WE MUST UNCOVER THIS HISTORY - Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

[Music] my mom told me a story of my granddad going to the local tractor shop and my granddad goes there he was the owner of the the one of the Cotton Gins here in Mount Bayou but he goes to the local tractor shop there in Cleveland Mississippi stands in the back wait for his turn to go to the counter and they had a new boy in the back in the back behind the counter working there so he didn't know most of the customers but yet he was young and he was working back there with them there were other people at the count of my granddad standing back there with his hat on waiting for his turn to come up and all of a sudden the little young boy hollered to the back and saw my granddad standing back there with his hat on he said hey take your hat off so my granddad my mom said just stood there with the part in his hand was standing there waiting for his time and uh certainly he's probably was thinking I know they not talking to me and uh he says again he said did you hear what I said take your hat off say about that time my granddad said they grabbed the little young guy one of the persons took him and pulled him up against the wall and said uh don't talk to him like that that's not he's from Mount Bayou and that was the thought that they had of the people in Mountain body was no more racism basically because they saw people in Mount bias green they saw him as money people that people that succeeded and they had a great respect people at my own body and mentored some of the other people so you can understand that the relationship even though uh there was a white black relationship black don't touch white white don't touch black Mound body was different [Music] thank you foreign [Music] Museum and uh we're here to tell the story of mile by Mississippi because we feel it's very very important that people know and not just for people from Mountain body but nationally they should know uh the story of Mount Bayou now there are a couple of parts in in what we what we have in this Museum when we do a tour we show the differences in how people came up in this country on the other side we have a collection that we Showcase in this museum by Dr Alvin Simpson Dr Simpson was a professor at all coin he's retired now in Atlanta but he had been collecting African-American artifacts all his life and uh once he realized that there was going to be a museum here in Mount Bayou and it being an all-african-american town and the history of Mount bayou he found that that would be the perfect place to put his collection and so we have that and he was offered a a substantial sum of money to to bring it take it somewhere else but he brought it he preferred to bring it here because this should be the place that it should be on the other side you see a lot of disparity in how blacks came up in this country and you'll see a lot of denigrating a lot of negative images on the other side over there a lot of postcards with with the n-word a lot of uh black babies a lot of negative stereotypes all through that part of the museum if you tour this museum at the same time you see those images there when we bring you to the other side you see the progress and the prosperity that blacks were having here in Mount Bayou Mountain Bible was founded by interested men and women that were former slaves on the plantation of Davis Bend Davis Ben was owned by the Confederate president's Brother Joseph Davis and because of that uh they because of some of the things that they did differently on those plantations one was utilizing an organism they call this type of utopian type society which allowed one of them for the the people on the plantation to educate themselves and so they didn't stop them from being educated and because of that um Montgomery one of the founders ended up uh being educated through the law library of uh Joseph Davis and they in turn uh began to educate other people within the camp so these people were highly educated highly functional in Commerce highly functional in industrialism commercialism and they ran the plantation in a very pristine manner and so much so that they had the highest rate of cotton there than anywhere else agriculturally just all around very highly educated because they didn't go from like grade one grade two grade three they went from I'm educating you and then you passes only your children and your other children and your grandchildren and and all of that and so it was a passing on of education and not just going through and I've made it like I got a degree I'm not going to be educated anymore but education became a life and those people that were educated there friends when they finally had had to leave and go and make their own uh country uh their own City and they call it their country they came to this place a hundred miles north of Vicksburg it was Heavy uh swamp areas and that's where they bought this land from was the train uh organization at that time the train organization really had a problem selling it to other people but they thought maybe we can offer this to the blacks and maybe because they came from Africa and they can deal with malaria and mosquitoes better than anybody else let's sell it to them they did but these people that that came the montgomers and and and uh the davises and the greens all of the rest of them that came they drained the swamp and this was the real swamp draining they actually drained the swamp land and they they uh strategically Drew up how to do it and within so many years Mound value became a thriving powerful City there was a time