mississippi is due to like a lot of, why are kids going to private schools. the academy. and all of a sudden i realized, well, i don t ever see those kind of kids that i used to see private schools in the schools that i would eventually go to and when i got to jps, i realized a lot of the resources were different. i used to have books and go home with books when i was in private school and when i went to jps, i have a classroom set, and it is not big enough for 20-plus students because all of the classes are huge because there s not enough teachers and we would get on chapters of certain books and there are pages ripped out and on field trips, that s proth the only time i heard of medgar evers because i was standing in his house and not because i was reading about him in a book. for me it was coveted. if i understood where i would come from, i would be in an uproar and mad and noticing everything that was around me, and i feel like that was very intentional. let me mention critic
proper condition for african americans and that mythology gets exploded immediately. and for them, for a majority of the population in mississippi, they won the civil war. the civil war was a victory for freedom and emancipation and it really takes a white supremacist revolution to institute the system of power that will become jim crow to overthrow that majority of the population. and that really, as you said, that s a history that s misunderstood, that we often cast as a period of reconstruction as a dark period in american history but it was here in mississippi, a great promise and potential that had to be thwarted by a white minority seeking power. was it mostly about slavery, did you link are think about it the way it happened? yes, it was mostly about slavery and know no i did not learn about it until later none life, when i really learned the
example, rarely are the racial underpinnings of the civil war discussed. nor is the fact that the civil war began because the south refused to give up slavery. to dig further into this idea, i traveled to jackson mississippi where i was joined by six locals, we talked about how lies and omissions about our nation s past have affected the generations that followed. here s part of that conversation. you know, you ask these guys about what it means to be a southerner, and i think for a lot of kind of mainstream particularly white middle class america when they think about southerners they think about white southerners but we understand a place like mississippi and the immediate aftermath of the civil war, the majority of the population was african american and they immediately began exploding the mythology around what it meant to be black in the south, what it meant to be an enslaved person, where folks assumed, particularly white folks assumed that being enslaved was the only