The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook by Charles W. Eagles

I've just been made aware of this book, but I'm moving it up on my reading list because it's pretty important to me.  The history of the struggle for civil rights is, in many ways, my own history.  Born in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, to a very political family, this is the world I entered into just as the fight was getting more heated.  

For the past several months, I've been doing a really deep dive into the integration of Galloway United Methodist Church, and my plan is to do Millsaps next.  This book is about incidents that happened later on, more into the early and mid-seventies.

Mississippi Conflict and Change was a textbook about Mississippi history written by James W. Loewen, who taught at Tougaloo, and Charles Sallis, who taught at Millsaps.  It was the first Mississippi History textbook to include anything about the civil rights movement.  There's where the conflict and change about the book itself came in.

Mississippi has a free textbook law.  That means students of the public schools (and some parochial schools) are provided free textbooks paid for by the State of Mississippi.  In order to qualify for these funds, the books have to go through an approval and adoption process as set out in the law.  This is true for all the states that have a free textbook law, which I believe is all the states now.  

Approving textbooks can be very political.  With so many concerns about Critical Race Theory and anything about people with different sexualities, approving textbooks has become much more political than has been in many years.  In the seventies, there was considerable pressure to keep the civil rights movement out of any Mississippi History textbook.  Authors Lowen and Sallis, having struggled to get the book published in the first place, were determined to have it adopted by the state Textbook board, so they filed suit, accusing the board of rejecting their book illegally.

Eagle's Book "Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook," tells the story of the fight over getting "Conflict and Change" published.   

At St. Andrews, I was taught Mississippi History using Conflict and Change.  A very young priest named Jerry McBride taught it.  I didn't know it at the time, but St. Andrews was the only school in the nation that had ordered the book for classroom use.  I knew this because my father and grandfather ran the Mississippi State Textbook Depository.

My dad was asked to give a deposition in the case.  Considering the very political nature of his business, both at Missco and Trustmark and St Dominics, he really didn't want to get mixed up in this, but he also was pretty determined to get the book adopted.  Dr. Sallis was an important member of the Millsaps History Department.  Bill Goodman represented the State of Mississippi in this and many other matters.  He was also a life trustee of Millsaps College.  Mr. Goodman's advice was that the state not fight this, that fighting it would make us look pretty bad.  

At the time, there were political figures in Mississippi who had much to gain for taking a stance against a civil rights textbook.  Sadly, those days may have returned.  There was considerable political wrangling over this.  I don't know how much is in Eagle's book, but it involved a lot of icons of my youth.

Ultimately, cooler heads were able to prevail, and the book was adopted after considerable political and legal pressure.  I'm very interested to see how much of this lines up with my own memory of that period.  I was thirteen and fourteen.  Interestingly, the only reviewer of the book on Amazon is Bob King, former Dean at Millsaps College.

They have Mississippi Conflict and Change listed as almost $1,500 on Amazon.  I think I have two copies.  

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook is available in hardcover, softcover, and kindle formats on Amazon.com I'll write a review once I've finished it.  

Moving Things - Moving Me

 Feist-dog got me up at five a.m.  The sun's still not out.  My little round ball Alexa alarm doesn't go off until six, so I don't know what his hurry is.

This week is preparation for the big move.  I meet the movers on Wednesday.  Some stuff I'm going to have to part with.  One is my dad's desk.  I've been using it as a desk for a while, but it was improperly stored after his death and got really badly warped.  It's also eight feet long.  As he was in the business of selling desks, I think Dad wanted something he could show off to people as an indication of what they might expect from us, plus I think our manufacturers had an expectation that he would showcase some of their more impressive wares.  

My dad liked everything modern.  Especially furniture and architecture.  He even grew his sideburns out for a while, and most of his lapels could double as a glider.  Being Mississippi's only Herman Miller dealer for a long time, most of his office set was Herman Miller, including the famous Eames Chair and Cricket Table.  

Since I still have mobility issues, I want to have safety rails installed in the bathroom.  I thought that'd be crazy expensive and complicated, but Lowes installs them for $85 each.  I already have an adjustable bed, so that's about all the accommodations I'll need.

I'm pretty relaxed about it now, but I'm sure as the time gets closer, I'll freak out.  Some of my theater friends have agreed to help hang my art.  That's probably the best I can do since they've done it to about a hundred of Brent's sets.  

