"I'm the youngest of 12 children. My parents were sharecroppers," said lifelong civil rights activist Hollis Watkins.
"We were taught that if you meet a white man on a sidewalk, you step off and bow your head until he passed by. Because if you didn't, he would consider you to be disrespectful. ... He would slap you or hit you or even have you put in jail.
"And if there was a white woman and you looked into her face, that was 'eye-ball rape,' and that, for the most part, would mean death."
Now at age 77, Watkins is still active as co-founder and legislative liaison of
Southern Echo, a leadership development, education, and training organization working to develop effective accountable grassroots leadership in the African-American communities in rural Mississippi.
He explained that sharecropping was an evolution of slavery in which "freed" slaves paid rent to work land owned by a white man. The sharecroppers usually had to take out loans at the start of the planting season to buy seed and then share the proceeds from the harvest with the landowner.
"At this age [his youth], I was becoming a sponge, not a conscious sponge but something even more essential. The good and the bad were flooding and mixing in me.
"The bad: the baking heat, the sticky sweat, the dirt and grime, the moans, aches, and pains. The good: being in the midst of my family, their ability to laugh in the pit of hell, their ability to use song as fuel, their ability to love, to make heaven out of hell.
"Deep inside me, I learned early that we were good people, that we were not the bad people, not the killers, nor the exploiters. We were the lovers."
He added that
sankofa comes from the Twi language of Ghana; it means "to go back and get it, to reflect on the past in order to build a successful future."
Watkins' story of meeting a white man or a white woman on a sidewalk, unfortunately, has a modern parallel today.
On November 24, 2016, less than a week after my journey on the Living Legacy Pilgrimage, 15-year-old James Means bumped into 62-year-old William Pulliam on a sidewalk in Charleston, West Virginia.
Pulliam, who was white, shot and killed Means, who was black. Pulliam, showing no remorse, admitted the killing, saying that he had rid society of "a piece of trash."
Pulliam was charged with first degree murder and felony use of a firearm. His trial is slated to begin in May 2019.
Recorded oral history of Thelma Stevens, recalling an experience as a young woman in Mississippi, heard at The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee:
"There were hundreds, literally hundreds, of people on the hillside. And there was a [black] man hanging from a limb. And [white] men standing all around him with guns in their hands, shooting at him. ... That's the kind of lynching that happened thousands of times, I'm sure."
Next blog: "Vigilante Victims: Mississippi Burning"
