Summer 2004

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Civil Rights Pioneer Unita Blackwell Reveals Tale of Survival and Inspires Students to Enact Change During Visit to College

by Mary E. McCrank

Unita Blackwell still works the night shift.

Nearly a half-century after she altered her personal time clock to accommodate her late-night shift, Blackwell still starts her daily routine around 9 p.m., slowly waking up with coffee and preparing for her turn to guard property.

Her job? To protect her family, her home, herself.

From what? The Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Welcome to Mississippi, pre-civil rights era.

"Sometimes I get to thinking about it," Blackwell said, recalling the days she and her husband would take turns watching over their home and had to be prepared to flee with their baby son, who was born in 1957, at a moment’s notice in case the KKK showed up to burn down their home or fire a round of bullets into it – intending to kill everyone inside.

Living in a "shotgun house" – which she described as a house with a "front room, living room and something hanging in the back" – it was hard to hide, she said. The black community relied on self-defense and occasional warnings from whites opposed to violence.

"I could’ve been dead a long time ago," she said. "I’ve been to death row."

Blackwell spoke to students in a class with Associate Professor of History Emilye J. Crosby. Crosby worked with Jackie Chessen, a sociology major entering her senior year this fall, to bring Blackwell and two other civil rights activists to the College for a weekend in April.

Blackwell was joined by fellow Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members Chuck McDew and Bob Zellner for "Working for Social Justice: SNCC Activists Then and Now." (See sidebar for their accomplishments.)

The weekend-long programs were made possible with funding from the Vice President’s Grant for Creating Community through Diversity, Contemporary Forum, the sociology club, the dean’s office, the Africana and women’s studies programs, and the history, sociology, philosophy and psychology departments.

"These are all really important people in our history," Crosby said. "I think it’s very important to be able to engage in dialogue with people who have been immersed in a movement."

Blackwell, still a resident of her native Mississippi, spoke openly with the students in an intimate lounge in Welles Hall. Now 71, Blackwell became a field worker for SNCC in 1964 when she was about the age of her student audience.

"We had an interesting time," Blackwell said, recalling "the pain of it all" so she could educate the younger generation, often not aware of the immense struggle for equal rights.

"For them, it was a way of life that would change, and for us it was a way of life that we needed changed," said Blackwell, who was raised on a plantation and had to cross the state line to attend school in West Helena, Ark.

"I look at my life and say it was terrible – the things that happened – but I find out I can survive in life through most anything," she said. "Just don’t panic with stuff. Ride it out."

"Mama would say, ‘Tell God about it. One of these days it’s going to be all right,’" she said. "They kept saying, ‘You can come out.’ I was oppressed, but you can make it."

Blackwell remembers watching silent Western movies starring the famous cowboy Tom Mix. Mix always rode a white horse and edged out a black horse, Blackwell recalled.

"It’s amazing how embedded and institutionalized racism is. In some countries I’ve been in, it’s vice versa. It’s the blacks that control," she said. "We always knew who was supposed to win. It was the white horse. Everything that was white was better off than me, and that’s strange but this is what was embedded."

Close with her grandparents, Blackwell had opportunities she otherwise would not have had. Her grandmother knew how to read and write because the white couple she worked for wanted her to be able to read recipes and ingredients, Blackwell said. So, she taught Blackwell, who, in turn, taught her mother.

"Everything that was put before us was a way out," she said. "I never felt that there wasn’t anything I could do. The impossible was never said to us.

"Family is important. It molds you to either accept yourself or to fight for that acceptance," she said.

Although education was important to her family, Blackwell only completed the eighth grade as a child. In those days, she said, children had to leave school to go work in the fields, picking cotton. (She later received a master’s degree in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.)

In 1964, Blackwell became a field worker for SNCC, joining efforts to register black voters in Mississippi.

Blackwell was jailed in Jackson, Miss., for marching. She remembers spending 14 days in a coliseum, 11 of them in the bathroom, while law-enforcement officers beat people with sticks. Children had to be sent home for safety, but Blackwell and others stayed on in their quest for equal rights.

"We were still marching for the right to register to vote," she said. "We had to demonstrate that we didn’t have housing, food and jobs, and we were discriminated against because you couldn’t register to vote," she said.