even while they were draining that swamp even while they were building Mount baia that uh Montgomery uh would would make a statement to them uh that why are you having a problem because many of them did some of them could not see what he saw the vision and he would say didn't you do this on behalf of your master didn't you do this because your master told you to do it can you not do it for yourself and your children that comes behind you and as he told them that and he would tell them as Moses did when he was leading his leading the children of Israel out of Egypt into the promised land there's a scripture where he says now stand still and steady yourself and look forward and go on go on and this is one of the things that Montgomery had to do to the people of Mound by and they did but now this happened in 1887 but by 1907 the president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt by the by the invitation of now Isaiah T Montgomery the founder but yet he was known across the land as a highly and well-respected person these guys were so highly educated that they invited the president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt who came and uh I used to ask the question what was the name of the train that Roosevelt wrote and my answer is he wrote choo choo one so he brought you to one to Mountain Bayou and uh he stood on the back of the train and he gave this message and he was emotional highly emotional about it he would make statements that like and at that time they would look at blacks and their color and say they're 100 black or if the color the tone moved back they say they're 80 black or they uh they 50 black based on their color and so his statement was that these are a hundred percent black and look at what they did and he called Mound by a coin the phrase Jewel of the Delta which we use right now Mound value is the Jewel of the Delta and Theodore Roosevelt gave us that and so when he came and corn Mound by The Jewel of the Delta he actually gave us a spurt here in Mound by to become that Jewel to to really show that Jewel and so and the reason that he did that when he looked up and down it was written that when he looked up and down that road and he saw white picket fences around huge homes which was built uh uh first and second and some on the third floor homes and they were magnificent and and and the the money that was spent in my own body was was high because there were more millionaires per capita in Mount Bayou than any other city in Mississippi because cotton had done this so he would tell that story and he would look at mile by and say this is the Jewel of the Delta and years later he would go down such as speaking at the YMCA in DC and other places and he would say you all need to take note of the people in Mount Bayou and what they did some of the people from Black Wall Street that started the things at Black Wall Street in Tulsa came through Mound Bayou there's parts of history that some of the key people at Black Wall Street were married and mentored by Isiah T Montgomery we had the starting of the Negro Business League through the people in Mound buyer Booker T Washington utilized at the National Convention for the national negro Business League the keynote speaker 12 times azer T Montgomery was the keynote speaker 12 different years Asia T Montgomery so that says a whole lot about our founder our founder must have been a well spoken person to be able to uh be utilized 12 times to be a keynote speaker at the Negro Business League mountain bike was different because people saw green people saw the uh the the six Cotton Gins that mountain Bayou had because the Cottons here in Mount Bayou was the most premium cotton in the whole world as a matter of fact at one time Mountain body set the price of cotton the cotton set the mound by a cotton set the price on Cotton because it was the most premium cotton there are banners these banners said Bolivar County leads the world in Cotton production of course when they make the banners they're not going to say my own body but people will come from all over everywhere just to get the mound by your seal on their cotton the whole peripheral Cleveland Shelby everywhere else the farmers will come I need my cotton gin and Mound by his soul that cotton can get the stamp Mound by you we had uh all types of uh stores up to 60 businesses were recorded at one time in Mound Bayou where people would come from all of the plantations from all around on the weekend just to come to mount Bayou because it was a place where people could live and live freely people in mountain bike didn't have to leave Mound Bayou it was that haven that you know you could go within just the circumference of the city and and get all of the things that you needed in the city right here even the bottling company in Mound Bayou that Bottling Company it's not down in history that it started Coca-Cola but that's what has been said by the people here in Mumbai of course people wouldn't give blacks the credit for starting something like Coca-Cola but this was said all of my life that Coca-Cola got started in Mount Bayou Mississippi and of course we you'll see these bottles that's that's here at this Museum that these bottles come from Mound by your Bottling Company and the bottling company was later sold to somewhere else but we had our own Bottling Company here in Mound Bayou in Booker T Washington and and the founder of mountain body would go other places and talk about it in his speech in 1912 Mr Montgomery began to mention uh this as well in his speech about the bottling company in Mound by now Booker T