Seeing Themselves: Education and Black Women Activism During the Mississippi Movement

Dr. Christina J. Thomas is the 2023-2025 Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Scholar at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. Her current research projects explore Black women’s intellectual history, biography, and early childhood education.

I met Alice Walker in November 2023 at the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival hosted by the Margaret Walker Center in Jackson, Mississippi. Yet I first met Walker through her books as a teenager as I read The Color Purple and The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Until graduate school, this was the Walker I knew, the Black feminist author and poet. However, as a historian, I came to research a different aspect of the writer’s life through her brief employment with Friends of Children of Mississippi. She worked as a field consultant and Black history consultant in this antipoverty early childhood program.

My manuscript-in-progress, “Worth More Than Just Money:” Friends of Children of Mississippi and the Struggle for Early Childhood Education, 1966-1970,” examines the early formative years of this grassroots organization. It studies the transformative potential of early childhood education as a tool for liberation and empowerment. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), FCM continued an early childhood revolution in the state by empowering Black residents to take ownership of their children’s education.[1] Through their unwavering determination, they harnessed the power of Head Start and championed their right to shape their educational future. Even without adequate funding in its first eighteen months, Friends of Children and its volunteers successfully built a network of centers across six counties in the Magnolia State, serving nearly 2,000 children.

Walker came to work for Friends of Children as a Black history consultant in 1968. Her archival collection at the Stuart A. Rose Library details her short yet critical time with the organization. As a field consultant, Walker quickly realized this job was incompatible with lifestyle and wants. In a letter to FCM director Fred Mangrum, she wrote, “I am interested in writing, doing reviews of books for centers, and exploring what can be done in the field of race awareness among young children – which would take lots of uninterrupted time.”[2] This letter perhaps led to her hiring as a Black history consultant, a job centered on instilling racial pride in Black children and their teachers. Her archive details this position and her commitment to teaching Black history. She wrote, “As a child I was ashamed of my blackness, just as I am ashamed now to have to admit that I was. But I was ashamed because nobody had told me how great and beautiful were my ancestors…How did we learn to hate ourselves and our color so much?”[3]   

Two of the most significant findings in the collection were two handmade textbooks developed by Walker and the autobiographies of FCM teachers. One of the textbooks she compiled was entitled “A Handbook About Africa,” bound by two pieces of purple construction paper. This textbook taught FCM administrators and teachers the continent’s history, beginning with maps and fact sheets that visualized its size, shape, populations, and vast climates. It continued with African and European’ viewpoints on Africa. Such lessons proved crucial to Walker, who found that many Black Mississippians she encountered held a negative perception of Africa. These workshop lessons are what I aim to share in this manuscript, documenting the early history of FCM while also centering the activism of local people.

As a Black history consultant, FCM tasked Walker with hosting two-week-long workshops for its staff. In an article for the Black Scholar, she noted that about 90 women attended one particular workshop, “Black is Black,” where she tasked participants with writing their autobiographies, an assignment inspired by her experience with local activist Mrs. Winson Hudson. Walker spoke of the difficulty in teaching Black history to a people taught to regard their history and themselves with shame. This task would allow them to “see themselves and their parents and grandparents as part of a living, working, creating movement in Time and Place.”[4] Walker preserved these autobiographies in her collection, perhaps knowingly or unknowingly, which allows me to craft the biographies of these women central to FCM’s survival. These women responded to a series of questions Walker proposed, ranging from their ideal partner as a young woman to what their parents told them about Black history. Other prompts included the following:

1. Did your parents ever tell you not to talk to Black people? 
2. Did your parents tell you not to talk to White people?
3. Why do you suppose they told you this?
4. How far in school did your mother go?
5. How far in school did your go?
6. Why did your mother stop school? 
7. Why did you stop? 
8. Why have your children (child) stopped?[5]

Among the autobiographies was Mrs. Hudson’s. Walker called the activist one of the “sleepless ones” in Mississippi, given her organizing in the state amid a climate of deep racial hostility and violence.[6] Maybe Hudson started her autobiography herself or through a nudge from Walker; nevertheless, the two women gathered one day under the tree to read the Mississippian’s life story together. She recalled that the activist longed to write her story for many reasons—not knowing the time she had left and leaving a record of her involvement in the Movement for her community. Walker became Hudson’s first editor, an honor for anyone seeking to publish. She recalled, “We worked out a plan, Mrs. Hudson and I. She would mail newly written pages of her autobiography to me as she wrote them; I would be typist and editor, sending the typed pages back to her to be proofread.”[7] This book ultimately became the first draft of Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, published nearly 35 years later in 2002.

During my visit, I also viewed Hudson’s autobiography and the drafts she crafted over the past 35 years with two other editors, civil rights activist Marilyn Lowen and civil rights activist and author Constance Curry. The Stuart A. Rose Library also serves as the repository for Curry’s archival papers. Borrowing the language of historian Francoise Hamlin, who was taught to me by Marilyn Lowen, Mrs. Hudson’s second editor, this was “Mississippi Magic.” Before meeting Walker last November, I connected with the grandchildren of Hudson through Lowen to craft ways to uplift her legacy and biography. It became another research project—maybe a book, a journal article, or a digital archive. Regardless, each draft, research record, and oral history adds to Hudson’s narrative and the crafting of a Black woman’s autobiography. With these three archives collectively, I can read her original autobiography and renditions from her three editors—Walker, Lowen, and Curry. As I read through my notes and view the countless images, I can now track how her story changed over time, what she added, what she removed, and how her memory changed from one draft to another. Ultimately, the stories these women crafted, Hudson and other FCM teachers, tell their history, a narrative often overlooked in the scholarship of the long Civil Rights Movement. But here, they wrote themselves into history almost sixty years ago, and today, their stories are in the archives of one of the nation’s most prominent Black women writers.

Footnotes:

[1] See also Crystal Sanders, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle, Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2016.

[2] Letter to Alice Walker Leventhal from Mr. Frederick Mangrum, June 19, 1968, Box 2, Folder 8, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[3] Alice Leventhal Walker, “When I Was a Child,” 1968, Alice Walker Papers, Box 92, Folder 3, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[4] Alice Walker, “‘But Yet and Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…’” The Black Scholar vol. 1, no. 3/4 (1970): 20.  

[5] Alice Walker, “For Writers of Autobiographies from the Black is Black Workshop,” 1968, Alice Walker Papers, Box 92, Folder 2, Stuart A. Rose Library. 

[6] Alice Walker, “‘But Yet and Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…’” The Black Scholar vol. 1, no. 3/4 (1970): 18.  

[7] Alice Walker, “‘But Yet and Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…’” The Black Scholar, vol. 1, no. 3/4 (1970): 18.