hall, as Ben says, “to create a dignified environment where these aging African-American musicians could carry on a tradition that was slowly disappearing without anybody’s notice.”

I arrived in town shortly after, in 1965, to spend my summer days as a law student researching the case of two New Orleans African Americans who had been on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary for 14 years. I spent my nights listening to the Preservation Hall band. Sandy Jaffe, seated at the hall’s front gate with a basket in her lap, charged me only 50 cents.

For that “student rate” I not only heard Allan play tuba with trombonist Jim Robinson, clarinetist George Lewis and other African Americans in their 80s and 90s but I also entered the Jaffes’ French Quarter world of, in Ben’s words, “thinkers and outsiders and poets and musicians and artists and wheeler dealers.”

What a wonderful world it was—bespectacled Bill Russell, 60, ragtime violinist, modernist composer, and leading historian of New Orleans music (who wrote to me on Embalming Fluid Company stationery and fixed friends’ violins for free) and potbellied Larry Borenstein, 46, the art dealer who added jazz performances to his art gallery, created a world market for Pre-Columbian art (don’t ask how he got the art out of Mexico) and encouraged painter Noel Rockmore to document the Preservation Hall musicians.

How does Jaffe explain that world, not the world of boozing and barfing tourists on Bourbon Street, but the racially tolerant, inviting New Orleans of Preservation Hall? He sees New Orleans as a city of French, Spanish, African and Native American culture, food, music and architecture that just happens to be in the Deep South. “We’re really the Northern Caribbean.”

“Our pleasure bar is much higher here than in any other city that I know,” he adds. “We’re very serious about enjoyment.”

Preservation Hall, New Orleans, Louisiana

He grew up in the Quarter, lived two blocks from Preservation Hall and spent his early life listening to—and learning—traditional New Orleans jazz. He became a part of a largely African-American world. He marched six miles in Mardi Gras parades. Following his father’s early death, he started playing tuba in the Preservation Hall band. Now he provides a place for older musicians to mentor youngsters who want to follow in their footsteps.

He also seeks to preserve a community and way of life nourished by the music. “Every time I see another Wal-Mart going up it breaks my heart that it’s chipping away at the soul of America,” he says. “I just use that as a metaphor for everything that’s becoming too big and too much.” He prefers, instead, the New Orleans world of traditional jazz.

The music, he says, “gives us hope. It allows us to mourn. It’s a way for us to celebrate and to honor people. And that’s what’s important to me, those traditions.” He describes people from other countries coming to New Orleans and hoping to find in the city and its music the meaning of life.

Those who stay, he says, realize “it’s not one thing.” He recalls the experience of pianist Marie Wantanabe. The first time she experienced New Orleans musicians playing in a funeral procession it was as a tourist, the second time as a performer, the third time as a mourner for someone she knew. “When you’ve gone from birth to death is when you’ve become a part of our community,” Jaffe says.

The way of life of his New Orleans, he suggests, should spread across the world. “If everybody would dance a little bit more, and sing a little more, and celebrate life—not Bourbon Street celebration, Preservation Hall celebration—if they would celebrate the way we celebrate, the way we honor people with our music, the way we celebrate at funerals, the way we’re able to mourn people, it just would be a better place for everyone.”

Loren Ghiglione

Video by Dan Q. Tham

When the doctors couldn’t completely remove the large and painful cyst on her son Kent’s lower back, Chung Kim Do, who insists that we call her Miss Kim, took matters into her own hands.

Miss Kim, 58, is a single immigrant mother from Vietnam who raised six children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is skeptical of Western medicine and, despite all the love that she has for her new homeland, Miss Kim refuses to administer Tylenol when she can call upon the healing properties of ginger and other herbs.

Every night, for five nights, Miss Kim snuck into her son Kent’s room, rolled him over and lifted up his shirt. She spat on the cyst and gently rubbed her saliva into the lesion as her son slept. A business week later, the cyst was gone.

Kent looks a little embarrassed when his mother tells us the tale. Her hair is neatly pressed up in a mini-bouffant and her girlish bangs are swept to one side. Dressed in a pinstriped business suit and adorned with jeweled earrings, Miss Kim clearly took the lessons she learned at beauty school to heart. Her laugh is an inaudible, joyous eruption and her kind eyes moisten with sadness or pride, depending on the story she’s telling.

A particularly wet-eyed story was the one about how she got here.