Washington talks about and some of the older people that even I ran into uh as a as a child that talked about Mountain value used to smell so good when you come to mind by your smell so good because there was a bread company here and the name of it was Wonder Bread it started in Mount Bayou the book that Booker T Washington wrote the town owned by Negroes and he talks about Mount Bayou extensively he talks about Wonder Bread getting started in Mound by Mississippi these are important facts but they were disregarded by the regular media disregarded by historians because a lot of it came from Mao Bayou we irregardless of all of that mound by you still has that history and that history has to be exposed such as the oil Meal which is one of the greatest opening and the greatest accomplishment at that time for African Americans in this country when Booker T Washington came and was the keynote speaker at the opening of that mound by an oil meal and they worked so hard against the people in Mountain Bay to stop the success of the oil mill so much so that finally even through the efforts of the people of Mound Bayer to put white people out front some of their white friends out front to keep them from coming against that they bought that and they decided we still are going to stop utilizing the people in mountain bike so they couldn't sail outside of Mount Bayou and so they white capped they what we call White Cap they stopped the organization from operating this is our powerful history Booker T Washington Mentor somebody named Charles Banks who Banks when he came opened a bank and mount Bayou then had a really a a strong financial uh peace that kept Mount by a rolling Charles Banks was a genius in finances and they recognized that they knew it they closed our bank they closed our bank in Mount Bayou and the reason that Mississippi who was not regulated by the federal at that time closed out bank because there was some type of outside agitations that had a problem and they wrote the state of Mississippi and they said now listen let's let's make sense of this how can you allow a person or people that hold Assets in the bank to record 100 asset for their Holdings and they are only 80 people they're not a hundred percent people if they're not a hundred percent people why can't they record a hundred percent of asset and so I guess the state of Mississippi say well you gotta you got a point because we've been saying that they're not 100 people so they closed the bank because of the devastation that was coming from racism there were certain rules and certain laws and unspoken rules but yet spoken certain things that you do certain things that you don't do and people knew how to live by those laws [Music] there are several variations of the story about Emmett Till but when he came of course being a young man from Chicago he didn't have any inhibitions about just being a a kid and um and so some things were taken the wrong way when he went to Money Mississippi and which was a very very and still is a very racist area uh there's some there's some things going on there right now that I can tell you that are extremely racist that people are experiencing right now in in that area and it's not that far from here you know so um so there's really some pockets of areas that are very racist so I can understand that when he went there as a kid from Chicago and not being inhibited at all uh that once he got there just just one wrong move or one move that was interpreted wrong uh could have put him in danger and so they took him out of that out of his bed in the middle of the night and and beat him and slashed him and and then beat him some more and I think and then shows in the movie they shot him and um so he was thrown in the Tallahatchie River and they uh a few days later they fished them out uh because he was uh tied down with a 200 pound gen fan and uh but but somehow his legs of course surfaced and they found that body they pulled them out and um and then he had he had when they saw the body uh it was it was really tough identifying it because they had because of the time being in the river and also the fact that the way they beat him it was just uh you know there was all types of uh contusions and things around his body but the one thing that he did have in his possession and on his finger was his father's ring and they were you able to use that as another way of identifying him because he had that ring on Mao Bayou was known uh throughout the North Mississippi area as being a Haven for blacks we had sort of like an underground railroad since we had a um a railroad railroad that came through here it was built on a rail line uh people knew in Mississippi black people at least knew in Mississippi if you were ever in trouble anywhere else in the state that if you made it to mile Bayou you could you could make it to safety and a lot of times people that have many stories about people who came from different places in Mississippi and came here and got here and they got on the train and went somewhere else just to get safe from whatever was going on after that happened with Emmett of course his mother came down she wanted to come to the trial and they had to have a place to stay so not only did made me till stay here but the black press and the black public officials all stayed in Mound Bayou because in the Mississippi Delta there was nowhere else where a black person at that time could have safe accommodations when that trial happened it was a natural place especially because trm Howard was already involved in the Civil Rights Movement he was he was a fiery orator