9 minute read
The Foot Soldier
CHARLES MCLAURIN
PHOTO BY JARED BURLESON
s 5-year-old Charles A McLaurin stood outside the whites only bathroom in the hectic Jackson train station, a big 6-foot-two white man lumbered towards him. “Nigger,” he said, “what you doing peeping in the restroom at white women?”
A crowd gathered. McLaurin was too scared to run, too scared to explain that his grandmother had gone in the restroom and told him to wait there. “It Former Indianola journalist David Rushing says that to white people in the 1960s, was more white people than I Charles McLaurin was “the most feared man in town.” PHOTO BY JARED BURLESON had ever seen,” he says now.
Then his grandmother, a light-skinned, wavyof the White Citizens Council made him the “most haired woman who could pass for white, walked out cussed man in Sunflower County,” according to of the bathroom and grabbed him by the arm. David Rushing, a former Indianola journalist. “He
When the white man told her McLaurin had been brought fear, total fear, to the power structure.” peeping in the restroom, she raised her voice: “You’re a McLaurin thinks he understands why. liar. This is my boy, and he’s standing right here where I left “When you’ve got these people with all of that him.” She and McLaurin turned around and walked away. power, they don’t want to give it up. I wonder
It was his first brush with racism -- myself, if I would want to give it up,” he said. almost 10 years before the 1955 murder of In 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. was leading his troops Emmett Till -- but he never forgot it. through the South, marching for change. In Jackson, the news that King was coming electrified a black community hungry to be freed from the yoke of segregation. King spoke at all-black Jackson State University. “He was the most cussed McLaurin, 19, joined several hundred students squeezed into a sweltering auditorium. He listened as King man in Sunflower County. and the NAACP’s Medgar Evers called them to the He brought fear, total fear, road of freedom. It changed his life. After talking to a SNCC recruiter, he told his mother he was dropping to the power structure.” out of school to become a civil rights worker. “My mama said I’d get killed. That’s all she said. She said that the voting will get you killed. Fooling — DAVID RUSHING around with Medgar Evers will get you killed. It was a challenge to me. I was going to get killed anyway. Who knows? Everywhere I went, some white man wanted
Charles McLaurin would go on to join the Student the space I was in, and I didn’t like it. More than likely, Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, travel to Sunflower I would have wound up in Parchman, or killed.” County to register black voters, and become a civil After joining SNCC, McLaurin and other recruits rights legend in the Delta -- the fearless foot soldier who were summoned by Medgar Evers. He assembled them tackled the tough towns. He was beaten, threatened around a big map of Mississippi. He drew a circle with guns, and jailed. But he kept at it. Never again around the heavily black counties of the Delta. would a big white man with “nigger” dripping from “This is a start,” said Evers, who knew that his lips scare him away from where he wanted to be. more than any place else, the huge black majority
McLaurin’s voter registration work in the home there could grasp power if it were able to vote. He
dispatched McLaurin to Sunflower County, home of segregationist U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland, with a single mission: get blacks registered to vote.
“Ella Baker, a little school teacher, a beautiful, little woman who organized SNCC in the early days, told us when we came to the Delta, to go and work among those who have the least. They may first be hesitant or frightened, but once you get them to understand that they can change their own lives, their own way, they don’t have to be in poverty. They can have leaders among themselves,” McLaurin said.
McLaurin was introduced to the Delta in the blazing heat of August 1962. It was an interesting first day. He and two other SNCC members had just reached the small town of Ruleville, their new base of operations. A little white man wearing a hat drove up to them and ordered, “Niggers, get in the car.” They looked at one another, perplexed. “Why?”
The stranger reached into his car and pulled out a .38 pistol. He drove them to City Hall. After rattling off their names, the white man threatened them. “You niggers, get out of town. I don’t want you niggers here. Get out of town.” He drove them back to the black neighborhood and put them out. There, a young, black kid told them the man in the hat was none other than the mayor.
“There were numerous attempts to intimidate us,” McLaurin said. “I got in jail almost every month, for some reason. It seemed again, here I am, faced with a situation where some white person wants the space I’m in. I’m being asked to ‘Move over. Get out. Nigger, run,’ and that kind of infuriated me, all the time.”
And not just in the Delta.
In 1964, McLaurin and several friends were on their way to help train summer volunteers in Atlanta when the blue
The Bryant Grocery where Emmett Till allegedly offended a white female store clerk. As a result, he was beaten and killed. PHOTO BY LOGAN KIRKLAND
Charles McLaurin outside the ruins of the Bryant Grocery at Money. It is on his civil rights tour. PHOTO BY LOGAN KIRKLAND
lights of a state highway patrolman appeared behind them. He pulled them over near Columbus and took them to jail. There, officers forced McLaurin to stand in front of a deputy sheriff and two patrolmen.
