Courage Lives On:
Another Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement
The name did not ring a bell. My initial hit was to chalk it up to one more of the ubiquitous marketing inquiries received through my website’s contact page — dozens had come through, wanting to increase traffic or followers or perform some other magic that would make me a wunderkind of the world wide web. Not something that interested me.
What caught my eye was that Torsheta’s message included a return email that didn’t look like gobbledygook. @MississippiFreePress was at the core of the address. I scanned southward to see a short message that read
Good evening. My name is Torsheta Jackson and I am the Education Equity Reporter for the Mississippi Free Press. I am writing a story on Debra Lewis from Carthage, Miss. Your father was the FBI agent on her first day of school at Carthage Elementary. I would love to talk with you about what you remember from that day. Can we schedule an interview.
How in the world did Ms. Jackson get wind of me? of Dad? of the specifics of Debra Lewis and Carthage, Mississippi, and an event that occurred decades ago? Of course I wanted the interview.
The plot did not disappoint. I emailed Ms. Jackson with a formal acceptance of her invitation and within 24 hours, we spoke on the phone for a full hour. I discovered that she was a serious researcher who tracked me down through a “like” I had made of an Instagram post made by the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum to whom I subscribe. Thing is, that Like was made well over a year ago, maybe longer. I had included a comment that said something like “My father was the FBI agent present on this day.” and on that merit she had clicked on my Instagram handle, seen the link to my website in my bio. One point for social media.
Never in a million years would I have imagined that my history with the Mississippi Civil Rights movement would move into 2024, become real with a new relationship built on a journalist’s interest in a story that compelled her on the 60th anniversary of first grader Debra Lewis entering a white elementary school in Carthage, Mississippi, surrounded by law enforcement to protect her from ill effects and the federal government represented in the presence of one FBI agent, a 32-year-old father who had arrived in Mississippi a mere month before with his Midwestern family to do what the FBI had been tasked to do….to protect the civil rights of the most vulnerable, those victims of the brutish southern apocalypse
And in a twist that only fate can deliver, on the very same day that Debra was surrounded by law enforcement, ensuring her safe passage into the school house in Carthage, the agent’s oldest daughter was starting first grade in Jackson just an hour away.
Here’s the portion of the story that appears in Circling Toward Home (2021):
Daddy reported to his new job on August 4, 1964, the day an informant showed investigators the earthen dam where the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been buried. Daddy remembered that detail as a keyhole through which the subsequent years could be seen.
At the end of a long day of unpacking in our new house in north Jackson, Daddy came into the bedroom where Ellie and I were already tucked into
our beds. Daddy was taller than most fathers, six feet six inches. To say I looked up to him was an understatement. He squatted near me, getting close to eye level, his fresh regulation haircut bringing an unfamiliar harshness to his profile. “Tomorrow we’re going to practice walking to school again.” he said. “You’re almost a first grader, Sharon.” He stated it as an accomplishment, so I smiled.
The school was so close we could almost see it through the pines in our backyard, and opening day drew near. The way Daddy told it, Momma would watch from the window as I walked up the hill with the rest of the children from our street. I took his hand and my small fingers started fumbling with his massive palm. “But what if I can’t find my teacher?” I asked, revealing a fear that had been building ever since Momma and I picked out a red plaid satchel from the Sears catalog. My tummy gurgled, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. “All the grown-ups will be there to help you, and you’re a smart girl. I would be there if I could, but I can’t. My job is to make sure children in another school are safe. We want them to be safe, don’t we?” He stood up, suggesting my answer. “Don’t forget to say your prayers, girls.” He reached to the twin bed next to mine and gave Ellie a kiss on the forehead. “Nightie-nite,” he said as he turned out the light.
I wanted to creep down the hall, sneak near enough to the living room to hear the grown-up conversation between Daddy and Momma. Instead, I
slipped onto the floor as I had been taught and folded my hands under my chin. “Please let me find my teacher,” I eeked out, “in Jesus name, amen.” And with that, I hopped back on the bed and pulled the covers over my head with one question burning in my mind: Why did other children need MY daddy to keep them safe?
