Musi Matimura

Nine students walked into a public library in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961 and asked for books. The library was for white people. Their own library did not have what they needed. They sat down and read. They were arrested for breach of the peace. For reading. 27th March 1961. The Tougaloo Nine — Meredith Anding, James Bradford, Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson, Albert Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce and Ethel Sawyer — students at Tougaloo College. They went first to the Black branch library and requested books that were not held there. Then they walked to the main public library on State Street and requested the same books. They were told to leave and go to the Black branch. They sat down at the tables and started reading. The police came. Breach of the peace. They spent about thirty-two hours in jail and were fined a hundred dollars each. The next day students at Jackson State held a prayer vigil for them and police broke it up with dogs and clubs. This is called the Jackson Read-In, and it is the first direct action of the Mississippi movement — before the Freedom Rides reached the state, before Medgar Evers's murder, before Freedom Summer. Nine students decided the opening move of the Mississippi civil rights movement would be requesting a book. The choice of target was not sentimental. A library is the purest possible demonstration. Nobody can argue that a library is about private property, or cleanliness, or protecting white women. It is a building full of public knowledge, paid for by everybody's taxes, that Black citizens were not allowed to enter. All nine finished their degrees. Several became teachers and professors. In 2011 Mississippi honoured them, fifty years on, in the state that had jailed them. The Jackson library is desegregated. One of the branches is named after Medgar Evers. Nine young people in good clothes, asking for a book.

In 1997, five old men were flown to the White House so that a President of the United States could apologise to them in person. They were the last survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis study. The oldest man to speak was ninety-four. He had been lied to by the United States government for forty years. Herman Shaw. The study ran from 1932 to 1972. Six hundred Black men in Macon County, Alabama — three hundred and ninety-nine of them with syphilis — were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were not treated. That was the point. The researchers wanted to watch the disease run its full course to death and then examine the bodies. When penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s, the men were deliberately kept away from it. The study's staff intervened to stop them being treated elsewhere, including through the draft board. It was ended in 1972 only because a whistleblower went to the press. By the time of the apology, only eight of the men were still alive. Five were well enough to travel. Herman Shaw stood at the podium in the East Room, at ninety-four, and spoke. He said the wounds that were inflicted could never be undone, but that he was there in the hope that it would never happen again and that it could begin to heal. He had been a farmer his whole life. He had gone to the clinic because he was told he was being cared for. The President apologised and said what the government had done was shameful. That is the whole story. Forty years of being watched. Twenty-five more years of nothing. Then an hour in a nice room, and five old men, and the word sorry. The Tuskegee survivors deserved more than an apology—they deserved to have what was done to them remembered. We created an ebook to keep these histories from being buried again savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…