South Toward Home

摘要

Official slavery had been abolished 60 years earlier. But to the sharecropper family into which Bennie Rayford was born in 1926, that distinction barely mattered. No black child in his part of Mississippi could set foot in the schoolhouse until all the cotton was picked. Rayford persevered against odds as long as the river: he finished high school, joined the navy and earned a degree from Alcorn State University—a gateway in the 1950s to a teaching career in the South's separate but unequal schools. Then, in 1957, the odds beat Rayford. As a principal, he chafed under outrageous conditions—four teachers, and two buses, for 300 children—and organized plantation families to agitate: for another bus. The county superintendent sent Rayford a ter-minationnotice. "You're too smart a nigger," it said. "We no longer need your services."