Cranes in the sky lipstick alley11/11/2022 Keahey donated the camera to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. These student activists attempted to integrate the Jackson Municipal Library in 1961 in Jackson, Miss. Images taken with the camera include several group photographs of the Tougaloo Nine student activists shown in the background print. Keahey used his Speed Graphic camera to document life on the campus of Tougaloo College during his time as a student in the 1960s. He had scraped up $3 to put it on layaway the year before. Keahey, a photographer for the yearbook, came armed with the Speed Graphic 2X3 camera he bought for $60. “He knew we were in danger,” Keahey said. John Mangram, the school chaplain, summoned Keahey and a small band of students to the lobby of a girls’ dorm to pray for their safety. The student from Laurel, Mississippi, had less than two months to graduate from Tougaloo, and that day’s lesson couldn’t be taught in a classroom. Keahey fiddled with his grits, eggs, bacon and toast slathered with grape jelly. They were arrested for “breach of the peace” and paraded past the crowd outside shouting at them, cursing them.įlanked by police, Sawyer threw her head back, tilting her chin toward the sky, snubbing her taunters. “This is an unlawful assembly, and you’re ordered to disperse, to leave,” the sheriff commanded. They ordered the students scattered at different tables to go across town to the colored library. Police arrived quickly at the Jackson Municipal Library that morning. “This moment of the Tougaloo Nine shocking the consciousness of Mississippians – Black and white – in 1961 is an important moment,” said Robert Luckett, a history professor at Jackson State University. The daring demonstration forced Mississippians to reckon with racial segregation. “They actually set aside their fear because they understood the implications of being involved in the movement.” “What they did in that particular moment was set a standard for what would happen after and set a precedent for youth activism,” said Daphne Chamberlain, a civil rights expert and history professor at what is now Tougaloo College. Police booked Ethel Sawyer, one of the "Tougaloo Nine" students arrested March 27, 1961, for entering the all-white library in Jackson, Miss. The better-equipped libraries, schools and hospitals were off-limits to the state’s Black citizens. The Tougaloo students were mentored by Medgar Evers, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, in a push by civil rights groups to harness the energy and passion of young people in Mississippi and beyond.įew dared to challenge an entrenched system of segregation across the South, particularly in Mississippi, that relegated citizens with brown skin such as Sawyer’s to libraries that often had outdated books or hardly any books at all. The “read-in” led by the students who became known as the Tougaloo Nine inspired young people across Mississippi to take action, setting the stage for demonstrations at other Black colleges and galvanizing a community around the fight for civil rights. State officials had created a commission to track civil rights activists. It was March 27, 1961, in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, where the Ku Klux Klan reigned, bombings of Black churches were frequent and the number of lynchings was the highest in the country. That morning, Sawyer, 20, a junior, along with eight fellow students from Tougaloo Southern Christian College, a private, historically Black school outside Jackson, walked into the public library designated for white patrons only. She’d rather go to jail than face the crowd gathering along the sidewalk on State Street. Sawyer quietly pleaded that police would hurry, please hurry, and arrest her for taking a seat in the whites-only library. She watched them shake their fists and point toward the building. She couldn’t hear the words, but their grimaces made her cringe. – Ethel Sawyer sat at a table facing the huge windows, watching the crowd swell outside the public library. Decades later, their work continues to shape debates over voting access, police brutality and equal rights for all. Throughout 1961, activists risked their lives to fight for voting rights and the integration of schools, businesses, public transit and libraries. USA TODAY’s “ Seven Days of 1961” explores how sustained acts of resistance can bring about sweeping change. A “read-in’’ led by the students who became known as the Tougaloo Nine inspired a Black youth activism movement in Mississippi.
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