Mississippi state trooper Jacob Sheriff couldn't help but note the irony of our journey Wednesday. For years, the state had been Ground Zero for the country's arch-segregationists while law officers did virtually nothing to protect African Americans. But today, we were privileged enough to have a police escort as our bus crossed the state line.
Indeed, times have changed and much progress has occurred in recent decades, said Sheriff, a 46-year-old African American born and raised in Yazoo City. Yet, while "a lot of people are going to approve" of the mission of the Freedom Express, he said, "a lot of them won't approve in some of the areas where there's still some discrimination."
"There are definitely some hard-core die-hards in this state," Sheriff said to several of us riding with him in his dark gray car.
That's not a surprise when you consider that among other things, Mississippi was the site of:
* Violent backlash in response to the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which led to school desegregation. White gangs lynched and fatally beat blacks.
* National scrutiny in 1955 when 14-year-old Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago, was brutally beaten and killed, his body dumped into a river. The teen had been visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, when he allegedly "wolf-whistled" at a white woman at a country store. Back in Chicago, Till's mother demanded an open-casket funeral so that all of America could see what happened to her son. Photos of his corpse were published in many black newspapers. Many consider Till's murder as a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
* More outrage in 1963 when NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, 37, was assassinated when he arrived at his home in Jackson. White supremacist Byron De La Beckwith went on trial twice, but the proceedings resulted in hung juries both times. In 1994, Evers's killer was finally convicted.
History is by no means lost upon Sheriff and other Mississippians who welcomed us here today. The troopers escorted us from the Alabama border, along Interstate 20 through Meridian, and then to the capital of Jackson. Others riding with us included State Rep. Erik R. Fleming, State Rep. Mary H. Coleman, State Commissioner of Insurance George Dale, and AARP State President Mary Jefferson Burciaga, who shared their memories of life during the Civil Rights Movement.
Sheriff summed it up this way: "We need to look back to those days in order to move forward."
