“People in Action: Pathos and Hope”
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: March 3, 1962
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Published Article
Topic: Voter registration
Details
In early February, King launched SCLC’s People to People campaign with a three-day tour of the Mississippi Delta, the “symbol of hard-core resistance” in the South. Aimed at registering new voters and nurturing local leadership to serve in a “nonviolent army,” the campaign included stops in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Talking “with thousands of people,” King recalls in this New York Amsterdam News article that he “listened to their problems, learned of their fears, felt the yearnings of their hope.” Concluding, King maintains that “we must encourage our people in Mississippi to rise up by the hundreds and thousands and demand their freedom—now!”1
I have just returned from the heart of the Mississippi Delta. It is a strange experience to see hope and pathos at the same time. Yet, this is the story of the Third Congressional District of dark Mississippi.
As part of SCLC’s “people-to-people” program, several members of our staff and I travelled the fertile and sometime depressing Delta country.2 This was the initial visit of a tour that will take me into every State in the South.
The immediate aim of this tour is to recruit hundreds of volunteers to work in our intensified Southwide voter registration drive and to enlist a smaller number of volunteers to serve in a nonviolent army.
This nonviolent army will consist of persons who can be on call to engage in direct action programs across the South and who will be prepared for prolonged jailings when necessary.
This trip provided me with an opportunity to talk with thousands of people on a personal basis. I talked with them on the farms and in the village stores, on the city streets and in the city churches. I listened to their problems, learned of their fears, felt the yearnings of their hope.
Bits Of Hope
There are some flesh and blood scenes that I can never dispel from my memory. One of our earliest stops was a Catholic school that included the elementary and high school grades.
The sister in charge in each classroom, asked the question, “Where are you going tonight?” The answer was chorused, “To the Baptist Church!” They were referring to the Baptist Church where I was to speak for the mass meeting.3 The sister had strongly urged them to attend.
How marvelous that the struggle for freedom and human dignity rises above the communions of Catholic and Protestant. This was a bit of the hope I glimpsed in the Mississippi Delta.
Then, of course, there was the pathos. How sobering it is to meet people who work only six months in the year and whose annual income averages $500.00 to $600.00.
We were informed that one plantation of 40,000 acres owned by a British syndicate and worked by a thousand Negro families, has a 95% illiteracy rate among the adults.4
Violence Is Fear
Along with the economic exploitation that the whole State of Mississippi inflicts upon the Negro, there is the ever-present problem of physical violence.
As we rode along the dusty roads of the Delta country, our riding companions cited unbelievable cases of police brutality and incidents of Negroes being brutally murdered by white mobs, which never became known to the outside world. In spite of this, there is a ray of hope.
This ray of hope is seen in the new determination of the Negroes themselves to be free.
As we talked with the “saints of the soil” at one country store, we recruited some twenty-odd volunteers, some unable to write their own names!5
Functionally illiterate, but desiring freedom nevertheless. Pathos and hope.
Editor Was Wrong
And speaking of hope, despite a blistering editorial in the Clarksdale daily decrying the advent of “professional agitators,” the two public meetings held in Clarksdale were packed and jammed Wednesday and Thursday nights.6
The editor had predicted that most of the Negroes in Clarksdale and its environs would ignore our presence. However, the Centennial Baptist and the First Baptist Churches whose sanctuaries seat more than a thousand, were filled hours before the meeting time. This was evidence that Negroes in Mississippi are not satisfied with segregation. Hope and pathos.
You have already read in the national press that The Reverend Theodore Trammell, minister of the Haven Methodist Church in Clarksdale has filed as a candidate for the Congress of the United States from the Third District.7 He is reportedly the first candidate for high office since Reconstruction.
He has been joined by another clergyman from the Fourth District in Jackson. Think of it! Two Negro candidates for Congress from Mississippi.
It is not improbable that if pending legislation in Washington outlawing literacy requirements above the sixth grade is enacted, and a concerted drive is made on the part of the Negro community itself in voter registration, Mississippi could have four or five Negro Congressmen in the next few years.8
A Beginning
During the week of our visit, the Reverend James Lawson of Nashville, Tennessee, our Special Projects Director, conducted nonviolent workshops in Laurel, Cleveland, and Jackson, Mississippi. We joined each other on Friday at Tougaloo College and shared a morning of fruitful workshops and discussion with some of the young people who are prodding forces in the social revolution of the South.
When I reflect on our visit to the state that has become the symbol of hard-core resistance, the enormity of the task is inescapable. We could put the field staffs of SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC and a few other agencies to work in the Delta alone. However, no matter how big and difficult a task it is, we have begun. We must encourage our people in Mississippi to rise up by the hundreds and thousands and demand their freedom—now!
1. Following the tour, Clarksdale resident and Mississippi NAACP activist Aaron Henry thanked SCLC on behalf of the city (Henry to Wyatt Tee Walker, 10 February 1962).
2. Wyatt Tee Walker, who went with King to Mississippi, later commented that one “cannot imagine how much humanity can be compressed into two and a half days of hour by hour scheduling” (“Report of the director,” April 1962).
3. King spoke at the Centennial Baptist Church in Coahoma County, Mississippi (SCLC, Press release, “King’s ‘People to People’ tour sweeps Delta,” 21 February 1962).
4. The Fine Cotton Spinners and Doublers Association, later known as the Delta and Pine Land Company, was owned by several private textile mill companies, and in 1911, they purchased thirty-eight thousand acres in the area surrounding Scott, Mississippi. Over three thousand sharecroppers, who represented one thousand tenant families, were employed by the company.
5. King stopped at a country store in Sherard, Mississippi, on 8 February (SCLC, Press release, “King’s ‘People to People’ tour sweeps Delta”).
6. “Time for Questions,” Clarksdale Press Register, 6 February 1962.
7. Despite his policy of not endorsing political candidates, King spoke at a “Trammell for Congress” rally on 8 February (see King to I. Logan Kearse, 2 November 1961, pp. 321–322 in this volume).
8. In 1986, Mississippi elected Alphonso Michael Espy, its first black congressman in over a hundred years.
Source: New York Amsterdam News, 3 March 1962.