The White Peril: A Family Memoir by Omo Moses

Author:Omo Moses [Moses, Omo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, African American & Black, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, Civil Rights
ISBN: 9780807004838
Google: 5nEDEQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2025-01-21T23:31:42.473089+00:00

CHAPTER 1

American Heroes, Continued

We were twelve and ten and eight and six when we traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, for the first time. Mama had baked the bread, made the sandwiches—peanut butter and honey, cheese with a slice of tomato and lettuce—and wrapped them in aluminum foil. We had gone to the department store. Purchased clip-on bow ties. Mama still cut our hair with scissors. Our bodies were streamlined, obsidian, chlorine-licked. We traveled by train. The conductors walkie-talkied each other and eventually found seats for the six of us to sit together. The journey lasted two days. We glided west to Chicago and then down through the cornfields of Illinois into Memphis, and then through the Mississippi Delta into Greenwood, the “cotton capital of the world.” Mama and Baba had borrowed the money for the trip from our local “aunts” and “uncles.” The train trip was a protracted lurch beyond the concrete and buildings that had become our vantage point into the guts of America. Through the windows, the smokestacks and power lines and telephone lines and freight trains and trucks became redundant, pockmarking and zig-zagging the landscape, making visible the harvesting and distribution of the country’s natural resources (in most instances without regard to ecological impact) that our cities required to exist.

We took turns at the window. At night the small towns, patches of civilization, appeared like jars of fireflies. Between them was relatively untampered land, hints of a natural order, the unbound wilderness that still dominated the planet.

We were traveling to Mississippi because Amzie Moore had died. When Fannie Lou Hamer had died five years earlier, in 1977, we had just returned from Tanzania and Baba had been unable to get out of Massachusetts. He’d put us on the phone with Amzie then. We were seven, five, and three and Malaika just out of Mama’s belly. Baba had invited Amzie to come up to see us. Amzie didn’t have the money to get out of Mississippi. “It was a hard job to stay alive,” Amzie said, describing the reality that pursued him to the grave. Amzie’s voice was one of a collection of voices that reverberated from the cotton fields and courthouses of Mississippi, the perilous trenches of American democracy, into our consciousness.

“One man, one vote,” they said.

“One woman, one vote,” they said.

“I am a citizen,” they said.

“I am a man,” they said.

“Power to the people,” they said.

“Freedom now,” they said.

When Baba had left Mississippi in 1967, he hadn’t thought it would take fifteen years to come back, or that SNCC would no longer exist. At SNCC’s height there were only thirty field secretaries on its staff: young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six who had “turned away from school, job, family, all the tokens of success in modern America, to take up new lives . . . in the hinterland of the Deep South.” “New abolitionists” is how Howard Zinn imagined them.

“We’re not heroes,” Baba had said of SNCC in 1965. “We’re trying very hard just to be people and that is very hard.

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