Mississippi Today
When Biden stepped down, Kamala Harris called her pastor, a Mississippi native, for a prayer
The day President Joe Biden announced he would step aside and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, one of the first calls Harris made was to her longtime pastor, a native Mississippian and storied civil rights leader.
The Rev. Amos C. Brown, an 83-year-old Jackson native and pastor at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, is no stranger to such high-profile contacts. He has often been turned to by U.S. presidents. He was a close mentee of Medgar Evers. Martin Luther King Jr. tutored Brown at Morehouse College and even wrote Brown a letter of recommendation for seminary.
But Brown acknowledged in an interview with Mississippi Today that July 21 was extraordinarily memorable. He was just about to walk to the pulpit of the historic church to deliver his sermon when a deacon privately shared the news about Biden’s just-announced decision to drop out of the race.
โI paused to mention it to the congregation before I read the sermon text, which I selected well before I knew anything about what would happen that day,โ Brown said. โThat text was from Hebrews 12: โTherefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily beset us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.’ The timing of that text struck me as providential and poetic.โ
After the Sunday service, Brown and his wife visited with members, went home, and, as pastors so often do on Sunday afternoons, he laid down to rest.
โI was actually about to go to sleep and my phone rang,โ Brown said. โWhen I answered, it was the vice president’s voice. She said, โHello, my pastor. I call because I need for you to pray for me, for Doug (Emhoff, her husband), for this nation because I’ve decided to run for president.’ I handed my phone to my wife, they talked for a minute, and then we had prayer together.โ
Brown, invoking a cornerstone Christian verse from the Book of Micah, continued: โI prayed for her safety and security. I prayed she’d be led by spirituality as she sought the presidency, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with her God. Then I recited a passage from James Weldon Johnson’s great hymn โLift Every Voice and Sing.’โ
Harris is a longtime member of Third Baptist Church โ Brown called her โan old-timerโ โ and she has talked extensively about her upbringing in both the Christian and Hindu faiths. Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir that her โearliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asked us to โspeak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to โdefend the rights of the poor and needy.’โ
Her Baptist upbringing, in particular, centers on the teachings of Brown, a civil rights leader who has fought for those same virtues for nearly 70 years.
Brown’s civil rights work began in his hometown of Jackson, where he organized the first NAACP youth council at College Hill Baptist Church. At age 15, he rode with Medgar Evers from Jackson to San Francisco for the 1956 NAACP national convention, held at the same Third Baptist Church that he has now pastored for nearly 50 years. He was temporarily expelled from Jim Hill High School for talking with a national newspaper about the importance of integration, and he was later stripped of his earned class president and high school valedictorian status. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission kept an extensive file on the teenager.
Later, after leaving Jackson for college at Morehouse in Atlanta, he traveled around the South to help lead the Movement, like organizing a wade-in at Tybee Island, Georgia, and serving as a leader for NAACP chapters in numerous states. While preaching at Third Baptist and at churches in St. Paul, Minnesota, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, he has been elected or appointed to numerous civil rights posts. He served as a delegate to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 2001, president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and vice chair of California’s Reparations Task Force.
“I think Vice President Harris was attracted to the history of this church, to the role we’ve played in social justice and advancing the human race,” Brown said. “She’s a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we’ve known for a very long time now.”
The relationship between Brown and Harris transcends faith. Brown said Harris served as his campaign manager when he ran for reelection to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1999, and he publicly supported her successful campaigns for San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. Senate and vice president.
But the spiritual bond the two share, Brown said, is what he’s been dwelling on most these past few days as his friend and church member barrels toward the Democratic presidential nomination ahead of a pivotal November election.
โShe’s above all else a good and decent human being,โ Brown said. โIf we had more people in this world of her integrity and her personhood, we’d get closer to being an expression of that beloved community that Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned. That’s the kind of outlook we need to hear in America today.
โAll this division and put-down and hate speech and fear mongering is too much,โ Brown continued. โThere’s just too much of that. Someone once said people tend to hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. Well, they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate or connect with each other. We must connect with each other, and we must love each other. That’s the message Kamala Harris is going to share with the country because that’s who she is. That’s the person I’ve known for so long.โ
As for his time in Mississippi, Brown said he’s been fortunate to carry his home state legacy with him around the world.
โEverybody has a connection to Mississippi. I think about Jackson often,โ he said. โYou know, the deacon who tapped me on the shoulder before I preached (on July 21) to tell me that President Biden had stepped down? That was Brother Cedric Carter, who’s actually from Vicksburg originally.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) โ A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 โ a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as โthe King of Ragtime,โ copyrighted the โMaple Leaf Rag,โ which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s โfirst classical music.โย
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: โMy faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, โMy gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’โ
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, โThe Sting,โ which won an Oscar for the music. His song, โThe Entertainer,โ reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among โSongs of the Centuryโ list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera โTreemonishaโ was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.ย
โThe ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,โ Rifkin said. โHe is a treasurable composer.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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