Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Views of Black History
Just as I was about to write this column, I had a flashback. I was just closing my Word document on the story on Dr. Charles Taylor and noticed that it was three pages long. And I flashed back to the 1990s when I would occasionally write for the late Betty Franklin-Hammonds and The Madison Times. It was my first brush up with an editor, you could say. I remember Betty pleading with me, “Keep it to one page. Keep it to one page.” And I chuckle now considering how long my stories can be. How I miss Betty sometimes.
Anyway, my view — or should I say perspective — of Black History has changed over the years. During my primary and secondary school years spent in parochial schools in Milwaukee, Black History didn’t even exist save for some references to slavery to explain the Civil War. And in some ways that carried on save for the civil rights demonstrations — and the ugly white backlash — that I would see on the news as a teenager culminating in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And then in college, I got involved in Project Self-Help & Awareness led by the late John Kinsman, a farmer from Lime Ridge. I made many a trip to Mississippi and learned about the Civil Rights Movement as we sat around and talked at night. In rural Mississippi, there wasn’t much else to do back then.
And then I started taking classes from the UW-Madison Afro-American Studies classes in 1973-1974 with Dr. Findley Campbell and Dr. Gerald Thomas serving as my professors among others.
And then for two years, from 1975-1977, I attended Alcorn State University a HCBU located in Lorman, Mississippi.
It was then that I started to really become aware of Black History and culture through interactions with my classmates and courses that I took at the college, reading the works of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes for the first time as well as other Black authors from the South. It was a foundational experience in my life.
While I returned to UW-Madison in the fall of 1977 to complete my degree in Political Science, by the late spring of 1978, I had made plans to return to Port Gibson, Mississippi to work on an independent study, supervised by Dr. Robert Booth Fowler — I needed three more credits to graduate — by working on the independent candidacy of Evan Doss for Congress. If elected, Evan would have been the first Black representative to the U.S. Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction. We had our own chance to make Black History during the same year that Charles Evers — Medgar Evers’ brother — ran for the U.S. Senate.
We were a hand-to-mouth campaign. I think Evan raised $25,000 for the run. He put me up in an un-air-conditioned rooming house — it was summer in Mississippi — in Port Gibson and I had $25 per week to live on plus five dollars or so that my sweet mother would send to me in her weekly letters to keep me connected to family. I did everything from design and silk-screen campaign posters and bumper stickers to write position papers for the unions and others Evan was trying to win endorsements from. And for a couple of months, I lived on J.R. Lynch Drive in Jackson, Mississippi in an RV and managed our campaign office a block from Jackson State University.
The campaigns of Charles Evers and Evan had attracted national news coverage. I remember sitting in a hotel room in Jackson with the late Ed Bradley who was filming a piece on the campaigns for CBS’ 60 Minutes. That was pretty cool.
Our campaign came in third although I think we came in first in terms of the number of votes received per money spent. And I feel that we paved the way for Rep. Bennie Thompson who represents the same area and is now chair of the House January 6 Committee.
For the first time, the Democrats couldn’t take the Black vote for granted and out-conservative the Republican candidate. John Stennis Jr. lost that election and eventually the district began electing Black representatives to Congress.
And that is my little contribution to Black History. I’ve always felt good about that.