“I don’t understand,” Miss Kim said, looking upward. “God blessed me.”

She was born in 1953 in a small hamlet called Pleiku, where my mother was also raised. I visited Pleiku once. As I sputtered along on a motorcycle with my father, I remember seeing a severed dog head for sale in the market. When we drove back through the main drag, the dog head was gone.

My mother has fonder memories of the place.

She was Miss Kim’s best friend in grade school. My mother remembers walking home from school with Chung every day. The road was lined with shady trees and vendors selling frozen yogurt. Miss Kim’s family was poor and only got poorer with the end of Vietnam War because of their affiliation with the losing South Vietnamese government. In their schoolgirl days, my mother recalls buying afterschool treats for the two of them. Crispy pâté chaud, sweet mung bean soup, pouches of sour frozen yogurt.

Miss Kim still remembers my mother’s kindness. Separated by more than 1,300 miles, they often talk on the phone.

Though my mother finished high school, Miss Kim dropped out after the ninth grade to help sell trinkets and candy at her family’s store. She eventually married a Chinese man, something she was reluctant to do but agreed upon for the sake of financial stability. Together, they had six children.

It was after her husband died in a motorcycle accident that Miss Kim wanted to leave Vietnam. “Bring me anywhere but here,” she said. “I wanted my children to have a good future. I had dreams. I dreamed my children would have a good education.”

Someone from a Catholic ministry saw Miss Kim, a single mother raising six children, and agreed to help her get to the United States via the Philippines. In 1994, she arrived in Baton Rouge, unable to speak English.

She immediately started working in a factory where she skinned raw fish and shelled crabs. After five months laboring in the factory, Miss Kim knew she had no future there. She decided to go to beauty school. With her newly minted license, she opened her own business, a nail salon, which has been in operation ever since.

“The customers so love me,” Miss Kim tells us with a laugh.

In 2003, with the help of her son Ben who had just graduated from pharmacy school, Miss Kim purchased the house they currently live in, an immaculate and spacious home to all her children and in-laws.

Next year, Miss Kim plans on converting her nail salon into a beauty school, so she can teach others the trade.

“If I was still in Vietnam, I’d be poor,” Miss Kim said. “I appreciate America very, very, very much.”

Rev. Paul J. Colling, a vicar for Hispanic issues for the Grand Island Diocese

“The writing was on the wall,” says Rev. Paul J. Colling, the 54-year-old pastor of St. Ann’s Catholic Church, Lexington, Nebraska, who also serves as vicar for Hispanic issues for the Grand Island diocese, 50,000 square miles of Nebraska that extends north to South Dakota and west to Wyoming. He remembers the life-or-death decision faced by the region’s small towns.

They could remain virtually 100 percent white, a choice favored by many residents, and lose their few factories to plants in other towns that welcomed low-pay, nonunion workers, a majority of them immigrants. Or the communities could try to avoid becoming ghost towns by supporting the hiring of workers who would make local factories more competitive. In Lexington, population 10,000, “city leaders said, ‘This is what we gotta do if we’re going to survive,’” Colling recalls.

So immigrants arrived in Lexington, home to an IBP (now Tyson Fresh Meats) beef processing plant, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, finally by the thousands. The town became ethnically 63 percent Hispanic, 37 percent non-Hispanic, with also an estimated 1,300 to 3,000 Somalis (not counted fully in the 2010 census).

When the immigrants—Mexicans, Guatemalan Indians, Cubans, Colombians, El Salvadorans and natives of numerous African nations—started arriving, many Lexington whites left for nearby towns like Johnson Lake, which grew from 531 in 1990 to 825 residents in 2000 and remains 98 percent white. The so-called white flight might not be completely attributable to the arrival of immigrants. An unpleasant odor, blamed on the STABL Inc. rendering plant, which converts dead animals from farms and feedlots into such products as Happy Hound dog food, reportedly also played a role.

Colling says that while prejudice still exists in Lexington he believes the community comparatively “is really, really open.” He says the town now attracts whites because of its diversity. If you walk along Washington Street, the main business thoroughfare, you can choose from not only from the usual downtown businesses but also a Somali restaurant, two importers of Mexican and Latin American goods, two Chinese restaurants and African International Food Market.

The diversity does not necessarily mean people mix. At lunchtime, Madeline’s Café & Bakery has 17 white female customers and, two doors away, Freddy’s, a Somali restaurant, has four black male customers. Colling tries at St. Ann’s, which has two masses in English and two in Spanish, “to help the community blend as much as I can.”

