Jackson, Miss.: the reality of race

Tom Brokaw • Profile

They were the images that shocked America—shocked the world.  People were left behind, stranded not just by a killer storm and a botched evacuation.  They were stranded by poverty, neglect and failure from above and below.

It’s been almost a year now since those images from Hurricane Katrina so affected us, but in black neighborhoods across the country, north and south, east and west, not just in New Orleans, the same desperate conditions are a daily reality.

We spent eight months in one American neighborhood posing the question to the people who live there and to the people who left.

We found a complex history, despair about the future, but also profoundly moving stories of hope and achievement.

Jackson, Mississippi, is 200 miles north of New Orleans:  It was just brushed by Katrina, but Jackson has its own challenges as a result of poverty, drugs, and lingering racism.

In the generation coming of age there, too many teenage girls have babies. Too many fathers are missing from too many homes.

Teenage boys struggle in school and many succumb to the dangers of the street.

Manuel Sturghill: I feel a little hopeless right now.  But I’m not really weak minded.  I’m just gonna try to get on my feet and do something.

And despite everything, many families persevere.

Mable Thomas: I’m trying to succeed in life and I want to make my sister proud of me.

Jackson and Mississippi have changed from the bad old days when the state was the epicenter of racism and fierce, often violent opposition to the idea of desegregation.

In 1962, President Kennedy sent federal troops to Ole Mississippi, the state university, to enforce the admission of James Meredith, a young black student—a move adamantly opposed by Governor Ross Barnett, a leading segregationist.

Barnett’s daughter, Ouida Atkins, is symbolic of the changes in her native state.

Tom Brokaw, NBC News: Do you think Mississippi has put race and its past behind it or are they still working its way through it?

Ouida Atkins: I think it’s still workin’ its way through it. 

Jackson now has a large black middle class and a growing black professional class.

There is a controversial, pistol-packing mayor, a black man named Frank Melton.

Frank Melton, Jackson, Miss. mayor: If you wanna talk about the African American community, I think you just have to be honest.  We’re in trouble.

And the local newspaper—once the racist voice of the white establishment, has a black editor—a sharecropper’s son, named Ronnie Agnew.

Ronnie Agnew: I’m a strong proponent of the lack of excuses because I guess I’m a product of the lack of excuse.

But Jackson still has thousands of black citizens who are falling farther and farther behind. 

In Jackson’s best known black neighborhood, the Georgetown district, during the years of enforced segregation, the hopes and dreams of this community were invested in a building—Lanier High School.  And during those years, it had a highly-motivated all black faculty. A student body that knew the best way to get out of Georgetown was through education - students who went on to become doctors and lawyers and civic leaders. But then something happened to Lanier: They passed the civil rights bill. 

That was supposed to bring integration to America.

Charlene Priester: This city didn’t just open their arms and say, “Okay, we’re ready to integrate.”  You know, they were drug kicking and screaming into this. 

Charlene Priester attended Lanier in the segregated ‘60s, when the school was the scene of civil rights protests.  Jackson schools were finally integrated, after years of court battles, in 1969.

Priester: So, how do we integrate?  We’re not going to send over any white children into this predominantly black school.  So, we’re going to send some white faculty there.

Many of those white teachers were young and inexperienced at the time ... such as Charles Norton.

Charles Norton: It was tough. And it was a sort of a novelty for my students, I think, to see a white guy.  They would all touch my hair and stuff like that.

Lanier’s best black teachers were transferred to all white schools, but very few white students were transferring to Lanier.  Instead, they enrolled in private academies—or moved out of the school district.  There were unexpected and unwelcome consequences as a result of integration.

Priester: A lot of the economic base was leaving, our tax dollars was leaving.  So by the time people that looked like us took over the administration of these public schools they’re administrating a bankrupt system. 

Today, the city of Jackson is 70 percent black, with a population that’s actually shrinking.  There are more people living in poverty than there were 25 years ago.  Just across the county line, in the suburbs, it is anywhere USA, with big box stores, malls, and movie theaters.  But not so in the majority black city of Jackson.

Agnew: Race has everything to do with the personal decisions about where to live, where to shop, everything.

Vince Gordon is a youth minister who graduated from Lanier high.

Vince Gordon: This is the capital city and we have no movie theatre.  How many capital cities have you visited without a movie theatre?

Brokaw: Because it’s now a predominantly black city?

Gordon: Right.

There are many well-tended homes in the Georgetown neighborhood, but there are also signs of decay everywhere—like an abandoned apartment complex next door to Lanier that is the very image of urban blight.

Priester: It’s a little sad because in the past, all this was very vibrant.

Charlene Priester is a Jackson success story.  She grew up poor in this neighborhood, where her family ran a small grocery store.  She went to law school at the University of Texas. Charlene has lived in two worlds.

Priester: When integration came, the money didn’t come, but the door opened and allowed people to move. And so unfortunately you leave behind the people who didn’t have the ability.  And just like Katrina, when they said evacuate, you know folks couldn’t leave.

Brokaw: So quite simply, integration without economic opportunity was not enough.

Priester: You’re right.  That’s it.

Charlene raised her kids in an affluent neighborhood on the north side of Jackson, once all white, now almost all black.  Her sons, Melvin and Jonathan, went to Jackson public schools but in a much better part of town than the one their mom grew up in.

Agnew: Jackson has experienced what I would characterize as economic flight. 

The newspaperman, Ronnie Agnew, says the movement of successful blacks out of the inner city has deprived whole communities of role models.

Agnew: There is a feeling here, quite honestly, of people saying, “That is not my problem. I am going to move my family to the suburbs, and I am going to live happily ever after.”  And I’ll be honest with you.  It’s a little bit hypocritical for me because I’ve done the same.

Agnew makes sure that his paper consistently reports on the difficult issues Jackson faces. Others take an even more personal approach.

Charlene Priester still volunteers at her alma mater, Lanier High School.

Vince Gordon, the youth minister, bought a house right across the street from Lanier and sends his daughter to school there—she’s a straight A student.

And Charles Norton, the one time novice teacher who helped integrate Lanier, stayed there and has taught for 36 years.  But he says he’s less optimistic now than he was when he started.

Brokaw: Once you get outside the confines of this neighborhood, do you think people of Mississippi, black and white, care?

Norton: I don’t.  I don’t think they care. I think for the most part, we’ve got some of the same feelings that we had in the ‘50s and ‘60s. 

Brokaw: But desegregation was supposed to change all that?  The civil rights bill was supposed to change all that?

Norton: It changes what you see. It doesn’t change what people think.  It doesn’t change people’s hearts. 

Today, Lanier high school’s student body is 100 percent black, just like it was in the segregation days.  Back then the school was a beacon of hope, but is has felt the effects of the changes all around it. 

There are still dedicated teachers and high achieving students.  But Lanier’s student test scores put it in the bottom 10-percent of schools in Mississippi... And Mississippi is routinely ranked in the bottom 10-percent nationally.

How can it be that, 50 years after the dawn of the civil rights movement, this school, and this neighborhood, still are all black, still struggling... and in some ways worse off than before? 

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