[Recording Starts]
Host:
I was rather distressed when I walked in this morning because I lost all my notes. So, I had to put this together as I was sitting there. So if anybody was watching, I was writing and this is what I was writing.So, luckily, I had a notebook and I found the date was 07/11/09. Today, 07/10/10, so it's been a year and a day since I had the honor to introduce Wazir. It is never easy to introduce folks. You always want to make sure you give the right amount of info.
If you were listening earlier, you heard Kathy [Emery] give a short bio of Wazir. Yes, he is a Mississippi native who has been involved in activism since the '60s and probably before that and just doesn't claim it.
Wazir comes with a long list of credentials, something we learned from SFOP, [San Francisco Organizing Project] organizing, voter registration, and being a part of SNCC and also organizing a credit union. I just scratched the surface with his credentials. Hopefully, he will share more.
The one thing I need to add is I have always wanted to know what, "Wazir," means. So I looked it up. It means minister or high-ranking political advisor. I would say that is a very fitting name.
So, it gives me great pleasure today to introduce to you Wazir Peacock.
Wazir Peacock
Thank you.As you were saying, my name is Wazir Peacock. I'm originally from Mississippi. I started working— The movement started for me when I was about 11 years old. And that's when my parents, for a reason we won't go into all the details now, I had the "privilege" of experiencing what plantation life was like — and it was slavery.
And so, it gave me the motivation and the inspiration and the urgency to— And then necessarily because I was in the situation to look at why am I in this situation and why these Black people being treated like they've been treated. And just before we made that move to the plantation, we had been studying slavery.
And that gave me— That was the map and that was the territory. When I moved to the territory, I could see plainly that slavery still exists in the form of sharecropping.
And so I set about to begin to find a way to get off the plantation. So I ran away from home. That forced my parents to leave the plantation. And the next thing I came back home with the determination that I would go to school and get an education.
We were poor as people like we were poor as church rats. Church mouse. But I believe— I don't know whether the ministers or the people in the church, but I believe what they said when they said that God will make a way, but if there was a will there was a way. And I had the will. All I had to do was find a way.
So I kept looking for a way to go to school for my education and find out a way to move on this system that oppressed certain people. And I say it that way now because as I began to move into action, I began to understand that as they called us then, the Negro wasn't the only one, only people being oppressed.
But when I went to Rust College, I joined forces with the students who were active there. And we began to research and find things that had been done in the past and whose shoulders we were standing on, so to speak.
And we found that we were standing on the shoulder of a— It was hard to get men to move. And we found that this was historical.
I went to the same school that Ida B. Wells Barnett went to. I went to Rust College. I graduated the 100 year from her birth. I graduated in 1962. She was born in 1862.
And I looked into her life and studied her life. She was contemporary with such men as Frederick Douglas. Du Bois was a junior to her. She fought. She fought politically with Booker T. Washington.
The one we called, "The Wizard." And basically, she [Wells] allied somewhat with Marcus Garvey when he came to the country. And in many other— At that time, as you probably know, women were expected to take a backseat to everything, and the men be out front.
And basically, men did some things, but basically just what they were doing. They were fronting. Behind them they were being pushed by women.
The women had many, many auxiliaries and organizations. Whatever aspect of the movement that would push things forward, they would organize a committee and that committee would soon blossom into a regional organization. And some of them even to national and international organizations.
I mean, they worked real hard with each other. And basically at that time, when you're talking about around, let's say, 1877 on up through there, it wasn't so much about the grassroots people, but basically it was about getting in the position to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who run the country and had privilege.
So they spent a lot of energy fighting for the same privilege that white people had. Something happened, some of Ida B. Wells' friends and things got lynched. And the kind of things they were accusing people of doing that they lynched caused her to look deeper and investigate and go and see about these things, which gradually pulled her into the grass to form and start the basic root of a grassroots movement.
She had certain status. She didn't have to do that. She could have hung out and hobnobbed with those other people. But she had a deep understanding from where she came from and the struggles that her people, that her family and everybody went through. And so, it was something she could never leave and it drove her.
And there were other women, then later down the line, there were other people like her that picked up where she was and expanded this grassroots movement. And I'm going to skip fast-forward to the World War II people, like Amzie Moore, [inaudible] and others in that area who had been World War II veterans, and they had fought in World War II and different places.