There are two really important events at Millsaps this week.  The first is a presentation about Millsaps, Tougaloo, and the Civil Rights Movement Tuesday at 1:00 at the Christian Center.  Speakers include Jeanne Middleton, TW Lewis, and Ed King.  Like myself, Ed has been having a mystery element with his leg and may attend by Zoom.  All three of these people had a pretty important role in several levels of integrating Jackson, from the sit-ins to the integration of the churches and the ultimate integration of Millsaps and lastly the public schools.  I'm proud to say that Millsaps and Galloway led the way in these movements, and I'm ashamed to say we didn't do it before the mid-sixties.

We did this before in 2010 when Rob Pearigen was new at Millsaps.  The panel was then Jon Meacham, Governor William Winter, Jerry Mitchell, Jeanne Luckett, and Dr. Leslie McLemore.  There's a chance some of these will attend the lecture Tuesday.  Jerry Mitchell now has his offices at Millsaps, and Jeanne Luckett gets around to more stuff than I do.  Sadly, Governor Winter is no longer with us.  

This might be Rob's last event as president of Millsaps.  He and Phoebe attended Galloway yesterday.  Cary mentioned him in his sermon but assured us we'd see Rob again when he comes to visit Phoebe, who we have no intention of letting go.  That's not entirely wrong.  Losing Phoebe is gonna cost, Jackson.  She's been very involved in the years they've been here, and I think it's fitting that she'll be moving back to Sewanee after attending one last International Ballet Competition.

Later, at 5:00, we'll meet again at Fondren Guitars for the second session of the Millsaps Ted Lasso talks about effective management.  The presenter is LeAnne Brewer, who heads up our executive education effort.  LeAnne was a student when I was a much better student, apparently.  She has remarkable energy and insight, so I'm looking forward to this.  Where I'm headed, this little cluster of businesses will probably be where you can find me most nights.  They have whiskey next door.  That should do.

I think the operational plan for the next two weeks will be to mask my anxiety about moving with false enthusiasm.  That usually works.  I simply have to take the next step, though.  I've accomplished all I can here, and I'm worried that I'll regress if I stay.  I have to learn to maintain my diet and exercise on my own.  I've done both before.  I tend to slip into really bad habits (mostly fast food) when I don't maintain my mood, so going to have to watch that.

You'll notice changes to the blog.  I'm trying to make it look more professional since I'm trying to go out into the world as an actual writer, not just a guy who scribbles his thoughts.  

My wake-up alarm still hasn't gone off.  Probably the greatest thing I ever did for myself was when I learned to touch type.  Now I can type much, much faster than I can read, meaning I can do about a thousand words an hour.  Not too bad for a dyslexic kid.   It's also a pretty good indication of just how much my mind races when I'm alone and when I'm not alone.  The way my mind works has always been a real irritation to the women in my life, starting with my mother.  I'm pretty satisfied with it, but it can make it difficult to have a conversation with me sometimes.

History Is Lunch: Robert McElvaine, “How 1964 Still Shapes Us”

Your Community Needs You to Get an MBA

Mississippi Art The Wolfes and the Lazy Log Lodge

This is a story about memory, and family, and art.  This is a story about Mississippi and happiness and a story about love.

Yesterday my sister sent me a text message that she found a painting and wanted to know if it was of the Raymond Lodge; and included a photo of it.  Immediately I confirmed that it was indeed a painting of the Raymond Lodge and that it had hung in our grandmother's house for many years.  

I believed it was painted by Jackson artist BeBe Wolfe.  My sister texted back a photo of the signature, and it was painted not by BeBe Wolfe but by her mom, Mildred.  All this opened the most beautiful treasury of memories I had stored away, not forgotten but not visited in a long time.

The Raymond Lodge Painting
As Sent By My Sister

The lodge was the Lazy Log Lodge, about five miles east of Raymond, Mississippi.  After World War I, a retired colonel built it, and my uncle Boyd bought it in the fifties.  It was a little over thirty-five acres, with a five-acre lake, and when he bought it, there was the log constructed main house, a caretaker's house, a horse barn, a sheep barn, and a pavilion.  

It was the site of many company and family gatherings.  I learned to ride a horse there and bait a hook there.  I told and heard many ghost stories there, and in the days when I barely got to see my dad because his career was so busy, I could spend time with him there. 

