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Friend,
Sunflower County, deep in the Mississippi Delta, is typical of Southern agricultural regions that have weathered generations of oppression. Almost 35% of the population lives in poverty. The average per capita income is below $16,000. Three-quarters of the population is Black.
But as a public school teacher in semi-rural Leflore County, which is adjacent to Sunflower, Ki Harris saw potential in his students every day. What he couldn’t see, though, was a way to lift up their gifts to make their prospects better than those of their parents.
“I found myself very disappointed with public school education,” Harris said. “I was always impressed with the brilliance of my students, but also just as jarred by all of the structures, policies and curricula designed to stalemate that sort of brilliance.”
Two years later, in 2016, Harris joined up with the Sunflower County Freedom Project, an initiative designed to enhance educational opportunities and exposure for those students.
“It’s based on the Freedom Schools, the Freedom Summer of 1964,” Harris said, explaining the program. “It uses education as a tool for the liberation of communities.”
And, as it was during the early 1960s, not only is the battle for educational equity active, the rights that communities of color gained over the passing decades in every facet of life are under assault from forces on the right. Cloaked in the same racist ideology of the past and bolstered by four years of the Trump administration’s cozy game of footsie with white supremacists and hate groups, efforts to deny voting rights, economic equality and equal justice for Black citizens are on the move.
It’s against that backdrop that the Southern Poverty Law Center released its flagship annual report, The Year in Hate & Extremism 2021, online this week. Although the report shows a decrease in the number of active hate and antigovernment extremist groups, it also warns that the decrease isn’t a sign of far-right extremists being vanquished or diminished. Instead, they are emboldened to the point that what used to be said in a hushed whisper or through a dog whistle is now emblazoned on T-shirts and blared through loudspeakers.
“The big change is the political leaders embracing it at the very top,” said Nate Schenkkan, deputy director of research for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “Yes, you did have senators and governors at that time in the ‘50s and ‘60s backing up those policies of resistance to desegregation, backing up attacks on the civil rights movement. Now, it’s been the president labeling Black Lives Matter protesters ‘terrorists’ and trying to deploy the forces of federal law enforcement – thankfully without success – trying to use them at times to investigate and to even shut those protests down.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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