What
Matters Most………..Commentary
by Jim High
You cannot hear the phrase “I Have a Dream” without
thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial on August 28, 1963, fifty years ago.
I was twenty three years old and remember those times well. Growing up in the segregated south of the
40’s and 50’s I didn’t think much about America’s huge race problem. Things just seemed normal as they had always
been segregated. Then the sixties began
to break a lot of thing open all across the country. Rock and Roll music, the hippy culture, the
sexual revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, and much more changed America forever.
The sixties were also the time of political assassinations. President John F. Kennedy was the first on
November 22, 1963, in Dallas; Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968,
in Memphis, and then Robert F. Kennedy as he was running for President just two
months later on June 5, 1968, in California.
But things were beginning to change even in
Mississippi, where in 1962, a year before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech riots
had broken out at The University of Mississippi upon the admission of the first
black student, James Meredith. That
change was evident the day Robert F. Kennedy spoke at the Tad Smith Coliseum on
the Ole miss campus in 1966. He had been
the country’s Attorney General who ordered the Federal Troops to protect
Meredith and here he was being invited to come on campus to speak. I went over to hear him with a group of my
friends from Tupelo.
There was real tension in the air as over 6,000 of
us waited for him to appear and wondered what he would say. And then there he was down on the floor in
the middle of the coliseum. He got off
to a good start by saying he felt just like the chicken inside a huge fox
coop. The crowd roared and the tension
was broken. He went on to give us all
his vision for America and I dare say he won over most of the crowd that
day. He sure won me over. I believe had he not been assassinated that
he would have been elected President in 1968 over Richard Nixon and our country
would have been better off today.
It was also during the 1960’s that I played a small role
in the vast changes sweeping across the segregated south. I graduated from Mississippi State University
in 1962 having never attended an integrated school. But the Civil Rights Act had become law in
1964 mainly as the result of the March on Washington the year before and real
change had begun across the nation, and more especially here in the south.
As a stockholder in the Peoples Bank and Trust
Company, at that time Tupelo’s largest bank, I attended my first stockholders
meeting in 1965. Those meetings were
held in the bank’s board room on the second floor of the bank building on Main
Street, now the GumTree Museum of Art.
At the close of the meeting the president thanked us for being there and
asked if we wanted to say anything. I
stood and ask the president and board very directly why after segregation had
been ended in our nation and the Civil Rights Act was the law of the land, our
bank still had a “White Only” sign on the water fountain in the lobby. Well there was a great rustling of papers and
a quick motion to adjourn the meeting.
No one spoke to me or answered my question, but
before the week was out the sign was taken down. It wasn’t a total victory, as they installed
a spigot on the fountain requiring the use of those cone shaped cups from the
dispenser that was also installed.
Heaven forbid that whites and blacks should bend over and drink from the
same fountain. Those were dark days for
Mississippi, and we are not over them yet.
What Matters Most……Fifty years ago a great American
lead a March on Washington for justice, fairness, and economic opportunity for
all Americans. We’ve have made some progress,
yesterday President Barack Obama gave a speech on those same steps as evidence
of how far we have come. But we must
keep marching until the reality of Dr. King’s dream is true for every American
citizen.
© 2013 #18 Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467,
Tupelo, MS 38802-0467