It had a massive brick barbeque that Kelly, the caretaker, once used to cook enough hamburgers to feed the entire St. Andrews eighth and ninth grade.  Some people got two!

Besides the main house being made of logs, I don't know why it was called "lazy log."  The colonel built the house himself with trees cut from the land and four sandstone fireplaces, made from the same sandstone quarried in Hinds County and used at the Jackson Zoo and Smith and Poindexter parks.

The horse barn burned down in the sixties, leaving only a mule cart with a broken axel, and the horses were moved to the sheep barn under the levee.  The pavilion was storm-damaged in the seventies and had to be torn down.  The whole farm was sold in the eighties to finance a project my dad was working on.  

The house and the pavilion were on a hill looking over the lake.  Mrs. Wolfe must have been sitting in the pavilion when she made the painting.  She would have been shaded, but her subject bathed in sunlight.  By the colors, it must have been fall.  Although I wasn't there that day, I can clearly see it in my mind.  I tried to find a photo I'd seen of her painting before to include here, but I couldn't find it.  Maybe it was in a book.  I'll keep looking.

My Grandparents were big fans of the Wolfe's, both from their studio work and their involvement in Millsaps.  I don't know exactly how the painting came to be.  Either they commissioned it from her, or she painted it as a gift.  I've seen other landscapes she made, but I didn't recognize the locations.  From the vantage point of the hill, she couldn't see the levee that created the lake, only the center part of it before smaller hills blocked the rest. 

Across the water in the painting is a medium-sized weeping willow tree.  There were four weeping willow trees around the lake, planted as saplings by the colonel himself.  By the time my dad sold the place, they were massive.  There was pretty good fishing under that willow tree, and it was a great place to water your horse.  One time my Uncle John said we could walk our horses all the way across the lake from there to the other side, and we did!  I was in trouble for getting my pants wet in the lake water, but boy, was it fun.

Veterans of the fabled Dixie Art Colony, Mildred, and Karl Wolfe, settled in Jackson, Mississippi, after World War II.  They started a studio and became a part of the fabric of central Mississippi and especially Millsaps College.  Some years they were the entire art department at Millsaps.  Karl became one of the most famous portrait artists in the state of Mississippi.  Mr. Wolfe's portrait of my uncle Boyd Campbell hung at Mississippi School Supply for many years and now hangs in Millsaps College.  Boyd also had a portrait done by Marie Hull, which was in my mom's house for many years, then my house, and now hangs in my sister's house.  My uncle had the hat trick of Mississippi portrait artists of the 1950s.

For many years, Karl's work overshadowed his wife, but by the 1980s, Mildred became more appreciated for her own work.  Both tended toward impressionism, but I always thought she did more than he.  I can't say that I prefer her paintings to his, but it's close.  She also worked in every other medium I can think of, including Ceramics (which I guess she's the most famous for now) and glass.  

Mrs. Wolfe and my paternal grandmother were friends.  I believe they played bridge together.  I was never invited to those parties.  There was a cluster of little old ladies in Jackson determined to bring arts and letters to our community, and they held Mildred Wolfe and Eudora Welty as proof of Mississippi's worthiness.  Looking back on it now, I guess they got what they wanted.

My grandmother Campbell had some forty-five paintings by Mississippi artists; three were by Mildred Wolfe and possibly two dozen of her ceramic birds.  My sister and aunt have them all now, and they're in good hands.

Signature On
The Raymond Lodge Painting

According to the signature on the Raymond Lodge landscape, I was three years old when Mrs. Wolfe finished it.  My uncle Boyd never lived to see it, but he would have loved it.  I cannot remember a time before this painting existed.

Before my sister's house, the Raymond lodge painting hung in the hallway of my grandparent's St Ann Street house in Bellhaven.  Across from it was the doorway to my Aunt Evelyn's bedroom, which became the guest room.  Visiting them, I saw it there my entire young life.  A well-made painting accomplishes so many things, not the least of which invoking happy memories, which this one did for me.  

I want to thank my sister, my brother, my brother-in-law, BeBe, and Mildred Wolfe for bringing all these memories back to me.

For more information about The Wolfe Studio and Wolfe Porceline Birds please visit their WEBSITE.

Karl and Mildred Wolfe 1950s

Karl and Mildred Wolfe 1950s

Hull Portrait
Campbell-Cooke Home

Wolfe Portrait
Millsaps College