Report from Jackson

I’m writing this from Jackson, Mississippi, where I gave a workshop yesterday on Jazz at Jackson State and then went to find the No Kings Rally. Jackson has a long history of resistance, the site of the Library Sit-in (1961), the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter Sit-in and the assassination of Medgar Evans (1963), the 1965 protests with 950 mass arrests, the 1966 March Against Fear organized by James Meredith and supported by Martin Luther King, the Jackson State police murders of students Phillip Gibbs and James Green in 1970, 10 days after the murder or 4 Kent State Students. The latter received significant press, but few of us (myself included) were ever aware of the Jackson State tragedy, further proof that the country needed to understand that Black Lives Matter. 

With this history of courageous protest in Jackson, I had high hopes that the No Kings Rally would be large and dynamic. So I was at first disappointed to see that it amounted to some 50 people on a bridge overlooking the freeway. It was in competition with the St. Patrick’s Day parade which drew larger crowds, which felt odd in a place where the Black population makes up 80% of the city. 

 

But as I joined them on the bridge, I noted that there was a pretty constant affirmation from the cars speeding below and honking their horns in a kind of “Amen!” to the signs. I started talking to the first man I met, a beautiful gentle Black man my age who was a retired pastor. We had a moving talk, as he described the protests he remembered as a boy in the 60’s. Medgar Evans was a neighbor he knew personally, his older siblings had been arrested in a protest and he told me with a smile how they sang songs all night in their jail cell and kept the guards awake. As a genuine Christian, he told me in all sincerity that despite 400 years of white folks hating black folks — and his (and my) confusion as to “Why?”— he didn’t hate them back. Then he showed me his sign that spoke his empathy for the two white people murdered by ICE recently in Minnesota. At the end of our conversation, I gifted him with my Jazz, Joy & Justice book to give to his grandchildren. So thought the numbers on the bridge were small, that conversation was profound and I walked away teary-eyed. 

 

This morning I looked for the news of other No Kings Rallies (of course, not highlighted by mainstream press, so I had to depend on Facebook posts) and saw the living sign on Ocean Beach in San Francisco made by 5,000 people. And my wife was one of them! I read about the 200,000 who gathered in Minnesota. About the 3,300 events across 50 states. About the total of some 8 or 9 million people (the largest single-day protest in U.S. history) who took the trouble to step out and say, “Enough!” About protests in other countries and on every continent—some seventeen countries in Europe, six in North America, Colombia in South America, Malawi in Africa, Japan in Asia, Australia in Oceania—and even four people in Antarctica! 

 

The momentum is clear. But still the guy and his cronies are there and in unbelievable defiance of the very cornerstone of democracy, working to shut down fair elections with the Supreme Court’s thumbs-up. Can’t the 9 million people simply go to DC and escort them all out? Just a thought. 

 

Meanwhile, I’m off to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson before heading off to Memphis. The courage these protestors in the 60’s had in the face of much more severe dangers when resisting, the tactical organization they showed in getting voters registered, the combining of exalted vision with political details and strategies, is mightily impressive. We owe them a great debt and clearly have so much more to do to complete their work. May it be so!