And they came back to Mississippi and with the determination to make a difference. Because they had fought the enemies of the United States of America. Now they had to deal with the enemy from within.
Because as you know, there were — Especially World War II, there were Black soldiers who returned home in their uniforms that were lynched in their uniforms. Just to make them an example, let them know that if you have to be "in your place," you've been over there and you've seen a different world. But you come back home now, nothing has changed. Things are still the same.
So, standing on that history, these World War II veterans that came back to Mississippi started framing what was called an infrastructure for struggle to make change, to get the franchise of the right to vote and all of that. And they knew basically what they had to do. They had to build the infrastructure first. And these veterans knew each other from one end of the state to the other. They knew each other. They had to work and make a living.
And basically, when we came along, and [when] I'm talking about the "we," I'm talking about the younger people like the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee [SNCC], basically [when] Bob [Moses] came along [to Mississippi], they [the war veterans] came to see how can we help [them].
And we didn't bring in an agenda. The agenda was already in place. What we brought was manpower. We didn't have to— We were young. We didn't have to have jobs and support our family, but we could provide the manpower that was needed to push forward this voter registration.
So that's what we did. We knocked on doors, which was tedious, tedious, and slow. And this is why most of the [local] young people, they were excited. When we came to— When they came to Mississippi, they had heard about the sit-in movements. They'd seen it on television and all that, and natural, young people want to move into action in a hurry.
But what those people, those men who came back to build infrastructure, what they knew is that jumping in and just doing a little direct action stuff for poor people who could not even afford to buy anything in these stores even if they were integrated [was not sufficient] because of the way the economic situation was for Black people in Mississippi and in the South in general.
So the most common sense thing to do was to get the franchise. Whereby, if you can vote, then you can have some control, a lot more control of your destiny. So, McComb, what you saw, [unclear], it was basically the first— It was the experiment. It was an experiment.
And many of the people who came in were direct-actionists. They were for integrating places and testing the system in that way. And it was a division in SNCC who wanted to do nothing but direct action.
And there was a division in SNCC [with those] who wanted to do the slow pace of voter registration kinds of things, organizing, day-to-day grind, slow action. And it almost caused the division and split in SNCC completely. And those forces did come, the direct action people, came to McComb. And after the walkout of the school in McComb and all of those students got arrested. And [unclear] Herbert Lee was killed.
Sad to say, historically it's the truth, many of them left. And it was like one man that came to the office there and talked to Bob. And he said, "Mr. Moses, I understand that SNCC done snuck."
And Bob told him, "Yeah, I think many of them left."
And then when Bob in '61, when they all got Bobby out and got out of jail, that's when the real work did start of the voter registry of knocking on the doors. That's when the ones who did stay, it was just a handful. And it was like Bob said, "It was what the people— "
And SNCC, that was how I think, we didn't come to impose an agenda upon the people. We seriously got serious then of finding out what the people really wanted to do. And basically, people weren't concerned about integrating anything. They were basically concerned about making what they had better and to have the equal protection of the law. And the only way they could see that they could have that is that they had the equal opportunity to vote their representatives into office. And in order to do that, they would have to register to vote.
And they understood that even attempting to register to vote was direct action. Because the political machine in Mississippi, which was headed by Senator James O. Eastland and Stennis in the various chapters of the White Citizen Council, they understood very clearly what it meant — for Black people to register to vote and to vote in Mississippi because that would upset the political machine that they had built.
At that time, the population was close— Well, around 1960, I'll show you how fast things— Round about 1955, the population was almost 50/50. Might have been a little more Black people than it was white people in the state of Mississippi. But after — giving you the background — after the Supreme Court made that decision that the school should be integrated by all deliberate speed, Louisiana and Mississippi started a campaign to give Black people one-way tickets out of the state. They could go anywhere they wanted but as long as they left.
[Whites] wanted to reduce the population because they knew inevitably that the right to vote for Blacks was going to come, they knew. And to keep the political scene the same as it was, it means that they needed to reduce the population of the Black people there in the state of Mississippi.
And by the time that the Voting Rights Act passed and Black people started registering to vote in mass in 1965, the populations had dropped from about 41% of the population Black to about 35% of the population. But what happened is that there was still a lot of resistance for Black people to do anything.
