Excellence in the Delta
I
am grateful to the administrators, faculty members and students of Mississippi
Valley State University for inviting me to speak at its 2016 Honors Convocation.
My topic is excellence in the Delta.
Although my brief remarks are addressed especially to students who will receive awards for
achievement, to young women and men who
have demonstrated that they made good
choices in using time and innate
intelligence to strengthen their minds, my words are directed to everyone. Yes, I salute students who have earned special
distinctions. I commend their use of common
sense to acquire uncommon knowledge. Their achievement, however, is not
isolated from the efforts of their unsung peers who are preparing themselves for a future in a world that is
increasingly assaulted by global changes and uncertainties. Remember that whether we are distinguished or
quite ordinary our lives and minds do matter.
After
many decades , I have come to know that excellence is often invisible, beyond measure,
and hidden in individual and collective efforts. Thus, we can speak of excellence in the
Mississippi Delta and at Mississippi Valley State University as part of a process of thinking and doing, of
work, of the being in the world that we call history. If we do not grasp that we all play various
roles in the production of what is to be commended in life, in the production
of excellence, we display a poverty of
intelligence and imagination .
I
use the word "excellence" to include the obsolete, 14th century
meaning of a favor or a kindness, because in the State of Mississippi and in the Delta
we are obligated to read both between and behind the lines. Excellence has many dimensions. The living text or spoken (oral) history of the Delta that unfolds year after
year provides an external reference for the invisible states of being that
consistently give shape to the indigenous music of the Delta --- the blues. It is in the lives of people who stayed in
the Delta, who did not or could not opt to participate in the Great Migration,
that we discover excellence as kindness. And
perhaps that kindness is a triumph of determination and will power. So, on this occasion, I speak of the ancestors and relatives of those being honored
today, of the people who lived the
realities of American Nightmare that is
a corrective for the myth of the
American Dream.
In my poetic imagination, the nightmare is a
man and a woman standing in the middle of July in the middle of a field , their
bodies glistening with sweat. They look
at the land from 360 angles and declare "Lord, Lord, there is no end to
it." Then, they resume chopping.
The woman and the man who haunt my imagination are the creators of lore
and wisdom that exceed what those of us
in institutions of higher learning spend years to understand. They have been written about in Kim Lacy Rogers's Life
and Death in the Delta, John Dittmer's Local
People: The Struggle for Civil Rights
in Mississippi, Sven Beckert's Empire
of Cotton: A Global History, K. C. Morrison's Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Insider Agitator, Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou
Hamer, and hundreds of books about
the peculiar history of the State of Mississippi and its Delta. The sacrifices, suffering, and moments of joy
the woman and the man endured have been partially documented. It is our obligation to continue documentation and to continue
remembering. What we must research, speak
and write about again and again, and transmit to a future is the man and the woman saying "Lord,
Lord, there is no end to it." They
did not define "it." They figured we would be savvy enough to figure
that out for ourselves. What I want
Mississippi Valley State students to never forget is this: in their defiance of
every ignoble effort to break and dehumanize them , the man and the woman
illuminated what excellence in the Delta is in actuality; it is the excellence of common sense and will power.
I shall draw attention to the power
of the will by noting a few facts about the life of
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 the women and the men 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. It is my belief that MVSU students know as much, whether they speak
out loud or meditate in silence.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Distinguished Honorary Professor
(2015-2017), Central China Normal University
