Politicians Should Pay Heed to History; Boycotts Work Says Civil Rights Author, Susan Klopfer

Contact: Susan Klopfer
http://susanklopfer.com
sklopfer@gmail.com


Politicians Should Pay Heed to History; Boycotts Work

Boycotts make a definite economic impact for groups seeking social justice, says a civil rights author.

Responding to Arizona's law cracking down on illegal immigration and the resulting national protests, including threat of boycott to Arizona’s tourism industry, Susan Klopfer, author of three books on civil rights in the Mississippi Delta, argues that "such economic embargoes have retained their role as a strong and successful tradition in modern civil rights history."

Klopfer's remarks come as protests have already taken place in more than 90 cities in the U.S. "reminding politicians of the size of the immigrant community."

This week, Jorge-Mario Cabrera from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, California, told reporters if Republicans and Democrats "do not take care of this albatross around our necks, this will in fact be the undoing of many, many years of civil rights struggle in this country."

In Cabrera's city, more than 60,000 reportedly people turned out for a downtown rally.

“Cabrera knows what he is talking about,” Klopfer responds, giving as example "a particularly strong but little known boycott" that took place in the Mississippi Delta nearly fifty years ago:

As 1961 came to a close, "Some white folks in the Mississippi Delta were dreaming of a White Christmas when they decided to keep their black customers away from the city of Clarksdale's annual parade."

But their tune changed dramatically when Coahoma County's NAACP chapter led by civil rights activist Aaron Henry sponsored a major boycott over the Christmas shopping season of 1961, according to Klopfer.

"Clarksdale's downtown stores were all heavily dependent on black trade, giving the boycott both immediate and lasting effects," Klopfer said.

Medgar Evers, head of the state NAACP, and Henry had met that summer with with President John F. Kennedy during the NAACP convention in Philadelphia, talking with Kennedy and others over the severity of their problems.

Then two months later, shortly after their meeting, Clarksdale's mayor decided there would be “no Negro participation” in the annual Christmas parade, and his decision would result in the first major confrontation in Clarksdale since 1955, according to Klopfer.

“Henry and others were stunned and affronted by the mayor's edict. It was tradition for the black band to play at the end of the parade, followed by floats from their community. There seemed to be no reason for this decision, except that the mayor apparently resented the progress African Americans were making all over the state.”

Henry and Evers called for a boycott of downtown stores with a slogan stating if they couldn't parade downtown, they wouldn't trade downtown.

Handbills were printed and a newsletter sent out asking for blacks to join in the boycott; merchants felt pressure from the start.

"The white community leaders would not come to terms with the black community and the boycott dragged on,” Klopfer said.

Aaron Henry "voiced the black community's view" when he said it could go on forever unless there were real changes in hiring practices.

When the county's attorney Thomas H. (Babe) Pearson threatened to jail Henry if he didn’t use his influence to call off the boycott, Henry would not budge, so Pearson called out for Clarksdale Police Chief Ben Collins to come out from the side room of his office, and told him to “take this nigger to jail.”

The arrest was illegal, Klopfer states, since no warrant was issued, "but Henry knew better not to argue with an armed policeman. He could have been killed for such dissent.”

Years later, "Henry admitted he didn't mind going to jail at the time, since he knew it would result in an intensification of the boycott--and it did.”

Seven more Clarksdale civil rights leaders were brought in and all were locked up, later charged with restraint of trade and released. The boycott reached its peak about three years later, following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and merchants felt the economic pinch throughout the event as they missed one-half of their customers, Klopfer said.

Yet even while Henry and others were being arrested, another group -- all white -- tried launching a boycott of their own when the Mississippi State Legislature passed a resolution that no loyal Mississippian should shop in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the state line, and quite close to Clarksdale, Klopfer said.

“Tougaloo College professor John Salter, a dedicated civil rights activist, wrote about the Clarksdale boycott, noting that while public accommodations and other facilities in Memphis were quietly desegregating, the Mississippi legislature further distinguished itself, ‘...by publicly investigating conditions at the University Hospital in Jackson, where white and black children were leaving their segregated wards and playing together in the corridors’.”

Few people today have read about the Clarkdale boycott, Klopfer admits.