“Why did you all run that white lady off of the road?” the deputy demanded. “We haven’t seen any white lady,” McLaurin replied. “You’re a nigger, ain’t you?”
McLaurin answered, “No.”
The patrolman on the right punched him in the jaw.
The deputy repeated the question, “You’re a nigger, ain’t you?”
Again, “No.”
The patrolman on the left threw the next punch.
“I look at them,” said McLaurin, beginning to catch on. “I look at this guy that’s asking me the questions on this side, and I look at this little deputy standing in front of me. I look at this guy here, and it seems like they’re so anxious. They’re anxious for me to say that I’m a nigger.”
The deputy continued the interrogation. “Ain’t you a nigger?”
McLaurin finally replied, “Yes.” The men relaxed.
The civil rights workers were glad to get out of town alive.
In August 1962, McLaurin took a busload of 18 people to Indianola to try to get them registered. As they approached the courthouse, the passengers became frightened. Men waved guns at them from passing trucks and hung out of their windows yelling, “Niggers, go home. We’re going to kill you all.”
Suddenly, a stocky, black woman McLaurin had never met started singing This Little Light of Mine. It broke the tension, and everyone joined in. McLaurin – and the rest of America – would soon find out the singer’s name: Fannie Lou Hamer. She was to become one of the biggest names in the fight for freedom.
McLaurin calls her one of his dearest friends. He recalls when he was asked to deliver her to a SNCC rally.
— CHARLES MCLAURIN
Hamer was living in a little shack on a hill. In a pouring rain, McLaurin knocked on the door, and a voice from inside told him to come in. A red-hot wood-burning stove illuminated the room, and a wingback chair sat in the center with its back to the door. “I’m looking for Fannie Lou Hamer,” he said
A small, stocky lady stood up. “I’m Fannie Lou Hamer.”
McLaurin told her that Bob Moses of SNCC had sent him to pick her up to go to Tougaloo College and then on to Nashville.
“Have a seat. I’ll be with you.” That was all she said. In a few minutes, Hamer, destined to become one of America’s most famous civil rights leaders, returned packed and ready to go.
McLaurin and Hamer became a strong pair in the movement. In 1963, McLaurin was told to take Hamer to Jackson to get her qualified to run for Congress. Under protest, he became her campaign manager. “I tried to tell her I don’t know anything about being a campaign manager,” he said. “But she said, ‘I don’t know anything about Congress, so sign the papers.’”
Theirs was a 15-year friendship. He was her driver, bodyguard, assistant, friend. When asked why he stayed in the Delta after the movement ended, McLaurin replied, “I had a Fannie Lou Hamer.”
After deciding to stay in Indianola, McLaurin found himself working for the same government he once tried to tear down. He was the city’s assistant public works director for 19 years. Today, in retirement, he finds satisfaction in giving young people civil rights tours for a “historic perspective” on the events of the 1960s. He’s guided dozens of college and civil rights
groups from all over the country.
Wearing a torn, blue Jackson State University baseball cap, Charles McLaurin sits in the B.B. King Museum gift shop in Indianola. “My wife tells me I need to throw it away,” he says with a mischievous grin. McLaurin isn’t good at letting go of the past. He feels a duty to tell new generations what happened during the civil rights era. Hence, the tour. As he shows off historic sites such as early civil rights leader Amzie Moore’s house, a “safe house” for activists in Cleveland, and the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden, the symbol of the movement in Ruleville, McLaurin says he is eager to “put life back into the movement.”
“Once a soldier, always a soldier. You can’t let go,” he said. “You are always fighting for values we hold dear.”
Even now, he can’t give it up. Standing before a group of students at the Emmett Till civil rights marker in Money, McLaurin’s eyes focus on something far off. “Where is the civil rights movement now?”
He peers down at the young faces before him and thinks back to the little boy who stood in the train station almost 50 years ago.
With hope in his voice, he answers, “It’s in you.” Design by Alli Moore
He Changed Mississippi Politics
Aaron Henry was firebombed twice, thrown in jail and forced to pick up the garbage. But he got what he wanted.
By Karson Brandenburg
Summer, 1964
It was late at night and the four civil rights veterans were cruising up lonely U.S. Highway 49 through the Delta on the way back from a meeting in Jackson. Aaron Henry drove, careful to stay within the speed limit. His passengers talked strategy, not paying much attention to the road. Suddenly, Henry stopped the car and rolled down the window. That’s when Leslie McLemore noticed a man dressed in ragged clothes. He was looking for a ride. And he was white.