He delights in the local July 4 parade that features Mexican-Americans riding their dancing horses. He encourages whites to experience the Our Lady of Guadalupe Fiesta, with its Mexican dancers wearing traditional, hand-made costumes. And he applauds the efforts by Tyson Fresh Meats to accommodate the cultures of workers who, for example, attach great significance to funerals: “They’ll just leave and can be gone for a week.”

But tough challenges remain, he says. He bemoans the closing of Haven House, a shelter for people who arrived in town virtually penniless, looking for work. He says his church is undertaking a feasibility study for the establishment of an immigration office for the parish.

He encourages us to talk with other Lexington residents. We are curious about the impact of the town’s meatpacking plant on its workers. It’s hard not to see the immigrant workers at Tyson as the twenty-first century equivalent of Jurgis Rudkus, the devastated Lithuanian immigrant in Upton Sinclair’s classic 1906 novel, The Jungle, about meatpacking in Chicago.

Ana Maria Hermosillo

But Ana Maria Hermosillo, 45, whose husband worked in Lexington’s plant, has a different view. She worries about immigrants now “applying but not being called” by Tyson. She fears for the future, pointing to the cut in workers’ hours at the plant, from 48 hours to 37 hours. Work at the plant may be repetitive and it may be exhausting, but she believes that the alternative, work in the fields, “that’s the hard work.”

Loren Ghiglione

Mexican American artist Andy Valdivia

Shortly after my Haskin grandparents left Kansas by railroad, Mexican immigrants began arriving in Kansas by railroad to escape poverty and the violence of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. They took unskilled jobs with railroads, mining companies and agribusinesses. Alyssa, Dan and I drive south from Morrill, home in the late nineteenth century to my great-grandparents and grandparents, to Topeka, to interview Andy Valdivia about his paintings on exhibit at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.

Murals by Valdivia, who shares his Nov. 30 birth date with Mark Twain, are part of an exhibit titled “From Mexico to America: Through the Eyes of Kansas Artists.” One mural captures the story of Mexicans arriving in Topeka, working for the Santa Fe railroad and living in cramped boxcars and bunkhouses, often without indoor bathrooms, electricity or running water.

Mexicans were not encouraged to continue their education. They were not permitted in the public pool or movie theaters—except in the balcony’s “Mexican Heaven,” next to the section for blacks, the “Crow’s Nest.” At restaurants, only takeout was available to Mexicans. A typical sign read “Coloreds, Mexicans and Indians Served in Sacks Only.”

"HIS Story," a mural by Andy Valdivia

Valdivia’s murals also tell the story of later generations of Mexican-Americans—distinguished military service overseas, graduation from college as well as high school and employment in skilled and professional positions. Valdivia, 63, taught computer programming at Topeka Correctional Facility until he retired on November 30, 2011—an anniversary, of course, of Twain’s birth.

Loren

Burl Cain, 69, warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary for about 17 years, arranges for us to view the 18,000-acre prison, the largest maximum security penitentiary in America, from its Mississippi River edge.

That’s the way Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) saw the same land—once a slave-breeding plantation (named Angola, after the African nation thought to have larger and stronger men, Cain says), then a cotton and indigo plantation and finally, a prison after the Civil War.

The slightly inclined beach, unlike the tall bluffs elsewhere on the Mississippi, allowed steamboat roustabouts during Twain’s time to harvest wood that would serve as riverboat fuel. But we motor up and down the Mississippi aboard a gas-fueled, 28-ft. prison pontoon boat while its captain, Randy Robinson, 45, explains why few inmates choose to try escaping on the 14-mile-long river sides of the penitentiary grounds.

Robinson describes a water temperature as low as 40 degrees, the river’s treacherous turbulence and, in places, a rapid current that is “spooky, spooky.” During heavy storms, the river also represents a flood threat; twice in recent years the penitentiary temporarily has had to evacuate 2,000 inmates to others prisons.

Later, we drive by a line of 150 inmates marching into a prison field to harvest vegetables as a rifle-toting guard on horseback watches. Nicknamed “The Farm,” the 5,300-inmate penitentiary produces enough vegetables to feed over 11,000 inmates housed in five state prisons year-round; each inmate is fed three meals daily for a cost of only $1.50, says Gary Young, the prison official who accompanies us.

