A WOMAN BRAVE AND BRILLIANT
Dr. Lula C. “L.C.” Dorsey, December 17, 1938-August 21, 2013
She rose from the spirit-murdering poverty of Mississippi
Delta plantations to spirit-giving national service by way of appointments from
Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and William Clinton. She never finished high school. She earned a Doctorate in Social Work from
Howard University. Although she had
purposeful experiences in South Africa, Israel, India, Russia, and the People’s
Republic of China, she was primarily a mother of six children and a cultural
worker who stayed at home in Mississippi.
She dedicated energy to improving health care and human
rights in the Mississippi Delta. She had
the courage and genius to effect crucial prison reform at Parchman, one of the
most notorious penitentiaries in America.
In special ways, her life was a response to the question
Margaret Walker posed in the poem “Lineage.”
My grandmothers were
strong.
Why am I not as they?
The life of L. C. Dorsey replied: My grandmothers were strong, and I am just like them.
In the rare chapbook Mississippi
Earthworks (1982), an anthology of the Jackson Actors/Writers Workshop,
Dorsey published “The Hunters/Executioners.”
The voice in her poem is that of a woman who offered “no apologies for
the events that brought her /here to speak of love and determination.” Her listeners
---lawyers, professors and learned folk, fathers, hunters and men
---cried. The speaker did not cry as she
sketched a question of existential irony ---
And when she finished
speaking
everyone knew why
this woman did not cry
for her tear well had
run dry
as she had pondered
this question many
times before
and was desperately
trying to understand
the laws of God and
man
that would let a bird
escape death through
flight
and a rabbit to out
run death on the ground
while her sons could
neither run or fly
and until she found an
answer
she didn’t have time
to cry.
Brave people do not cry. They ask diamond-hard
questions. They think. They act.
Dr. L. C. Dorsey is mentioned in a single sentence as one of
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s friends in John
Dittmer’s Local
People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994):
During her last days
she felt abandoned by all but a few old friends, movement colleagues like Owen
Brooks, Charles McLaurin, June Johnson, and L. C. Dorsey, a woman who shared
Mrs. Hamer’s background as a sharecropper and who, inspired by Mrs. Hamer’s
example, became active in the struggle in the mid-1960s. (433)
Dr. Dorsey’s personality and voice emerged more vividly from
Tom Dent’s Southern Journey: A Return to
the Civil Rights
Movement (1997). Dent asked “But what can we do to change some of this
[rapid loss of
hard-won gains in the Delta]?” Her answer was
All I can see…is that our salvation has to come from looking back at
what we’ve done in the past that worked.
We’ve got to do something for ourselves; those of us who see what’s
happening have to take more initiative.
For one thing, we have to put money back into the black community. And we’ve got to do a better job with the
education of our youngsters, both in and out of the public schools.
(368)
In Kim Lacy Rogers’s Life
and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience,
and
Social Change
(2006), Dr. Dorsey’s importance as an agent of change in Mississippi is quite strongly
projected in what is quoted from interviews Owen Brooks and
I conducted on June 21, 1996 and Brooks,
Rogers, and I conducted on July 18, 1997.
Dr. Dorsey’s accomplishments, her
gifts to humanity, have been partially documented. There is more to be
remembered, especially the standards she set for those who would speak truth in
the United States of America. Future generations
can document her achievements more fully.
They and we can give honor and respect by trying to be as brave,
brilliant, and strong as she was.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
August 23, 2013