What could Daddy have been thinking as he walked away from us that night? His oldest was to begin first grade the very year that Mississippi’s slow roll toward integration was set to begin — with six year olds. Had he calculated the meaning of the Confederate symbol emblazoned on the state flag? Was he concerned at the national ranking of a Mississippi education, near the bottom of the fifty states? Did he wonder how Mississippi would mold his girls? Did he imagine its power?
The federal government stretched its broad reach into the business of schools with the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education, which established that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. That mandate had been ignored in Mississippi for ten
long years. To the Whites, the discovery of the lifeless bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner paled in comparison to the federal push for school integration.
The state’s nominal efforts toward ending segregation included a freedom- of-choice method, which put Black parents in the position of registering
their children in White schools for integration to succeed. This injudicious response required Black citizens to assume primary responsibility for desegregation with little or no oversight by White authorities. Intimidation tactics involved a full spectrum of violent acts, from verbal threats to drive-
by shootings, all meant to forestall the gov’ments intentions.
As an eyewitness to the integration of schools, Winson Hudson, a local Black community-builder and activist, explained that in the town of
Carthage, an hour from Jackson, “the last few days before school opened White people were riding by day and night, threatening everyone ….”
Of the families in Carthage who volunteered to register their children, all but one withdrew from the effort after threats and harassment. The daughter of A. J. and Minnie Lewis was one child who would rise to the ominous occasion of entering a White school in Carthage on opening day.
Little Debra would have a welcoming party of overwhelming proportions: police, marshalls, attorneys from the Justice Department, and Daddy.
Just as Momma and Daddy planned, I joined the neighborhood children ~ for the walk up the hill on the first day of school. We passed a fire truck,
ambulance, and several police cars without as much as a hiccup. The city of Jackson was taking no chances on a day like today. Daddy hadn’t warned me about the appearance of emergency vehicles, but I took cues from the other children and kept walking toward the front door where a crowd huddled before the morning bell. My teacher was outside the first grade classroom door to welcome me as Daddy promised. I arrived home that afternoon proud that I was an official school girl and had no imagination for the fact that other children and their families had and would endure hardships for walking into a schoolhouse.
In Carthage, part of Daddy’s territory, the Lewis family was one of those families. A historical Black newspaper up East, The New Pittsburg Courier,
picked up the story and reported the following on September 12, 1964:
CARTHAGE, Miss. — A Negro father kept his promise to the slain Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — Medgar Evers — and was fired from his job for doing so. A. J. Lewis, who enrolled his young daughter in the first grade of the Leake County School here Tuesday, Sept. 1, has been notified by the lumber company at which he was employed
that he no longer has a job. The daughter, Debra, was the only one of nine Negro children eligible to attend the school under a Federal court order won by the NAACP. Parents of the others bowed to intimidating pressures, levied by white businessmen the day before, and kept their children home.
These details were unknown to me until I researched them myself well ~ into my adulthood. As a six-year-old, the scariest things in my life were the ghost stories that the older kids on the block told on rainy days when we would make forts under folding patio chairs. The monsters of prejudice and hate existed on the invisible sidelines of my life, as cases in my father’s F.B.I. files, in the secret plans hatched in Ku Klux Klan meetings, and in the biggest accomplice to the rebirth of the Confederacy, Jim Crow. I didn’t have a clue.
Debra Lewis, the first grader who single-handedly integrated Carthage Elementary School, would not live to see the continued horrors committed by the very institutions that were constructed to protect and defend her and all citizens of the republic. She wouldn’t live to learn of the perpetual violence, murders of Black men and women, names too numerous to list here, dead by the hands of White terrorists and law enforcement, many shot in the back. Debra died on February 4, 2001, at age forty-three. Rest in power, Debra Lewis, as one of the unsung heroes of the unending march toward freedom.
According to Ms. Jackson, Debra’s family has established a scholarship at Carthage High School in her name. I’ll publish details about how to support this scholarship soon. Find the link to Torsheta Jackson’s bio HERE. Read a 2002 LA Times story that references Winsom Hudson and Debra Lewis HERE.
