Gloria Dickerson (Photo by Justin Hardiman)
We Integrated an All-White School. Then We Were Evicted.
After Gloria Dickerson's parents enrolled their children in an all-white Mississippi school, they were shot at, forced off the plantation where they lived, and helped by Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights leaders as they rebuilt their lives.
Youth nonprofit leader Gloria Dickerson, 72, remembers the consequences of integrating the all-white school in rural Drew, Mississippi.
This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
My mom and dad talked a lot about how they were dissatisfied with the way they were living. My mom kept saying, “We’re living in poverty, and I don’t like it.” She said her mom, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother had lived in poverty. So, she said, “When I had my first child, I decided my kids will not live in poverty. They’re going to find a way to lift themselves out of poverty.” She wanted us to go to school every day. And back in the day of the plantations, children didn’t go to school all fall. They had to get out during the fall, pick the cotton, and then go back after all the cotton came out of the field. And some days, my mom said, she would cry because the plantation owner had come by and said, “Well, your kids can’t go to school today. They’ve got to get out in those fields and pick that cotton.”
Most of the school districts had not been obeying what Brown v. Board of Education had said. They weren’t integrating the schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 said they were going to cut off the funding to the schools unless they integrated. So the Drew Separate School District sent out freedom of choice papers, and each family could decide what school they wanted their children to go to. We children had heard Mama talk so much about education, so we said this is our opportunity. We told her we wanted to go to the all-white Drew High School. She said she wanted us to be sure, and we were. Mom and Dad went out and signed the freedom of choice papers. The next morning, the plantation overseer came out. He honked his horn and called my daddy. He said he heard my parents put us in the all-white school, and he told my dad he was going to go to the school with him and take us out. My dad told my mama what the plantation overseer had said. And my mama said, “No, we’re not going to do it. He can’t tell me where to send my kids to school.”
Maybe two or three nights later, my mom and dad said, they saw a lot of lights coming down this dark road, like car lights. And the next thing they knew, they were just shooting all in the house. And Mama started screaming and telling us to get on the floor. And we got on the floor. They were trying to kill us for choosing this school, but she said, “This is not going to stop us.” Then they came out and said, “We’re going to evict you. You’ve got 30 days to get out of this house.” And Mama and Daddy had no idea where we were going to go.
My mom was friends with Fannie Lou Hamer at the time. They were really close. Somehow she heard that Mom and Dad had put their kids in Drew High School, and she sent Mr. Charles McLaurin out to the house to find out what was going on. And they said, “We’re going to help you find a house. We’re going to help you get food. We’re going to help you get clothes. We’re going to try to take care of you.” They started sending us money, and the next thing we know, they sent somebody to find us a house. He posed as a preacher and said, “I’m trying to buy a house.” They sold him the house, and then we moved into the house. And once we got in the house, it was like, oh my God, a dream come true. We had a home. Now we had indoor plumbing. We had water. We had things we never thought we’d ever have.
