Strayhorn by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agate Publishing

The evening of Friday, June 7, more than 2,500 people packed “Negro” Masonic Temple on Lynch Street in Jackson. Lena sang a medley of freedom songs arranged by Billy and echoed the words he wrote for her. She said, “The battle . . . being fought here in Jackson, as elsewhere in the South, is our nation’s primary crisis. Let it be understood that the courage and grim determination of the Negro people in these cities of the South have challenged the moral integrity of the entire nation.”28

From the front row, Byron De La Beckwith and two of his cronies blew cigarette smoke at Lena and Billy while they performed.29 When asked to extinguish their smokes, the three stormed away. Beckwith shot and killed Medgar Evers four days later just after midnight, Wednesday, June 12.

Evers’s death led the national news that morning; coincidentally, Horne was scheduled to appear on The Today Show. It was not until arriving at the studio, sitting in the holding room watching a girl showing self-defense exercises on the monitor, that she heard of Evers’s killing.

I don’t really remember what I said on that show, except that the girl who had been demonstrating judo reminded me of a class I had attended in Jackson in which they had been teaching little nine- to twelve-year-olds self protection, how to protect their bodies, how to cover their heads if they were knocked down and someone started to kick them.

Medgar’s death had so filled me with horror that all I could see were miles and miles of little Negro children lying in the knee-chest position, protecting themselves from white people. I talked about that. And I talked about the terrible loneliness of the Negro child when his mother first explains to him what it is to be a “Nigger” and he knows that he is, from that day forward, forever set apart.30

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