After beginning a series of six inmate interviews, we break for a five-course, prisoner-produced lunch at a dining center for penitentiary guests called The Ranch. We are gorging on tasty, tiny chocolate chip cookies and lemon meringue pie when we are summoned to the office of Warden Cain, a short, affable, Santa-Claus-shaped true believer in religion’s ability to achieve inmates’ moral rehabilitation.

During our meeting Cain displays his several sides—flatterer, nontraditional penologist, propagandist and teacher on parenting. Cain claims he has been a Twainiac since childhood. He says his mother, a fourth-grade teacher, encouraged him to read Twain’s writings. Cain played fish with a deck of cards that featured Louisa May Alcott, Twain and other American authors. Cain says, “I always wanted to get Mark Twain.”

Interspersing his talk with “that’s just cool” and “it’s pretty cool,” Cain outlines his philosophy for a good prison: “good food, good medicine, good play and good praying….We do all those four components and we just rock and roll.” In a prison world of few Muslims and Buddhists and a lot of what Cain calls “Bapticostals,” Cain promotes praying, avoiding profanity and studying the Bible.

The prison helps trains inmates to become preachers to spread the gospel at other Louisiana prisons, as well as Angola. The penitentiary’s 83 death row inmates and 4,000 lifers are encouraged “to find meaning to their existence in prison even in the direst circumstances,” writes Dennis Shere, in Cain’s authorized biography. “For the warden, that existence is found in believing in Jesus Christ as Savior.” Cain’s biography makes clear that it was produced by a publisher of books “written from a biblical perspective.”

At least one former prisoner views Cain’s systems of rewards and privileges for moral rehabilitation with skepticism. Wilbert Rideau, the prize-winning former editor of the prison’s newsmagazine and probably the penitentiary’s most famous ex-con, calls Cain a bully. Rideau writes in his memoir, In the Place of Justice, that Cain “enjoyed being a dictator, and regarded himself as a benevolent one.”

Months before our scheduled visit to the penitentiary I had written to Cathy Fontenot, the assistant warden in charge of public relations, to arrange for interviews with what the prison has taken to calling “offenders” (a label disliked, a prison official acknowledged, by inmates). Fontenot had refused to confirm my prison-visit date and had denied my request to interview a death-row prisoner.

Since previously I had interviewed several death-row inmates at the penitentiary, I contacted the Louisiana office of the American Civil Liberties Union for its help. The ACLU, in turn, talked with Warden Cain, who called me. “I’m probably the only warden in the country,” he said, “who gets along with the ACLU.”

Cain explained the difficulty of arranging an interview with death-row inmates. Families of victims did not want the inmates to receive publicity. The inmates’ lawyers worried about media attention damaging their clients’ appeal for release or a reduced sentence. But Cain said he would try to arrange a death-row interview.

In our presence that afternoon, he drafts a letter that he says he hopes will persuade Manuel Ortiz to allow us to video interview him on death row, despite his lawyers’ concerns. “This story will be good for Angola and should not cause you any grief,” Cain writes. “If you don’t feel comfortable with the questions they ask, then don’t answer, just move on to the next one.” Cain’s letter does not work. We say hello to Ortiz during our visit to death row but do not video interview him.

But we do video interview Cain. Earlier both prisoners and ex-staff had groused to us about being required to classify themselves as black or white on penitentiary forms, even though they identified as Asian American, Native American or something else. So I ask Can about the prison’s classification system.

Cain says that, in melting-pot America, the prison really does not care about race or ethnicity: “We just all Americans….We Americans, and we don’t refer to anyone as African Americans or English Americans or Vietnamese. You can tell he is Vietnamese, you know, because of the way he looks. We really don’t get into all that. We just don’t care. We just Americans.”

Cain ends the interview with his approach to raising children, captured on Dan Tham’s video.

Loren Ghiglione

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

I remember Ernest Withers of Memphis as a distinguished civil rights photographer, whose message to journalism students at Emory and Northwestern Universities, when I invited him to speak, was more spiritual than shutter-speed, f-stop practical.

Shortly before he died, Withers told a Northwestern class on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day that the most important quality of a photographer’s work was its honesty: “Is it true? Does it hurt? What good does it do?”

Withers’ work—he shot more than a million photos—rose at times to that level where a picture becomes a defining icon of an era, an image that so repulses or engages us that it brings some slight change in us. Most great photographers are remembered, at best, for one such image.

