Mississippi civil rights pioneer Brenda Travis, jailed at 15, dies at 81
By Jerry Mitchell | Originally published by Mississippi Today
Brenda Travis was 15 when she joined the Civil Rights Movement, deciding she could not “sit still and be silent.” She was subsequently beaten, jailed, expelled and ultimately sent away from Mississippi,
The McComb native, a self-described exile of the Mississippi movement, died Sunday at age 81.
When she was 10, the sheriff broke into her family’s house without knocking or a warrant and arrested her 13-year-old brother.
A vision flashed in her head of the photograph of Emmett Till’s beaten, battered and swollen body, she said in a 2007 interview posted to the Civil Rights Movement Archive website. “I became enraged and knew that one day I had to take a stand.”
That time began in 1961 when she was just 15, and she became the youth leader for Pike County’s NAACP. Local president C.C. Bryant had just welcomed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses to the area.
“I joined the NAACP and became involved in the movement to get people to vote. “But they were afraid,” she said in a 2013 interview published in the Huffington Post.
SNCC began to teach Black Mississippians how they could vote. First, they had to pay a poll tax and then they had to pass the test given by circuit clerks. The test was supposed to center on the Mississippi Constitution, but Travis recalled that it sometimes became an absurd question like “How many grains are in a bag of rice?”
SNCC soon began a series of protests in McComb. After a sit-in at Woolworth’s in August 1961 resulted in two arrests, SNCC members gathered. Moses had been beaten for helping two Black men try to register to vote, and his head was wrapped in gauze.
“They were asking people to volunteer, because they wanted to keep the momentum going,” Travis recalled. “And it was at that point that I knew that I could not sit still and be silent. So I volunteered to go to jail.”
On Aug. 30, 1961, she and two other SNCC volunteers purchased tickets and sat at the “all-white” lunch counter inside the Greyhound Bus station.
She spent a month in jail. “The Movement trained us very well,” she recalled. “They trained us how to survive, how not to go stir crazy. … Our survival technique was prayer and singing. … We had the jailhouse rocking.”
When she was finally released, she learned that civil rights leader Herbert Lee had been killed for working with SNCC.
She also learned that Berglund High School had expelled her. She stormed to the school and led a walk-out of more than 100 students, who sang “We Shall Overcome” as they marched to city hall and knelt in prayer.
They were beaten and so were SNCC leaders who accompanied them — Moses, Chuck McDew and Bob Zellner — who were arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Behind bars, Moses wrote, “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. … There is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg — from a stone that the builders rejected.”
Students continued protesting by refusing to return to school until Travis was allowed to re-enroll. School officials expelled those students, too.
SNCC started its own high school for the students. Moses taught math, Dion Diamond handled science, and McDew informed students about history.
“Nonviolent High” inspired the creation of “Freedom Schools” during 1964’s Freedom Summer.
Travis was sent to Oakley Training School, a juvenile detention center near Raymond.
“People say, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ but that’s not true,” she recalled. “The wound may have a scab over it, but deep within, it’s still sore. It’s still painful. When I was placed in reformatory school, nobody knew where I was, not even my attorney.”
She was released after six and a half months when she agreed to leave Mississippi. She finished high school in Connecticut and later attended the Tony Taylor School of Business in California.
“I still carry the blood-stained banner, and one day it will be all right,” she recalled in the 2007 interview.
Six years later, she started the Brenda Travis Historical Education Foundation in McComb and wrote a memoir, “Mississippi’s Exiled Daughter: How My Civil Rights Baptism Under Fire Shaped My Life.”
A half-century after the protest, district officials honored the protesting students and awarded Travis, a longtime civil rights veteran, an honorary degree.
“You know what the beauty of it is?” she told The Associated Press. “They made a scapegoat of me, but the students continued to come.”
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
