Silver Rights

This overwhelmingly sensitive and warm story of Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter's fight to live through and overcome the discrimination and oppression of segregation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, is beautifully written and shared with the reader by Constance Curry. Ms. Curry, the field service representative of the American Friends Service Committee, saw the Carter family through their placing of their seven youngest children in the Drew, Mississippi, white schools as the first and only blacks to do so in Sunflower County in the years 1965-1968. This story follows the family and the children through their long years of sticking in out all the way through the integration of Ole Miss. The story is hard to imagine in that Mae Carter finished only the third grade in the truncated education of sharecroppers but her and her husband's spirit and drive to get their 13 children out of the cotton fields drove her and her husband to get their children education. Their first five children finished high school and left the South. The surviving seven received all of the necessary support to overcome and rise up. This story is so moving that it is difficult to keep a dry eye throughout as the pluck and inner strength necessary to overcome white Mississippi is and was so brutal in its oppression of its black citizens.

In the 1965-66 school year I was in Mrs. Harpole's second grade class at AW James Elementary School in Drew, Mississippi. That year two little black girls, Beverly and Deborah Carter, enrolled at the same school. Beverly was a third grader, Deborah was in the first grade. Their sister Pearl was there as well. She seemed much older and was in the fifth or sixth grade. That was the beginning of a series of changes in the Drew Public Schools. In 1964 the graduating class of Drew High School was all white. Across Highway 49, the Class of 64 of Hunter High School was all black. In 1971 the first "desegregated" class graduated from Drew High. In the in five years in between most of the white children left the public schools. By 1976 the graduating class picture was evenly split between black and white faces. Many years later I read "Silver Rights" in a motel room in Greenville, Mississippi. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. I didn't sleep much that night. Instead, I thought about all the things I had read, and all the things that were done by the people I knew. I knew Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter and I knew them to be good people. I didn't know how hard they had worked or how much they suffered so their children could receive the same education as any other Mississippi child. I had no idea of the resistance they faced every step of the way. I won't discuss the rightness or wrongness or deeper meanings of this book. I'm not about to get into the concepts of social justice and civil rights. I do know these things, though. Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter did what was right for their children. That is the highest calling any parent could have. To the best of my knowledge, the story in this book is true in every point. The people involved were my Little League coaches, Sunday School teachers, and the parents of my friends. This is a very good book that tells a great story of how two people did the right thing for their children and in the process did the right thing for thousands of other children.

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress mandated the desegregation of all public schools receiving Federal aid. Mississippi tried to "comply" with the law by a "Freedom of Choice" program which allowed students over a certain age and parents to designate the schools they wished to attend. While, perhaps, facially appealing, the "Freedom of Choice" program served as a means to intimidate blacks from attempting to register in what were at the time all-white schools. Those with the courage to do so faced danger to their livelihood, property, and persons. The "Freedom of Choice" program ultimately was invalidated through litigation. Constance Curry's inspiring book "Silver Rights" (1995) tells the story of a family of black sharecroppers in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter and seven of their thirteen children (all their children then of school age). The Carter's took the "Freedom of Choice" program at its word. In 1965, the seven children enrolled in the primary and secondary schools of Drew, Mississippi, a small town with a then-deserved reputation for violence and lawlessness. Ms. Curry worked as a field representative for the American Friends Service Committee from 1965-1975. She got to know the Carter family well and was instrumental in providing the assistance necessary to get them through their difficult times. The book includes excellent pictures of life in the Mississippi Delta, for both white and black people, in the early to mid-twentieth century. The book shows a feel for the place, for sharecropping life on the farms and for life in the dusty towns, for the blues culture of the Delta, and for its history. The book offers substantial discussion of the notorious Emmett Till case and of other lynchings and of early attempts to organize civil rights activities in the Delta. Ms. Curry eloquently evokes the spirit of the Delta at the opening of her story: "In trying to describe the Mississippi Delta, I seem to find only superlatives -- the flattest land, the blackest dirt, the hottest summers, the nicest people, the poorest people. In defining the delta's past and even its present, I am aware of these extremes and also of its incongruities: the violence and the peacefulness, the beauty and the ugliness, the stillness and the tension. It is a place complex almost beyond comprehension." (p. xxi) In telling her story, Ms. Curry lets her protagonists do most of the talking. The opening chapters set the stage and explain the Carter's ambitions for an education, and an end to the hardships of sharecropping, for their children. The second section of the book explores the backround of Mae Bertha Carter and her mother Luvenia's early life as the wife of a Delta sharecropper. The book discusses throughout the experiences of the Carter family as they faced violence and shootings in the early stages following their enrollment in the formerly white schools. Throughout their period in the public schools the

Silver Right is a moving and telling story of my family struggle to achieve equality in America. This book does a very good job of relating the feeling, fear and turmoil that I felt during those four long years of being the only black family at an all white school in the Mississippi Delta in the sixites. Silver Rights goes beyond the actions of people during that time. It looks at the cilvil right movement on a personal level. This book will make you laugh, and it will also make your cry