The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science senior had written a spoken word poem called “White Black” to perform at Saturday’s annual Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration — an annual commemoration of the day federal troops arrived in Columbus in 1865 and told the last remaining slaves they were free.
Jones and 17 other students in MSMS teacher Chuck Yarborough’s African American History Course put together the production as part of a research project on historic African-American figures from Columbus, and particularly those buried in Sandfield Cemetery. The students wrote scripts based on their lives to perform at Saturday’s event in between traditional songs with MSMS’s student-run Voices in Harmony gospel choir.
MSMS has hosted the performance off and on for 15 years, Yarborough said, with the production gaining more and more recognition over the years and culminating this past year with it being featured in HBO’s film “Our Towns,” a feature-length documentary on American towns.
This year’s production is set up with a stage and microphones that carry the students’ voices throughout the cemetery. Joining the MSMS students this year are members of the Columbus High School choir, directed by Doug Browning, and the Mississippi State University Department of Music Jembe Den percussion ensemble, which is directed by Robert Damm and which performs traditional African songs, Yarborough said.
It’s a far cry from the first year Yarborough’s students put it on, when only a dozen students performed and a mere eight audience members showed up for their second performance.
“We had more performers than we did audience,” Yarborough laughed. “It’s (great) to see that it’s been valued by students who have helped make it grow, and the community has responded.”
The students, many of whom will be dressed as historical figures from Columbus, said they’ve enjoyed getting a look into local African-American history and culture.
“I think it’s very interesting and very powerful to recognize the importance Mississippi had in the freedom and the emancipation of slavery … and on the United States as a whole,” said senior Jacob McGee — who is not in the African American history class, but who Jones “recruited” to help him perform in the production. “Because when you think of Civil Rights, you think of Selma, Chicago, all these other places. Civil rights is right here. Civil rights is at home. All the Civil Rights movements that happened, from (the Underground Railroad) to Martin Luther King, they were right here in Mississippi.”
The characters the students portray are business owners, reverends and teachers, and the stories they tell include those of figures like William I. Mitchell, the first Black principal of Union Academy, to Henry Edwin Baker Jr., the third Black student to be admitted to the US Naval Academy and an examiner at the US Patent Office who worked to promote Black inventions.
Madison Meeks, who runs the Voices in Harmony class with fellow senior Niyah Lockett, said joining the production was “probably the best decision I’ve made this year.”
“I think it’s just reaffirmed a lot of things for me, that Black people aren’t a monolithic people, we’ve had different journeys,” she said. “… Everything wasn’t rainbows, but everything wasn’t stormy skies either. We had some success stories even in the midst of our storms, and I think that’s been the best part of this African American history course … to know that throughout all of the hardships and especially here in Columbus, Black people thrived. They had businesses, they had success stories, they founded schools, and it’s just so great to know and learn.”
Yarborough said one of the things he’s tried to instill in students is that all history is local — which seems to be something Jones has taken to heart.
“What we talk about a lot in African American history is African-American history is American history,” Jones said. “It’s woven in, and this program shows that it’s not just American history — African American history is this community’s history.”
He pointed out the character he portrays (in addition to reciting his poem) is Rev. Jesse F. Boulden, a politically active minister in the 19th Century who worked all over the country, starting churches, raising funds to help local Black communities and even starting the first petition in Mississippi to grant African Americans the right to vote. According to information Yarborough provided to The Dispatch, Boulden was a Columbus resident who gave the first Republican address by an African American at the Lowndes County Courthouse.
“That story’s not unique,” Jones said. “There’s so many other people who this program celebrates that did amazing things and pushed and fought for change, and we hope that by coming out here and performing, we’re living up to those hopes that they had, the dreams that they established, and we’re carrying them on.”
In addition to attending the event, audience members can livestream it on Saturday at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84432811134.
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