Going back to 1964, we had the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City, whereby we would challenge the seating of the regular Democratic Party. And because the regular Democratic Party was all-white, there's not one Black person or any Native American or anything what made up— Asian [inaudible] was [not] a part of that delegation, pure white. We weren't seated, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was not seated, but it brought about a lot of pressure on the Johnson administration to push for passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, where Black people began to register in mass.
And that laid the groundwork for the regular Democratic Party to get together — we always call them the "Dixiecrats" — they decided that they would take the Democratic Party out of the [unclear] so to speak. And they became— They decided to front— I call it fronting because they were fronting the Democratic Party — hey decided to front the Republican Party, which they are doing to this day. They are fronting the Republican Party in Mississippi.
And that thing that somebody said, in order for things to remain the same, things had to change. It's changed the— What you call it? The title of the same people. And they dampened the economy in Mississippi. And it's true, now today, you have more Black elected officials in the state of Mississippi than you have anywhere in the country.
But the economics, the money was controlled by the same people who had the money all the time, the same for a long time, they froze out a different industry to keep them from coming in to give Black people any kind of economic leverage. The catfish industry was wonderful. They started importing catfish from Asia. Most of the catfish ponds where [Blacks once] raised catfish in Mississippi have been drained. They have been drained because the catfishery today is not Mississippi raised, it's from Japan and other places in Asia. So you don't know what you need to get it. So this is the way they keep control of the things, control the economics, they control the politics, although you have Black officials in office.
So there is movement. People have gone back to the history, but what do you have to do? Mistakes are made when things— When a movement reaches a certain plateau, certain people think that you can lock that up and you got it made. It never— As long as we are a human being, change will continue, and there will be always people trying to control other people. So we will always have to keep moving and keep working to make things equal and just for all. And I'm told, and I've studied that once in a while in the history of man, every once in a while, there are days of time of Nirvana, but it's a long way from now. We got a whole lot of work to do before that. It's out of bounds. We have more people on the other side pressing down than we have the people pushing up to make an equal balance.
So I'll lead with that, and you can ask me all kind of questions and ask [inaudible].
Participant
Could you talk a little bit about Brenda Travis? Since that is who the young woman who got sent away to school is— Could you talk about her a bit?
Wazir Peacock
Yes. Brenda Travis, I knew about Brenda Travis long before I met her. I met her in the March on n Washington in 1963, but this is what— Brenda Travis is that young girl who they picked out to especially punish. They put her in this reform school. And she was one of the students that walked out of the school at McComb.And she was fiery, and although she was just 15 years old but she had this— She was just this charisma and leadership character. And they put her there, and she went through a lot. From Ross Barnett, who was the governor at the time—
One of these professor at Talladega, it's a white professor at Talladega college in Alabama. He made some kind of deal with Governor Barnett to sponsor her, and got her out of this reformatory school. And she was living with him, and she had to run away from there because he was trying to molest her. And she was underage, and he tried—
She got to Jim Forman, who was the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She got his phone number, she called, and they made arrangements for her to come to Atlanta. And this man, Professor at Talladega College, he found her, and he pressed charges against Jim Forman, that this professor, that he was the guardian of Brenda Travis, and that Jim Forman was, so to speak, was aiding and abetting in that [inaudible] and that he wanted to get her back.
And, just to make a long story short, it just so happened that Brenda had made 17, and under the law in Georgia, when somebody reached 17, they were at the age of discretion— She had reached the age where she didn't have to be treated as a juvenile, so he could not— The law wouldn't side with him pulling her back to tell her [inaudible] Alabama where she was. And that's how she got free from that situation.
But as a child, she underwent a lot of abuse with that walking out of the school that day in McComb. Yeah. Others underwent some things, but she was punished more than any. And it affects her to even this day. She's beginning [inaudible] and she got a chance to tell her story, and she had me sitting beside her, so really hold her hands, so to speak, because it was bringing it up. It brought up all of those feelings and those emotions and all those things. And I think now you can be looking for her one of these days after that, because she's ready to write that book now, write about it. Yeah. So there— As you said, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and there's a price to pay for every— People paid a lot.
