Rhonda Dunaway
Enterprise-Journal
Civil rights activists who were not welcomed in McComb in 1961, visited southwest Mississippi this week and on Monday spoke to McComb school students.
Freedom Riders, who worked in the segregated South in the 1960s, talked to students about the first test of the Interstate Commerce Commission’s anti-segregation ruling of Sept. 22, 1961, at McComb’s bus terminal.
McComb Mayor Whitney Rawlings and city school officials welcomed the visitors to a luncheon on Monday, between assemblies for students.
Eric Etheridge, author of “Breech of Peace,” a historical account of the Freedom Riders, has organized a tour and a reunion of sorts with Freedom Ride veterans.
Etheridge said the tour is being made possible through funding from the Mississippi Fiftieth Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
On Monday, they made presentations at Denman Junior High and McComb High School. This week they also are visiting Hattiesburg High School and Jackson area high schools, Murrah, Lanier and Northwest Rankin.
Group members are sharing their stories of courage and perseverance with students through videos, pictures and documents of their struggles, Etheridge said.
“We start the program with an assembly and each of the riders talks a little bit about their experiences,” he said.
Dodie Smith-Simmons of New Orleans, a member of New Orleans CORE — Congress of Racial Equality — in the 1960s, showed archival videos to students. Then students were put into smaller discussion groups.
Etheridge said he was in McComb for the 50th Anniversary of the Burglund High School Walkout in October, which was put on by the Young People’s Project, a civic-minded group of McComb High School students, and was inspired by the dynamics he found between the veterans of the civil rights movement and the youth.
“We really liked the energy that we found between the students and the members of the Burglund High reunion. We wanted to try to incorporate that same dynamic. So, we decided we would bring the Freedom Riders to the students,” Etheridge said.
He said he was impressed with how much of their own history McComb students knew.
“The kids were very enthusiastic. It was apparent that they had been learning about the history in McComb,” he said.
Etheridge hopes this tour with living members of civil rights history will inspire other students to learn about the era of racial unrest and struggle for equal rights in their own town. McComb School District is one of the few districts in the state that has a rigorous civil rights history curriculum, Etheridge noted.
McComb School District, the City of McComb, the Black History Gallery, the Young People’s Project of McComb, McComb NAACP Youth Council and McComb Public Library received the 2012 Governor’s Award to honor Mississippi’s top school-community partnerships.
“The history and the movement in Mississippi is a great story, and it would be great for the state to learn about these stories. And we think a great way to get these stories out there is to bring these riders out and share them,” Etheridge said. “We think it is a very effective way to teach people of Missisippi about their history.”
McComb was the first stop and for Dodie Smith-Simmons, one of the five riders from New Orleans CORE, it was a spiritual journey of sorts.
“Because of what happened to me in McComb I felt a spiritual responsibility to come here. When I came in 1961 as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality I was not welcomed. But, I think McComb is a better city today than it was back then. Back then, you wouldn’t have had a group like this meeting here.”
Smith-Simmons said she was a CORE trainer. Members of the group had tough guidelines of nonviolence to follow, and preparing members for what might happen was the trainer’s job.
“We dressed like we were going to church when we went on these campaigns... Ha! I outran a truck in high heels,” she recalled.
“I was a trainer. We had to train everyone who wanted to go on the rides to react in a nonviolent way, always. We had to do everything to them that might be done — hit them, curse them, belittle them. And if they couldn’t bear us doing that then they couldn’t go on the ride,” she said.
Mayor Rawlings welcomed the group to McComb.
“The 1960s was a time for change in America and young people were standing up for that change,” Rawlings said. “You rode buses, you sat in and some of you lost your lives.
“In 1961, you were not welcomed here, but on behalf of the city of McComb, welcome,” the mayor said.