But others have learned in their history books -- or were alive at the time -- when six years earlier, African-Americans in Alabama launched a boycott of the bus system in Montgomery after local civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white rider.

“Parks 1955 decision came soon after the trial freeing the murderers of Emmett Till, an African American 14-year-old Illinois school boy who was killed in the Mississippi Delta for allegedly whistling at white women,” Klopfer said.

Given that African-Americans constituted a large part of the bus ridership, history books show the boycott hurt Montgomery’s revenue base.

“People found alternative ways to get to work and school, and the boycott drew national attention. Even some northerners supported the boycott and gave donations."

Both Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, who would remain at the forefront of the struggle through the 1960s, "emerged at this time.”

The Montgomery boycott ended in 1956 when the Supreme Court declared that the segregated transit system was unconstitutional.

“From this history and their own, Hispanics know that boycotts have proven effective in their quest for labor justice and union rights.” Klopfer said.

In 1965, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, led by Cesar Chavez, launched a national boycott against grapes.

“The five-year boycott, or la huelga, placed enormous pressure on California grape growers to recognize the union and it drew national attention to the plight of unorganized immigrant workers in low-paying and dangerous jobs,” Klopfer said.

Meanwhile, boycotts still carry a threat in the Delta, according to the civil rights author.

“Citizens in the small town of Cleveland, near the site where Emmett Till was killed in 1955, threatened an Easter boycott just last month over an issue involving school segregation. One thousand school children marched from their building to administrative offices."

Klopfer says the school board listened -- "at least for this particular demand" -- and gave in, after board members were told of an impending boycott.

“Boycotts carry weight and politicians should be taking seriously the response to Arizona’s new law, if they value lessons learned from history.”

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Susan Klopfer is the author of three civil rights books, including "Who Killed Emmett Till?" "The Emmett Till Book" and "Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited." She is an award-winning journalist and has been an acquisitions and development editor for Prentice Hall. She is the author of a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection and is a public speaker, freelance writer and active blogger.

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Source: AARP Bulletin Today | January 8, 2010

Black History Month Program Features ‘Mississippi Story Behind Rosa Parks’

Most people who’ve taken a high school history class know something about Rosa Parks. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Parks' act of defiance became a symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and the U.S. Congress later called her the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement."

But there was another spark that lit this movement, and it came three months earlier from the depths of the Mississippi Delta, says writer Susan Klopfer of Mount Pleasant. The author of an audio book, “Who Killed Emmett Till?” is set to present a program on Parks and Till for Black History Month at the Mount Pleasant Library in the Large Study Room at noon on Tuesday, Feb. 16. Attendees are invited to bring a brownbag lunch, said Library Director Gayle Trede.

Klopfer lived in the Mississippi Delta for two years on the grounds of a state prison when her husband took a job as the director of the state’s prison psychological services. Her fascination with the region and its civil rights history led her to driving around the Delta “almost daily” to talk with people who remembered the modern civil rights movement -- nearly 60 years earlier.

“There’s a saying in Mississippi, that the past is the present. I found this true as people told me story after story of their involvement in trying to end Jim Crow and achieve voting rights.”

The Delta was an unsafe place for any black person, considering the heightened tension following Brown v. the Board of Education I in 1954 and then Brown II the following year. It was particularly unsafe for anyone violating Jim Crow standards for acceptable behavior in the segregated south.

“Till was a young man from Chicago who had never experienced living in such hostility. He was known to be a prankster and had no idea that his action of harassing a white woman would end his life.”

Parks had been planning her action, but when she and the NAACP heard about the acquittal of the two men who tortured and killed this 14-year-old in Mississippi, they knew the time had come for her move, Klopfer said.

Klopfer plans to tell the Emmett Till story adding new information she gained from interviews, including a woman whose family sheltered three men claiming they murdered Till, the mortician’s assistant who prepared Till’s body before he put it on the train from Chicago, and a student who interviewed one of Till’s killers two weeks before the man died of cancer. Klopfer also plans to talk about Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore and other forgotten Delta civil rights heroes.

A question and answer session will follow Klopfer’s talk and the program is free to the public.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Susan Klopfer
505-728-7924 (cell)
sklopfer@gmail.com
www.susanklopfer.com
404 North Main St.
Mount Pleasant, IA 52641

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