Participant:
That is a fascinating story too, and I'm so glad that she's coming forward because that would be a wonderful movie for people to see.I want to go back now and I want to talk about, or ask the question about, the vets, because that's a fascinating area for me. It's really interesting to see the Glen Turning character playing one of the World War II veterans. I want to know how did the vets, because this was during, what, 1943, 1945? But I want to kind of connect that with the NAACP and being that Dubois, even before that time, and working with those guys like Walter White, Weldon Johnson, they had to feel people out even before that time, trying to work the field to get people out to vote, bringing them into that awareness.
How did the veterans work beside— Because I'm reading a wonderful book right now, which is called the "NAACP, The Making of a Movement," and that just came out last year, by the way. It's an excellent play-by-play book.
How did the veterans work with the NAACP? Had it already established the groundwork trying to get people out to vote long before the war? Because I know that there was some tension there between the vets, between— Even though the NAACP helped them in one way, but there was also some stuff going on within the NAACP. How did the vets work with the NAACP and continue that infrastructure that had already been started? Because we don't hear enough about that, the NAACP and the vets, working together regarding that infrastructure.
So how did that technically expound and continue to grow?
Wazir Peacock
Right. Well, basically what happened is that all these men, as you mentioned, they were members of the NAACP. They were presidents and things of their different chapters from Clarksdale all the way to the southern part of Mississippi, McComb, and all of that. [E.W.] Steptoe was a chairman. Herbert Lee was one of the local chairmans of the NAACP, over that.What the NAACP, the national office wanted, they wanted to just have a few test cases and go to court, to try, you know? And they wanted to be the ones who handpicked the ones who would do these test [cases].
But what happened is that you had these strong— These, like Amzie Moore, Steptoe, Aaron Henry, and Reverend Collins, [activists in] Greenwood, and all these men. These were strong personalities. They didn't see any reason why that they could not begin to work on Mississippi because Mississippi represented— When you can't send your child, a Black, Negro child to the store and have to worry about whether they're going to get back home without somebody lynching or killing them, it comes a time that it pushes the people against the wall, and they got to come out fighting.
And this is what caused them to come back from World War II and start organizing infrastructure statewide, where they could network that anything happened in one place, they would know quickly what happened. If somebody needs to get out of the state, because they stood up against the white power structure in any way, shape, or form, they had ways of getting them out of there overnight.
And so, this made them a rogue group [in] the NAACP, and it was well known that they were like that. And they had— The one— She wasn't a star but she such strong— Ruby Hurley of the regional office of [unclear] to cover those Southern states—
Participant
Yeah. They had said there could be a problem [inaudible].
Wazir Peacock
Always fighting, fighting. So she took those men on trying to keep them in their NAACP place. A lot of them would shine it on, but Amzie Moore, he didn't. He and Ruby just couldn't make it. He respected her. He respected her position and went on and did what he needed to do. That's basically what happened. And basically, that's what happened to most of those guys. They went on and did what they had to do.It was never an approved kind of thing mentioning Medgar Evers. Medgar was doing some things. It's not written here, but Medgar was about to get fired.
Participant
What was it? Was he too forward for the end of —
Wazir Peacock
Yeah. Yeah. Too forward for a lot of people at that point? I mean [inaudible]. Basically for the [NAACP] national office, he was working too close with the young people doing— They were having marches. In '63, they were having marches every day downtown on Capitol Street [Jackson MS], trying to get on Capitol Street. And [NAACP national leaders] just couldn't have that. They sent Roy Wilkins in there. They went down, he and Medgar, to Capitol Street. And they intentionally was setting Medgar up for him to get fired. And they got arrested. And they had this meeting and was talking about, "You see what happened? This is wasting the resources of the NACPP and we getting these young people [out of jail]."And so in the White citizen council, see this is what happens in any movement. When they find out that the basic leadership of a particular organization has abandoned you, that sets you up to get killed. Oh, we can kill him now. They're not with him. I mean, that's basically it. But move edge the thing on for Medgar Evers to get assassinated.
Host:
Are there other questions?
Participant:
I have a question. I appreciate that you didn't want to go knocking and try to get people to vote, but obviously the film shows that it was dangerous for them to vote. How did you get them to the polls? Did they even want to go? Aren't they scared?
