Will Stribling: The 70 year anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education ruling recently passed. What was it like hearing that news as a 14-year-old in Walls? Did you think that it was going to have an impact in Mississippi anytime soon? Did you think that you were going to be spending your high school years in desegregated schools?
Leslie McLemore: For me, it was very personal. When the decision was rendered, I was in the fields chopping cotton with some of my friends and my relatives. I remember, in particular, having a conversation with my double second cousin. We were figuring out the schools that we were going to attend. We were excited about the possibility of going to an integrated school. We thought in our 14 and 12-year-old minds that we would be going to these schools the following year. We had no idea it was going to take forever to desegregate the schools.
WS: Six years later when you went to college, Mississippi’s schools were still segregated. And it was then that you really got involved with the Civil Rights Movement. What was that like in those early years of the movement?
LM: I went off to college in 1960. I really should have finished high school two years prior. But I went off to college as a 20-year-old freshman. The timing was perfect. I was at Rust (College) between 1960-1964, which afforded me the opportunity to get involved in the movement. Before I arrived at Rust in 1960, there really hadn't been any organized, campus-wide civil rights activities on the campus. So I really got involved in campus life and the civil rights movement, which provided the very foundation for my life moving forward.
I had the freedom to read the study, and that's all I had to do. I got involved in the movement, got involved in voter registration. I had this unique opportunity to read, to reflect and think. I'm the first person in my family to graduate high school and the first person in my family to go to college. In 1960, no one had knocked on doors to get people to register to vote. No one had marched downtown to boycott the local theater in Holly Springs because black folk had to sit in the back. Rust College was a laboratory for me and so many others that were involved in the movement.
WS: How did your family feel about the stuff that you were doing? Was there a fear that you’d be subjected to the violence that many white people responded to civil rights organizing with?
LM: My mother was very fearful of my involvement in the movement. She didn't want anything to happen to her oldest child. But my grandfather, my mother's father, Leslie William, was supportive. My mother was very supportive, too, but my grandfather was very encouraging. He always said that I had the right to do what I was doing because we were fundamentally working on voter registration, and he believed in first class citizenship. He did not register to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but he clearly believed in first class citizenship. He thought that Black people should be registered to vote, and run for public office. In fact, he had the vision that one day Black folk would hold statewide office. In fact, he said that one day a Black person would be elected the governor of Mississippi. That has not happened yet. I still believe. I won't be around, but one day it will happen.
WS: Why do you think that hasn’t happened yet?
LM: V.O. Key wrote a book called “Southern Politics” back in 1949. Key talked about the fact that in 1949, black people were not registered to vote. They didn't serve in the legislature. They didn't serve in any public body. The fear of Black people assuming power and taking over public life is something that white folk feared in 1949, and obviously that is the great fear today. In 2024, a state that has 40% blacks in the population, there's not one Black statewide elected official. So that tells you something about this idea of the sharing of power, the struggle for power. So the struggle for power continues in 2024. And that is not going to change anytime soon. I mean, until Black people collectively decide that we really want to become much more active in the body politic in Mississippi and become registered voters and become much more active. We must do a better job of organizing ourselves, quite frankly.
WS: How do you feel about the young people who’ve been tasked with carrying the torch carried by you and the other people that made up the Civil Rights Movement?
LM: I feel optimistic that they have the smarts and the ability. I feel that the young people are much more self-centered than we were when I was growing up. I guess they can be, because we have given them the foundation to think much more about themselves as opposed to the larger community. But, when I was in college, I was not just getting an education for Leslie McLemore, I was getting an education to try to help other people. The young people don't quite have that same focus, that same mission in mind. My son Leslie McLemore II, who is brilliant, lives in Marietta, Georgia. He doesn't live in Mississippi. So many of our young Black, bright men and women leave Mississippi. Until we move off the base of being self centered and understand the importance of organizing, we're still going to have white, conservative statewide elected officials. Running for public office statewide, if you're Black in Mississippi, your chances of winning are few and far between. If we don't do the organizational stuff first, we will never get elected statewide. So if we register people to vote, if we engage in community education, if we do all the things that we know we have to do, we can elect people statewide. We can run for governor. We can run for the Senate. But there is no way in hell that we can win until we think organizationally about what we can do. We can have all the summits we wish to have on leadership, but until we talk about organizing in a very serious way from precinct to precinct statewide, then we are not going to have the effect and the impact that we should have.
WS: Going back to the anniversary of the Brown decision, what did you feel that day? What was it like reflecting on how your life turned out from then until now?
LM: I thought about my conversation with my cousin. I am 83, and she's 81. I have taken in the understanding that I don't have many more years left. I just think about the wisdom of my grandfather, Leslie William, and the support that I had of my mother, Christin William McLemore and what they were able to do for me and for my late brother Eugene and for the rest of my siblings. They gave us opportunities that a lot of young people in my hometown of Walls did not have. I reflect on a daily basis, but with Brown in particular, I really thought about that conversation I had with my cousin in the cotton fields about where we were going to attend elementary school. We have made tremendous progress in Mississippi, but we have so, so far to go.
.png)
