Beautiful Agitators

Bringing civil rights heritage to life in the Mississippi Delta.

by

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Built in 1903, the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, is a thing of beauty. Freshly renovated in recent years, it’s a prime example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, marked by “the broad low arch over the main entrance, round arches on the upper windows, and the pyramidal-roofed towers,” as its listing on the National Register of Historic Places reads. The clock tower, polished wood interiors, and austere legal chambers would be gems in any architectural tour of the South. Indeed, it’s a regular destination for visitors drawn to the region in search of the “Most Southern Place on Earth.”

That’s the title for an ongoing series of conferences run by The Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the annual “Most Southern Place on Earth” conferences are workshops for schoolteachers, helping them develop creative ways to teach the humanities. Dr. Rolando Herts, director of The Delta Center, says visits to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse “galvanize these educators.” But these conference-goers, who flock to the Delta from across the nation, aren’t just curious about architecture. They come by the busload to see where, in 1955, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were tried for the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

That trial itself didn’t turn the Delta’s racial order upside down, of course. The all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant of the young African American’s murder in less than an hour. But the unprecedented media attention and the outrage over the verdict helped kickstart the modern Civil Rights Movement. And, as Herts sees it, the educators’ palpable sense of seeing — and feeling — where history reached a tipping point has been stirring.

Visiting Sumner, he says, “got them to see how powerful Emmett Till’s story is, in terms of being the spark that lit the fuse of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The Emmett Till case really was a lightning rod for so many people. Not just nationally but in the Mississippi Delta. And the NEH workshop, which started in 2009 or ’10, before I was here, spent a good deal of time discussing that. So you’re taking people to the places where history happened and then having conversations about it. It’s really immersing them.”

Such immersion represents a different sort of travel, a reexamination of the purpose of tourism: More than simply to take a pleasant break, one travels to seek new perspectives, to become a more conscious citizen. The term “civil rights tourism” has caught on as a convenient shorthand for this way of seeing the world, especially in the Mississippi Delta, where so much of the struggle for civil rights has played out.

With Herts as its executive director, the MDNHA has spearheaded several projects that bring history to life for travelers and local residents alike, and that’s recently earned it national recognition.

As Herts notes, this mix of travel and history is not confined to a few conference-goers. “We’re seeing an uptick in interest in civil rights heritage tourism, based on what happened in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the various police brutality situations,” he says. “We’ve always been responsive to that, but seeing that uptick makes it even more of a priority.”

None have prioritized it more than The Delta Center for Culture and Learning. Established at Delta State in 2000 by Dr. Luther Brown, it has been a driving force in reimagining Mississippi tourism ever since, partly through collaboration with other like-minded entities. Beyond its work with the NEH, The Delta Center is home to the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MDNHA), linking it in common cause with 54 other National Heritage Areas throughout the country.

With Herts as its executive director, the MDNHA has spearheaded several projects that bring history to life for travelers and local residents alike, and that’s recently earned it national recognition. Last July, the National Park Service (NPS) named the MDNHA to its African American Civil Rights Network, “a unique preservation program that brings together both tangible and intangible resources to tell a more complete narrative of the Civil Rights Movement in America,” according to NPS Deputy Director Shawn Benge.

That’s partly due to MDNHA’s Civil Rights Heritage Archive, launched recently in collaboration with the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Park Campaign. Such efforts reveal the Center’s commitment to telling the larger stories of the Delta’s culture and heritage, beyond a few discrete markers or plaques. And, perhaps surprisingly to some, that’s very much in line with one of the most progressive, imaginative forces in historical tourism today, the National Park Service.

“It kind of comes down to a conversation that the National Park Service is spearheading,” says Herts. “Who is American? Who is considered American now and who has been considered American in the past? Who has had the right to speak and present themselves as American? The Delta is a microcosm of that conversation. Who is a true Mississippi Deltan? Who is the voice of the authentic Mississippi Delta community? How do we define community?”

National Heritage Areas are independent, but operate via partnerships between the National Park Service, states, and local communities, through which the NPS supports local and state efforts to preserve natural resources and promote tourism. Information on all National Heritage Areas — including the MDNHA, the Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area, and the Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area — is listed on the NPS website, and all three offer NPS passport stamps for travelers. All told, these areas are forging a new and lively vision of what tourism can be. And the Mississippi Delta is at the heart of that movement.

“This April, during National Park Week, we’re planning to host the Alliance of National Heritage Areas Spring Meeting, which will bring most if not all of the heritage areas from all over the country here for a week,” says Herts. “We’re engaging multiple audiences, certainly. It’s not just the students at Delta State or at other universities and colleges here in the Delta. There are various constituencies. It’s multi-layered. It’s rich.”

Indeed, between the MDNHA and other projects initiated by The Delta Center, broad swaths of Mississippi history and culture are being recognized, to the benefit of visitors and locals alike. Naturally, the blues figure heavily in local history (see “Return to the Roots,” in our February 2021 issue), and the Center both administers the International Delta Blues Project and hosts a permanent exhibit honoring regional musicians.

“The exhibit is called ‘A Cast of Blues,’” says Herts. “It is not owned by The Delta Center, but it was given to Delta State by artist Sharon McConnell and placed by The Delta Center because of the blues heritage development work that we do. And it was by virtue of my predecessor, Dr. Luther Brown, that the exhibit came here. It features casts of the faces of blues men and women who have some connection to the Delta, either through the music or they were born here or they lived here. They’re life casts of their faces, and these are the originals; there are copies of them at Chess Records in Chicago. And in our ‘Spirit of the Blues’ project, a number of African-American musicians and speakers got a chance to express themselves. That is something that has not really been done in that fashion, with regard to the blues tourism realm and its creation of blues spaces. The traditional approach has been more extractive.”