Wazir Peacock
Good question. Yeah, they were scared. We were scared.
Participant:
I mean, how did you get them? Did you promise them protection?
Wazir Peacock
We couldn't promise them any protection.
Participant:
But people came.
Wazir Peacock
It took a long time. We call it what's called awareness. We brought to the fore the awareness of the fact of what happens when we do nothing and how much was going home. How many people were getting lynched. How many people were being found dead who they thought had just left to go to Detroit. They never made that there. That was happening all over the state. And we made the people aware. And they weren't even trying to [inaudible]. They weren't trying to go into White restaurants to eat. They weren't even trying to do anything. They wouldn't bother. I mean, they wouldn't bother anybody.They see White people, they'd get off the street, all that kind of stuff. Just being as humble as possibly could be. And you're still getting killed and lynched. And we put it to why is it that they hate us so bad? What did we do? What are we doing for them? We're making them rich, blah, blah, blah. We'd write it all down. And people had to go home and think about that. Think about that. Think about it, then ruminate on that. Ruminate on that. And after a while, people make up their mind.
And if I do, I'm there. If I'm doing it, I'm there. So I'm going to be damn new. That's what it really came down to. And it wasn't people coming in the hordes at first. It was people who came to attempt to register to vote that the community respected. If Mr. And Mrs. So-and-so did it, then it's the thing to do.
Participant:
So you weren't just asking anybody to vote. You were focusing on the leaders of the community?
Wazir Peacock
The leaders, that's right. It was their movement. The leaders. This one can talk to this one, this one can talk to that one in translate it in the local vernacular of the people. And this is what happened. And you got people, a person like Fannie Lou Hamer who was afraid of nothing and nobody. Ms. Hamer came and found us. She found us. This is what she had been waiting for and she had a lot of influence. She was already a leader. People would follow in her local community. And when she went down, the day we went down to [inaudible] to vote with her on the bus, we carried about 70 people down to register to vote. That's more people than had ever tried to attempt to register to vote in one day.
Host
We have a time for one more question, but then Wazir's going to stay for lunch. And then if you want to have lunch with him and talk further, I'm sure he'll be happy to do that in between mouthfuls of food. Catherine, do you want to ask one question here? Last question.
Catherine:
I wanted to ask about the importance of community. Because when watching these documentaries, one of the most evident things for me, the difference between then and now is how tight-knit the communities were, how they fed each other, they took care of each other. Organizing, it was word-to-mouth. A lot of people heard, "Oh, she went to register to vote, so I'll go to register to vote."
But in organizing in the now, organizing at San Francisco State [University], I think one of the things that kept troubling me is, how are we going to build a movement if we can't even build communities? If we're not talking to each other, how do we rebuild communities when a lot of us, our generation, hasn't even grown up knowing what a community is? So that's always on my mind and I don't know.
Wazir Peacock
Wow. I couldn't even imagine as a child growing up, not having community. The community that I grew up in was so tight. As five years old, I could go anywhere I wanted to go, and I was looked out for and cared for. There was no danger we being molested about anything, anybody. So that was built before I was born.
I know the elements of a community, yeah. People having things in common. People having to survive together. People seeing the need to help each other, to know each other. People seeing the need to address things that are out of sync with the community. All I can say to you, it is possible to build community, but it's hard work, and it takes that same effort of knocking on doors. Like minds get together. You're not expecting hordes at first. Like minds getting together, accepting each other's differences, and supporting each other in any way that you possibly can. Just a small experiment in some kind of way, and start building community.
And leave some kind of infrastructure. This is talking about [inaudible]. Leave some kind of infrastructure there whereby it can be continued to be built on as you leave there. Because like SNCC was destroyed, SNCC was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Students were supposed to be feeding that organization even up until now, but something happened. And I can't go into that right now in not enough time.
And you have to protect community. Each one is a community of one to protect community. In that way, it's easy to develop, to detect agent provocateurs that's going to destroy you. Because you start being effective, the enemy is going to come. No doubt about it. And that's the test, can you stand where you stand. Everybody won't stay. The ones who stay, that's what you got. That's what you work with.
Host:
All right. Thank you so much. Let me turn this off for a second.
Copyright © Wazir Peacock, 2011
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