"Freedom to me, people have paid a price. Just for the right to register to vote. So, to vote for me is the most important thing to me in terms of people and government that we have in the world," she said.

Also in 1964, Blackwell served as a delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., with the mission to unseat the segregationist Democratic Party of Mississippi delegation. The point of he challenge was to expose the fact that black citizens were excluded from the political process in Mississippi and to bypass the segregationist state apparatus and appeal directly to the national Democratic Party. After the murder of three young MFDP workers—where were teaching black people how to read and write so they could pass the test to register to vote—the organization worked harder than ever to prove they should have the seats. Being offered a compromise of two non-voting seats next to the Mississippi delegates – a compromise Martin Luther King Jr. urged them to accept – the MFDP refused the Democratic Party’s offer. They left the convention defeated but proud.

"We will not take the compromise," Blackwell remembered SNCC members telling the party. "I can feel it now. It was a sense of freedom, a sense of belonging to yourself."

"It changed the history of the way people do politics in this country," she said.

Blackwell was quoted in the 1987 Public Broadcasting Series Eyes on the Prize about the issue being a moral one, not political. "Praise God today, we did not take that compromise. And there was a group of people that stood up in this country. And stood up to the payoffs and buyoffs and so forth." (p. 203, Voices of Freedom, ed. by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, et al.)

Blackwell went on to lead a life filled with accomplishments.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Blackwell went on to work for the National Council of Negro Women as a community development specialist, and she has risen as a prominent speaker on rural housing and development.

In 1976, she became the first black woman to be elected mayor of a Mississippi town—the Issaquena County community of Mayersville, which she helped incorporate. Also that year, she founded and became president of the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association. In 1979, she participated in President Jimmy Carter’s Energy Summit at Camp David. And in 1992, Blackwell received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Blackwell told the students that people who are prejudiced have internal hang-ups and that it’s up to the young people to continue to change the world for the better.

"You all have much more freedom that we had. So you can get up and do what’s right. They didn’t know what freedom meant. Freedom is to come in the face of fear."

"Our nation and the shape it’s in, good and bad, it’s because young people like yourselves dared to walk," she told the students. "They knew something was wrong with America."

Alex Waldauer of Syracuse, who will enter his senior year this fall, said he learned a lot listening to Blackwell.

"Sometimes I feel like I’m so crazy because I think so differently," said the physics major and history minor. Hearing Blackwell made him realized other people also feel the way he does: that all people are equal.

"A lot of things she said I connected with personally," he said. "She is just a regular person. They were regular, everyday folk. They’re regular people who made history."

Crosby said today’s students are extremely interested in learning about the civil rights movement and that many are opting to select this topic upon which to conduct advanced research.

"There’s a real strong interest in it…But they also find meaning about it for themselves as they learn to be in the world and how to act," Crosby said.
Jackie Chessen, the student who organized the events, agreed. Learning how these pioneers organized a peaceful social rights movement has motivated her and other students to become leaders, said Chessen, of Great Neck, N.Y.

"Speakers like Miss Blackwell, Mr. Zellner, and Mr. McDew not only provide firsthand accounts of the momentous Black Freedom Struggle but they also provide a realistic model for change," Chessen said. "By this I mean that Blackwell, Zellner and McDew acted because they saw the blatant inequality of society in the South, and also in the North, and they knew both social and political structures needed to be changed.

"In bringing Blackwell, Zellner, and McDew to campus, students are able to hear the true experiences, those accounts that have been overlooked by traditional history books. From the viewpoint of students who today are immersed in many freedom struggles, from the current U.S.-Iraqi war to the cutting of SUNY funding, the successes and the survival of Blackwell, Zellner, and McDew—albeit not without uncompromising struggle—provide a sense of confidence. Confidence that young people not only can have our voices heard, but like the three activists, truly alter the injustice of today’s society."

Unita Blackwell, a pioneer in the civil rights movement, visited Geneseo in April to talk about the movement.

Student Chris Machanoff and Professor Emilye Crosby intently listen to Unita Blackwell April 16.

Students Jared DePass and Sarah Buzanowski listen to Unita Blackwell.

Students listen to Unita Blackwell.

Photos by Ron Pretzer