“People in Action: Unknown Heroes”
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: May 12, 1962
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Published Article
Topic: Brown v. Board of Education
Details
In April 1962 SCLC’s People to People tour stopped in South Carolina where King met with local heroes Esau Jenkins and Billie Fleming. As part of King’s biweekly column in the New York Amsterdam News, he writes of discovering “literally thousands of unknown heroes across our Southland,” like Jenkins and Fleming, who keep the “threadbare hopes of the Negro community intact against insurmountable odds.”1
I never realized how many unknown heroes there were in the Freedom struggle of the Negro in the South until I began our “people to people” tours. Out of the Montgomery Bus protest experience, Ralph Abernathy and I had learned, that through a quirk of fortune and circumstances, public exposure, national and international, came to us. We honestly faced through all the days that followed the truth that there were literally hundreds of others in Montgomery who were more deserving than ourselves. It was but a whim of history that made us the titular leaders.2
Thus the awareness of unknown heroes in our struggle has always been present, but never to the degree that it now exists. However, after spending the better part of three days in the Negro-majority counties of the First and Second Congressional Districts of South Carolina on our third “people to people” tour, I see now, that in nearly every hamlet, every town, every county seat, every rural community, there is some staunch lover of Freedom—unknown and unpublicized—who kept the threadbare hopes of the Negro community intact against insurmountable odds. Esau Jenkins and Billy Fleming are two of these.
Esau Jenkins is a rather portly, dark-skinned Negro who has lived on John’s Island all his life. John’s Island is one of a number of the Sea Islands of South Carolina where there is the unique admixture of French, Negro and white family strain, very similar to the Creoles of New Orleans.
Esau Jenkins is an industrious business man who has parlayed one small business into a network of restaurants and bus-service lines to the islands in the Charleston area.
Involved
For as long as he can remember, he has been “involved” in the drive for Negro rights, many times spending his own money and giving uncalculated time. Yet by his own testimony he told us that though in many quarters of the community both Negro and white, he is persona non grata, his businesses have flourished and all of his seven children educated.3
The most remarkable thing about Esau Jenkins is that the Citizenship School Program of SCLC which now represents nearly a $100,000.00 a year operation, was born on one of his buses.4
Several years ago, while waiting to make a run into Charleston from the islands, Esau Jenkins conceived the idea to use the time between trips to teach his riders “their letters.”
Thus he began teaching reading and writing to his adult riders in order that they could qualify to vote.
Idea Spreads
It was not too long before the classes outgrew the bus and were transferred to a back room of his store. Soon the idea began to spread all over the Sea Islands.
Then, with the help of the Field Foundation, schools were established and staffed throughout the islands. This program has now been developed on a South-wide basis through SCLC.
In less than six months, we have trained 200 teachers and there are presently 105 Citizenship Schools operative in nine states across the South, six in Mississippi.5 And all of this began with Esau Jenkins on his bus at John’s Island, South Carolina.
He is one of the unknown heroes of the Freedom struggle in the South.
Billy Fleming is another.
On our people to people tour the second day, we headed northeast early in the morning.
Clarendon County
Our next stop was a little hamlet called Manning. Manning is in Clarendon County! This is the county where the suit that resulted in the Supreme Court Decision of 1954 originated.6
In some magisterial districts, Negroes outnumber whites, five to one. An old friend, Billy Fleming, is the leader there. Tall and robust, easily six feet three or four, Billy Fleming’s gentleness was disarming when contrasted with his physical size.
You could not miss a definite grimness in his copper-colored countenance. I later learned there was good reason.
Billy Fleming related to me a story of bombings, economic reprisals, mayhem threatenings and intimidations that would make Alabama and Georgia seem tame.7
Reprisals
He explained that during the last three years, the farm people of Clarendon County (there is no other industry of any kind) have had grain standing in the field that couldn’t be harvested; the White Citizens Councils pressured the withdrawal of commercial combines.
On other occasions, men with money in their hands couldn’t buy seed and fertilizer and fuel for their machinery.
This latter condition existed with some farmers at the very moment he talked with us. Billy Fleming happens to be an undertaker. Negroes who indicate they desire his services, are pressured and investigated by the WCC. Yet Billy Fleming hangs on, holding together the integrity and dignity of the Negro community despite the tremendous pressures he faces from every quarter.
How?
Just before we left Manning, I had the opportunity to shake hands with several of the original plaintiffs in the Clarendon County school desegregation suit. Very seldom have I been as inspired as when I met the simple people of the land who possessed such great courage and persistent devotion to freedom.
