On Wednesday, June 15, 1966 at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the Meredith March Against Fear arrived in Grenada, MS. The event kicked off five months of marches, demonstrations, boycotts and protests, known as the Grenada Freedom Movement, challenging the local community to live up to the promises of equality and justice for all people. In September that year, integration of Grenada's public schools began. Local response was violent.

Beginning on June 15, 2016, the Grenada-based racial justice group, Activists With a Purpose, will begin a summer-long commemoration of that fraught summer by hosting panel discussions, public forums and workshops to examine the legacies of that difficult period 50 years ago and to envision a way forward as a united community. Commemorative events will include a walk from the entrance of the city to Belle Flower Church at the site of the Church's Civil Rights historical marker, a ceremony recognizing participants in the movement of 1966, art and photo displays and book exhibits.

For more information, please contact Activists With a Purpose, 662-809-0113 or kiamshi@bellsouth.net.

The Mississippi Humanities Council is happy to announce two new speakers to its Speakers Bureau Dr. Shennette Garrett-Scott and Dr. Otis W. Pickett.

Dr.

Dr. Shennette Garrett-Scott

Shennette Garrett-Scott, a scholar of black women's history who teaches at the Un iversity of Mississippi, offers a lecture entitled Everything that is Mean, Damnable and Cursed: Minnie Geddings Cox and the Indianola Affair. In 1891, Minnie Geddings Cox became the first African-American woman appointed federal postmaster in Mississippi. In December 1902, threats against Cox's life led her to resign. President Theodore Roosevelt refused to accept her resignation and closed the town's post office. The Indianola Affair, as the event was known, sparked the first major national debate since Reconstruction about race, states' rights and federal power. Garrett-Scott's presentation reconsiders the Indianola Affair and the woman at its center. Extralegal violence, political repression, economic downturn, racial backlash, cooperation and resistance-these all figure in that story. The presentation highlights the larger cultural, political and economic forces that resonated through and far beyond the early twentieth-century Mississippi Delta, forces that continue to shape and be shaped by our understandings and uses of the past.

Dr.

Dr. Otis Pickett

Otis W. Pickett, who teaches history at Mississippi College and at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, lectures on Rethinking Mass Incarceration for a Better Way Forward, a brief introduction of the current state of incarceration in America and Mississippi. Pickett shares the long history of incarceration in Mississippi, beginning with the institution of slavery, the first jails in Natchez and Jackson, the black codes and the convict lease system in the late nineteenth century. He describes the shift in the state's history for prison reform to penitentiaries like Parchman at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, he examines incarceration and punishment through the Jim Crow era and the use of lynching, imprisonment during the Civil Rights movement and the modern day situation of private, for-profit prisons in Mississippi, and provides examples of ways we can begin to, as a society, rethink the prison space through programs such as the Prison to College Pipeline. He demonstrates how providing small investments in education has tremendous results in reducing recidivism, enhancing re-entry and lowering the violence level of incarcerated spaces.

Please visit the Speakers Bureau page on the Mississippi Humanities Council website for a full listing of available speakers and topics.