The musical heritage of the Delta, in turn, draws visitors into related topics. “There are a number of blues tourists that come and then discover other histories here,” says Herts. “They say, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know about this other aspect. I came here for the blues and now I’m getting something else.’ So they also learn about the Delta Chinese, the Delta Lebanese, the Delta Italians — all these immigrant groups. The food, the pottery, the river, agriculture, expressions of faith. Various things that have shaped life, history, and present-day conditions in the Delta.”

Nonetheless, the civil rights heritage work done by MDNHA and The Delta Center is a special point of pride, so much so that Herts recently published an article in the Mississippi Free Press titled “‘Get on Board, Little Children’: Civil Rights Heritage Is Mississippi’s Next Tourism Movement.” The examples of their work in this area are too numerous to list fully. In some cases, The Delta Center has worked with the Mississippi Freedom Trail, placing a series of informational plaques throughout the state that note significant civil rights sites. Similar collaborations have also impacted more local projects.

“When I was coming up in school,” Herts concludes, “you had to read certain things because the teacher told you so. Now that’s just not good enough. The question is, ‘How does this apply to my life now? How can I use this? Because if I can’t use it, I’m not going to.’”

“We funded the civil rights walk in Greenwood several years ago,” Herts notes, by way of example. “And Clarksdale has recently done an African-American heritage guide, focused on civil rights. We didn’t fund that project, but we have supported some things that are in there. Here at Delta State, last October, there was a screening of a civil rights documentary, Voices From the Sit-In, based on oral histories from Delta State graduates who participated in the sit-ins in 1969 here. It’s a little-known story. The film’s premiere event was extremely well attended here at the Bologna Performing Arts Center.”

Such events are not limited to well-traveled burgs like Greenwood, Clarksdale, or Cleveland. Take the little town of Shaw, just down Highway 61 from Delta State, with less than 2,000 people. In 1970, Andrew and Mary Lou Hawkins, along with 20 other Black residents, brought a class-action suit against the town’s municipal government for skewing services like sewage lines and paved roads to white-only neighborhoods, winning the case on appeal the next year. Thirty-eight years later, the Delta Center-sponsored Shaw Civil Rights Project commemorated the activism with a play, Wade Through the Waters, staged at the local elementary school. In 2020, the town received the Preserver of Mississippi Culture award from the Mississippi Humanities Council for their efforts.

Closer to home, The Delta Center organized a reading of the play Beautiful Agitators, about Clarksdale beauty shop owner and civil rights activist Vera Mae Pigee, at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, then brought in visiting NEH educators to attend along with community members.

“So the event blended those groups together,” says Herts. “You had teachers from all over the country coming in and interacting with locals. And we had a conversation after the reading about the current state of voting rights in the Delta and nationwide. It was a real-time conversation, creating a safe space for our residents and for our teachers, to ask questions, express their frustrations with the current state of things, drawing the connections between what they’re experiencing now and what happened in the past. And seeing if progress has been made. So creating spaces for those kinds of conversation to happen: That is what a university is about, and certainly what a National Heritage Area is about.”

Indeed, for Herts, connecting events of the past with current issues and struggles is very much the point of such heritage tourism. His great hope is that it will empower local communities. And since he left his native Arkansas for higher education, that’s been his passion. After writing his doctoral dissertation in part about the MDNHA, he returned to the Delta with a Ph.D. in planning and public policy, determined to put his knowledge to work closer to home, building regional development through greater community engagement.

But Herts’ focus on bringing it all back home is more than geographical. The goal of such tourism, in his eyes, is relating past struggles with current-day dilemmas. Celebrating local unsung heroes is one way to do that.

“One of my first projects when I came in was the Delta Jewels Oral Partnership. The Delta Jewels are church mothers from the Mississippi Delta featured in Alysia Burton Steele’s book, Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom [Center Street Books]. She interviewed and photographed over 50 church mothers here in the Mississippi Delta. These women lived through sharecropping, the Civil Rights Movement, the Jim Crow era, all of that stuff. And they’ve survived to tell about it. They’ve had children, educated their children, and gone on to get their own education in some cases. These are very inspiring stories. Myrlie Evers, Medgar Evers’ widow, is one of the church mothers.”

What followed was a series of gatherings across the state, celebrating these Delta Jewels. During Women’s History Month in 2016, The Delta Center went so far as to take one of the Jewels, 92-year-old Annyce P. Campbell of Mound Bayou, to Washington, D.C., with two of her daughters, for a tour of the White House and a ceremony at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum.

Most importantly, perhaps, was the event staged in Mound Bayou itself that included 30 of the Delta Jewels, very much in their element at a local church, celebrated by over 300 people. “It was a very powerful event,” says Herts, “and we ended up winning a National Parks Service Centennial Award for this, for engaging the next generation of parkgoers: young people, the elderly, people from all races and backgrounds. So that was another seed that was planted, regarding civil rights heritage development.

“And now, here we are in 2022, in the aftermath of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and all that. We’re seeing now that people don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. People want to come to places like the Delta as a touchstone, making the connections between the past and the present. We have to be very thoughtful about the civil rights heritage work that we’re doing, ensuring that it’s not only accurate, but speaks to this younger generation that’s coming up. They’re really asking the ‘So what?’ questions.

“When I was coming up in school,” he concludes, “you had to read certain things because the teacher told you so. Now that’s just not good enough. The question is, ‘How does this apply to my life now? How can I use this? Because if I can’t use it, I’m not going to.’”