During the travels for our soul food book, it was very troubling to see the Confederate flag flying over Mississippi almost everywhere we looked. It was especially enlightening to have lunch with and interview and photograph James Meredith in Jackson, Mississippi. Mr. Meredith was the first African American to enter the University of Mississippi (in 1962). He described fighting a war for his entire life and only winning one battle. Photographing him outside the restaurant was one of the highlights of my life.
The issue was brought to the attention of America again in Charleston, S.C. on June 17, 2015, when a young man murdered 9 churchgoers trying to start a race war. Among the many outcomes of this event was the removal of the Confederate flag from the capitol building in South Carolina.
This week there is an amazing article in the ESPN Magazine written by Keise Laymon, an African American man from Mississippi who went down to his home state to write about race relations and football on a grant from a foundation set up by the author John Grisham, another Mississippi resident and an outspoken civil rights activist. The subtitle of the article is:
“Seven weeks in Mississippi in search of the allure of football, the stains of the Confederacy and the meaning of honorable change.”
In the article he talks about seeing confederate flags on pickup trucks and Prius’s. He talks to an artist named Skip Coon, a native of Jackson, who says:
“They can change the flag all they want. It’s a false solution. It’s also what black people have always gotten. We ask for equality- we get integration. We ask for freedom- we get reconstruction. They can change the flag and my material reality won’t improve one bit.”
I remember standing in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, at the corner where Rosa Parks waited for a bus, and reading a marker memorializing the building where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the president of the confederacy- and another marker describing a building where slaves were “Stored” before they were sold on the auction block (right across the street from Dr. Martin Luther King’s church).
So, have we gotten anywhere in this world? I really don’t know. We have a black president, who did a pretty good job. We have a woman as the front runner in the Democratic race, and a black man in the Republican race. Maybe change can come, but I am not so sure.
I remember walking through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama in 1989 with my friend Vernon Reid, the lead guitar player for the band Living Color, and he said something that I will never forget:
“When I wake up in the morning, and look in the mirror, I see a black face. When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, you see a white face. That will never change.”