If you ever visit Clarendon County, you will wonder as I did, “How on earth did a school desegregation suit begin here in the early fifties?” It was begun because of an unknown hero named Billy Fleming and his faithful followers of Clarendon County, South Carolina.
Unknown Heroes
There must be literally thousands of unknown heroes across our Southland. There’s one at John’s Island, South Carolina and another at Manning in Clarendon County. Remember their names. Esau Jenkins and Billy Fleming.
Unknown Heroes.
1. Following his visit to South Carolina, King thanked Jenkins for his hospitality and commended the civil rights leader for his “deep dedication and genuine commitment to the cause of freedom and human dignity” (King to Jenkins, 24 April 1962). Esau Jenkins (1910–1972), born on Johns Island, South Carolina, left school after the fourth grade to help his father work in the cotton and rice fields. By the 1930s Jenkins owned his own farm and a trucking company to transport his vegetables to the market in Charleston, South Carolina. As his trucking company prospered, Jenkins invested in several other businesses, including a fruit stand, a motel, and a restaurant. As a prominent member of the Johns Island community, Jenkins began lobbying for a black high school on the island and purchased a bus to transport students living on the island to the city to attend school. Three years later, Jenkins bought additional buses to transport islanders who commuted into Charleston to work. It was during one of these trips that Jenkins began teaching riders to read parts of the Constitution to prepare them for the voter registration test. In 1954 Jenkins at the urging of Septima Clark attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. In 1956, Jenkins, Clark, and Bernice Robinson with the help of Highlander set up one of the citizenship schools on Johns Island. Throughout the 1960s Jenkins continued to play a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. He served on the boards of the Charleston chapter of the NAACP and SCLC, and was president of the Citizens Committee of Charleston. In 1966 Jenkins founded the CO Federal Credit Union. Just before his death, Jenkins was appointed to the state advisory committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Billie Sunday Fleming (1923–1992) was born in Manning, South Carolina. After receiving a B.A. from South Carolina State College, Fleming served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Fleming worked to improve race relations in Clarendon County, as president of the Manning branch of the NAACP for thirty-two years and co-founder and president of the Clarendon County Improvement Association. Before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in 1959, Fleming testified to economic and violent retaliation for his participation in the civil rights movement. Following his death, Fleming was recognized by the South Carolina General Assembly for his long-time civil rights work.
2. King expressed similar sentiments in a sermon “Conquering Self-Centeredness” on 11 August 1957 (Papers 4:255).
3. Jenkins’s seven children were Abraham, Marie, Ethel, James, Lorretta, Francena, and Elaine.
4. From July 1961–June 1962, the proposed budget for the citizenship schools was $40,500 of which $31,500 came from a Field Foundation grant (Citizenship Education Program, Financial statement, “Citizenship Education Program in the South, Field Foundation,” 11 December 1961).
5. From January to June 1962, 334 people attended SCLC’s training seminars held in Dorchester Center in Midway, Georgia, and 125 schools were established in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and Texas (SCLC, Citizenship School attendance records, 1962).
6. In March 1948, local citizen Levi Pearson brought a suit requesting that the state provide public transportation for students attending Scott’s Branch High School in Clarendon County. Although the suit was dismissed on legal technicalities, local citizens gave their support to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP to declare school segregation unconstitutional. On 23 June 1951 the U.S. District Court in Charleston ruled in Briggs v. Elliott (98 F. Supp. 529 [E.D.S.C. 1951]) that Clarendon County must improve its black public schools, but that segregated schools by themselves were legal. After the NAACP appealed the decision on the basis that segregated facilities by nature violated the Fourteenth Amendment, Briggs was combined with Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (103 F. Supp. 337 [1952]), Brown v. Board of Education (98 F. Supp. 797 [D. Kan. 1951]), Bolling v. Sharpe (347 U.S. 497 [1954]), and Belton v. Gebhart (87 A. 2d [Del. Ch. 1952] aff’d 91 A. 2d 137 [Del. 1952]).
7. As retaliation for his efforts to desegregate schools in Manning, shots were fired into Fleming’s home in 1955. Fleming’s funeral home suffered economic hardship when his name appeared on a list maintained by the White Citizens Council (WCC) warning blacks not to do business with him. In 1959 Fleming testified before a Senate subcommittee that he founded the Clarendon County Improvement Association to provide economic aid to NAACP members and Briggs plaintiffs blacklisted by the local WCC. According to Fleming’s testimony, WCC pressure led to white farmers refusing to rent out harvesting equipment to NAACP members and wholesalers refusing to sell goods to merchants affiliated with the NAACP (Civil Rights—1959, Part One [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959], pp. 526–544).
Source: New York Amsterdam News, 12 May 1962.