Withers shot several—his photo of massed “I Am A Man” marchers, of Dr. King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy sitting in the front of the bus, and of the beaten face of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago tortured and murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Photographer Carl Mydans once said, “Behind the camera there must be a man’s eye, and a soul.” A soul. I feel that Withers’ photos showed his soul. So I was especially troubled when—three years after Withers’ death in 2007 at age 85—a report by Marc Perrusquia in The Commercial Appeal, Wither’s hometown paper, concluded that he had doubled as FBI informant to spy on the civil rights movement.

While in Memphis, I wanted to talk with Perrusquia and Withers’ daughter, Rosalind, president of the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery. What about Ernest Withers, FBI spy?

In our interview, Rosalind stresses her father’s efforts to help the civil rights cause, saying he was “very, very much a part of the movement.” And the movement, she says, echoing Andrew Young, pursued a policy of being transparent about its activities, especially with FBI agents, who, unlike local police, were seen as protectors of the movement.

She acknowledges her father’s role as FBI informant. But she recalls his career in law enforcement—as one of Memphis’s first black police officers, Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent and county constable: “Once a policeman is always a policeman.” He felt he was providing information for life and safety, she says, helping the FBI, for example, derail the Invaders, a black militant group feared by city leaders.

If the FBI paid her father, Rosalind says, it was for the photos that the agency requested of him. She feels certain he would never have used his photos to hurt the civil rights movement, its leaders or their reputations.

She recalls that, following Dr. King’s assassination, her father was the only photographer invited into the hospital to shoot the blood-stained corpse. The photos could have made Withers a lot of money. But he told a King funeral organizer, Rosalind recalls, “I’m not going to take a picture of him that way. When you suit him up I’ll release that picture to the nation.”

Perrusquia of The Commercial Appeal agrees that Winters was “a kind-hearted guy” who possibly saw his work for the FBI informing on Black Panther-style militants as a “vital function for law and order.” But Withers also “was a very complicated guy, let’s put it that way,” Perrusquia adds.

Withers was paid little for his photography and struggled financially to raise eight children. Perrusquia quotes a federal source who said Withers was driven by a need for money. That need, Perrusquia suggests, led Withers to participate in a corrupt system. In various law enforcement roles, Perrusquia says, Withers was not immune from kickbacks—“cash for pardons” and “cash for bribes.”

Perrusquia’s pursuit of Wither’s sealed FBI informant file continues, part of a Commercial Appeal investigation that thus far has cost the paper $80,000 in legal fees. The investigation could reveal the length of Withers’ service to the FBI, what the service entailed and how much he was paid for it.

Whatever the investigation reveals, I will remember forever Withers and his courageous coverage of the civil rights movement. As Perrusquia, in fairness, wrote in his article: Withers defied a judge’s order that banned picture-taking during the Emmett Till murder trial and “captured the moment Till’s great-uncle Mose Wright stood up at the witness stand and pointed an accusing finger at the killers.”

Withers, as Perrusquia also wrote, endured harassment in Mississippi following the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers and a police beating covering Medgar Evers’ 1963 funeral. I like to believe that the soul of Withers lives on in the honest photos he so bravely shot.

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

Our conversation with Smith, which focuses on the Defender’s past as well as present and future, reminds me of two interesting tidbits of journalism history. First, the Defender is part of a strong Memphis-Chicago journalism connection. Ida B. Wells, the feisty editor and part-owner of Memphis’s Free Speech and Highlight and a crusader against lynching, continued her crusade in Chicago, as author and editor of the African-American Conservator. The Tri-State Defender was founded by John Sengstacke, publisher of the flagship Chicago Defender.

Second, the Tri-State Defender reported key events in the early history of the U.S. civil rights movement, despite risk to its reporters. The Defender’s Alex Wilson covered the Mississippi murder of Emmett Till, a Chicago 14-year-old, in 1955, and the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Wilson was knocked to the ground at Central High, hit on the head with a brick, and kicked as he knelt. Attackers shouted, “Run, nigger, run,” but he refused to run. He said later, “They would have had to kill me before I would have run.”

For more on the Defender’s role in history, see an excerpt from Dan Tham’s video of our interview with Smith, the paper’s publisher.

For more on the Defender, see an excerpt from Dan Tham’s video of our interview of Smith, the paper’s publisher.

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