African-American MP on motorcycle in the segregated US Army of WW II; April 13, 1942. photo Pfc. Victor Tampone
At MSU the rejected speaker who was too controversial was Aaron Henry, head of the Mississippi NAACP. He finally became the first black speaker on a white Mississippi campus in 1967 — as the guest of the Young Democrats. At Cal our first speaker who had previously been rejected as too controversial was Malcolm X, who addressed thousands in 1963.
There were differences. At MSU, the Young Democrats were the radical edge. At Cal, we were the moderate middle. MSU’s YMCA was kicked off campus for its progressive positions. Our YMCA was already off campus – occupying a building at campus edge where we could hold the political meetings we couldn’t hold on campus. It had been attacked by a legislative committee for this openness — in 1946.
Both states had a state-funded body dedicated to exposing subversives. California’s was a legislative committee dating from 1940. It hunted Communists and commiesymps. Mississippi’s was an executive commission created in 1956. It hunted civil rights activists and sympathizers, arguing that they were all basically Communists. Alsup and his friends knew about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the need to keep out of its reach. I and my friends and political colleagues did not.
Alsup’s growing interest in the civil rights movement was enhanced by the Meredith March through Mississippi in June of 1966. He drove through Canton to observe the march right before we were teargassed. He and a friend went to "our first real civil rights rally" at Tougaloo college, which was a concert with top-notch entertainment. They skipped the final rally at the back of the state Capital building in Jackson the next day. The MSSC was at both, writing down license tags and taking photographs.
The book pretty much ends when Alsup leaves for Harvard Law School, so we learn little about his experiences there, or as a Supreme Court Clerk. He eventually moved to California, where his wife was from, practiced law for 25 years and became a federal judge. He does tell us what happened to his friends and there are flash forwards throughout, but the book is about life before he graduated from MSU in 1967.
There is a sequel waiting to be written. Civil rights were just the first revolution he lived through, and a lot of those took place in California. Now that he lives next door to Berkeley, I’d like to know what he thought when the "antifas" attacked those they called "fascists" in Berkeley in 2017. Did it remind him of Mississippi as much as it did me?
This book is an easy read, unobscured by legalese. If Judge Alsup writes the next one, he needs to include an index.
©2019 by Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
Jo Freeman is the author of At Berkeley in the Sixties. She spent four years in the civil rights movement, including seven weeks in Mississippi. She left the state when "exposed" by the MSSC in the Jackson Daily News.
Pages: 1 · 2
More Articles
- National Archives Records Lay Foundation for Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
- Nichola D. Gutgold - The Most Private Roosevelt Makes a Significant Public Contribution: Ethel Carow Roosevelt Derby
- Oppenheimer: July 28 UC Berkeley Panel Discussion Focuses On The Man Behind The Movie
- Sheila Pepe, Textile Artist: My Neighbor’s Garden .... In Madison Square Park, NYC
- Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library
- Jo Freeman Reviews: The Moment: Changemakers on Why and How They Joined the Fight for Social Justice
- "Henry Ford Innovation Nation", a Favorite Television Show
- Jo Freeman Writes: The Lost Promise, American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker
- Julia Sneden Wrote: Going Forth On the Fourth After Strict Blackout Conditions and Requisitioned Gunpowder Had Been the Law
- National Institutes of Health: COVID-19 Vaccines Linked to Small Increase in Menstrual Cycle Length