Almost 60 years ago, 20-year-old Marvin Griffin joined the efforts of the Council of Federated Organizations during Freedom Summer. He and his cohorts fought to help Black citizens overcome poll taxes and literacy tests and register to vote, while facing harassment, threats and possible arrest.
Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science senior Dylan Wiley will share Griffin’s story at 6 p.m. Wednesday during the Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration at Sandfield Cemetery, as a way to continue Griffin’s work.
“Black history is our history,” Wiley said. “It’s a part of America. It’s a part of our culture. It’s a part of our world. That’s why we need to continue to fight the good fight and keep going. The job’s not finished. That’s why we keep doing these projects.”
MSMS history teacher Chuck Yarborough said Wiley, along with other students in his African American studies class, will portray local historical Black figures in dramatic performances, commemorating the anniversary of Black emancipation in Lowndes County in 1865.
Performances will cover about 160 years of Black history, he said, including marking the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer and this year’s 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that integrated public schools.
“When we bring people into the cemetery and bring attention to the history that’s contained there, it encourages people to preserve the cemetery itself,” Yarborough said. “And after all, what we’re really doing is we’re celebrating the contributions of people that have helped to shape this community over the past 160 or so years.”
There will also be live music and dance performances by the Columbus High School Choir, MSMS Blue Notes and the Blue Diamondz and Blu Knights step teams.
While celebrations of emancipation on May 8 originally started in 1866, Yarborough said, those celebrations faded in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2006, then-MSMS student Renita Holmes approached him asking to put together a project focused on Black history.
Together, he and Holmes organized a revived version of tradition, which evolved into the current Emancipation Celebration.
Holmes will be a special guest at this year’s Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration, Yarborough said, leading a performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Another special guest, Peter Norall, will also be present. Norall personally helped with Freedom Summer Black voting registration efforts in Columbus.
Ivie Kirkland, a 17-year-old MSMS senior, said she is going to be performing in the Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration for the first time this year. She will be portraying Flora Stringer, wife of Dr. Emmett Stringer.
Both, Kirkland said, were passionate about voter registration for the Black community, helping to found the Columbus NAACP chapter and organize responses to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
This project, Kirkland said, has helped her to connect with local Black history in a much more personal way, since she has met people in town who remember Dr. Stringer as their dentist and friend.
“I love that I get to do this project that is a part of Black history, that’s something that I can really connect to as well, that reminds me that I’m a part … of this Black history,” Kirkland said.
Dr. Stringer will be memorialized on a Freedom Trail marker by the Mississippi Humanities Council later this year, Yarborough said.
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