Ooh, Superman, where are you now
When everything's gone wrong somehow?
The men of steel, the men of power
Are losing control by the hour
This is the time, this is the place
So we look for the future
But there's not much love to go round
Tell me why this is a land of confusion
The Medgar Ever's Institute sponsored a lecture at Millsaps College featuring Rev. Ed King, Dr. T.W. Lewis, and Jeanne Middleton Hairston yesterday. The Evers Institute rents space in the John Stone House at Millsaps. They easily could have found space at Jackson State or Tougaloo, but they chose Millsaps, which is a point that isn't lost on me.
Rev. King and Dr. Lewis are my parent's age. They have children my age. That point became important when Dr. Lewis was delivering his remarks, and he talked about a time when there was a racially motivated murder in his town. He was trying to put his children to bed, knowing there were unknown men making threatening noises outside of his house, and the police chief refused to send a squad car to watch over the house.
I grew up with Tom and Catherine. Even though this was a while ago, the idea that some unnamed peckerwood was threatening them, I found upsetting. I don't use that word very often, but I figure it fits here.
My whole life, I've heard stories about what Ed and T.W. went through. Among Methodist ministers, they are considered heroes of a golden age, and you'll often see younger ministers watching out for them. I'd like to think I have the courage to lead the kind of life they did. I have a pretty big mouth; I probably would have got shot if I had tried.
I will forever know Jeanne Middleton Hairston as Jeanne Middleton because that's the name I knew her by when she was the driving force behind the Education Department at Millsaps during a time when that was one of our most active departments. Half the girls I knew took classes under her, and my former wife was one of her graduates.
Jeanne is an alumnus of Millsaps. She was one of the very first black students at Millsaps. As a student, she helped Dr. Sallis prepare the textbook Mississippi Conflict and Change, which I wrote about earlier. That book is out of print; by the way, I don't know what would be involved in making it available in Kindle format, but I'd love for that to happen.
Besides Dr. Sallis, her remarks included JQ Addams and Robert Bergmark, who were still teaching at Millsaps when I was there and made a remarkable impression.
Because my father served in the Korean Conflict rather than in WWII, I consider myself a member of Generation X, although, by most accounting by years, I came along at the very end of the baby boom. Jeanne was born to one end of the Baby Boom Generation, and I was born to the other. That was true of most of my teachers. Nearly all of them were less than twenty years older than me. David Culpepper is only like five or six years older than I.
When I look at people on Jeanne's end of my generation, I see people like her, Andy Mullins, Dick Molpus, and Ray Mabus. On the national scale, I see people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. While people like TW Lewis and Ed King broke the Rubicon in Mississippi culture, it was people in Jeanne's generation, their students, who cleared the way giving us passage to the other side.
It's impossible to measure how much her part of my generation did for the people of Mississippi. There's not much that means more to me than the people of Mississippi. They did great work that made a huge difference. My part of my generation seems to have forgotten that.
I mentioned Speaker Gunn earlier. Dick Wilson gave one of the first fundraising events for his campaign. For most of Phillip Gunn's career, I've agreed with about fifty percent of the legislation he supported or proposed. He's conservative, and I'm moderate, so that's about right. In the last ten years or so, that ratio has shifted remarkably. I haven't gotten more liberal; he and his entire party have gotten considerably more conservative. I see this a lot. Many of the more radical names you hear in the Republican Party are in my generation and into Generation X. I know the Regan Revolution came along in the early eighties. Still, it's almost like my part of my generation has decided to work against everything Jeanne's part of my generation accomplished.
I asked Jeanne yesterday if it was too late. Is this pattern cast in stone now? I read a story the other day where over fifty percent of Mississippi schools still violate the federal desegregation decree. We have a growing healthcare crisis. Most of my generation chose to move out of Jackson rather than deal with a black government.
When he was alive, Medgar Evers believed that poverty was the greatest measure of the cultural failure of Mississippi. I'd like to think we've made progress on that, but right now, we're backsliding, and it's almost entirely on the shoulders of people on my end of my generation.
I know that most of my friends like to focus on those of us who aren't, but most of Mississippi is still very, very poor. I'm guilty of forgetting that too. Lately, our ship of state is listing heavily to that side. We're taking on water, and it's like most of the guys my age just can't see it or don't want to.
I asked Jeanne if it was too late if guys my age had broken the chain of progress. She said, "It's never too late." She's a lot smarter than me. I hope she's right. Sometimes I feel like I can't say I know she's right. I don't intend to give up. Sometimes it gets really lonely hiking out on this side of the ship, trying to balance the weight dragging us down on the other side. There are a few of us doing it, though. Let's see what happens.