and he would go around the country not only mentoring civil rights leaders here but he was also mentoring civil rights leaders in other states and other places and he was he was a nationally known figure and he would uh end up inviting Mamie till Mobley uh to come to stay in Mound Bayou and uh and he hit her out in his home he had a large home my dad said and he talked about his home he talked about uh how he would hide her there and they talk about uh the security that he had he had people that that were security but yet when he drove his car you would he would have uh he would have guns in his car in places that nobody else could ever find of course he will stop the many times when he would cover for a manateeel would drive her from here to to uh to the court or from here to in for investigation there was a caravan of armed guards taking her to and from the courthouse and uh matter of fact my dad tells me they would lay her down in the back seat put a cover over her and take her back and forth because they had snipers out uh ready for them going back and forth to the courthouse Dr trm Howard I would say instigated a lot of the things that went National about the Emmett Till and mamateo Mosley investigations of that case and so Dr Howard was like in the background making things happen he made calls he knew people and no wonder Miss Miss uh mayman was able to make some telephone calls because if you call Dr Howard he knew who knew who knew who that knew somebody else that knew who would be able to tell somebody else to tell them to deal with this and those are the types of things that you needed during that time and that's the reason why Emmett Till body didn't go in the ground in Mississippi because if it had gone in the ground in Mississippi we would not have had the Civil Rights Movement and it was because they took that body the way it was and sent it to Chicago Illinois where she could expose that body to the world that's the reason that we had civil rights if there was not a civil rights movement then there would not have been appalled in that and then we can send that all the way back to contribute that to the work that Dr trm Howard did during the time of the Emmett Till trials mainly teal uh not only she did not come when she came to mountain bike she did not come to a strange place there is a family there are family members that are still here that are related to May Matteo even though she was hiding out at trm Howard's house she made her way through the community she was able to talk to her relatives she was able to to later on come back and revisit malabaya and Go by different people homes and talk to different people about what actually happened you know what's reported in newspapers and what actually happens sometimes can be different and she talked about how important it was for the whole world to see what they did in Mississippi she released her son 's death to be a seed planted for the rights of African Americans across this country she released that and she said how she thought her son had to die so that these things would happen she changed her life to be able to come the rest of her life and to just talk about the rights of African Americans we were offered a collection from that made me till uh women of the movement story when they separated the sets they gave the DuSable Museum and uh the main teal house that they're going to refurbish the set that was used for Mississippi we have here now we have that ring here in that museum that they use in the film we have the bed that him it was taken out of in the movie and uh so most of those things uh we are putting together for uh another part of the tour you know you have Mount Bayou you have the other side and then you'll have the the Emmett Till Story the women of the movement story here at this Museum in Mound Bayou the uh Knights and Daughters of Tabor fraternity put together their nickels and dimes across the country and their secret fraternity and they built for the first time where blacks could walk through the front door of a hospital the taborian hospital in Mount Bayou and thus you have Dr t r m Howard coming into Mound Bayou and Dr trm Howard coming to be not only the chief surgeon but the medical director for taborian Hospital Dr trm Howard Will Go On and began to build up Mount Bayou he was an entrepreneur across the street he would put a zoo then he would also build a similar place to taborian hospital called the Friendship Clinic before then he had the green parrot in which was a restaurant and people would enjoy the green parody hen but he would also build this big Olympic-sized swimming pool across the street and young people with all over would come and jump off of the high diving board to low diving board and just have a good time right here in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s would you believe black people were able to not be discriminated at an Olympic-sized public swimming pool the only place that you'll find it in Mississippi and would you believe that Dr r.m Howard still had time to be a doctor he was such a wonderful doctor that even the whites would have him to come and see personally their family members uh it was all known that of course at night that he would go and visit some of the other people but yet they couldn't they wouldn't I guess come to mount bayonore but they paid him to come to be doctors for their family members as well uh he was a he was a very uh Jazzy man he was he was a man of my father said because my dad would come here in 1953 and begin to work for him himself uh because he had hired Mega Evers and mega Evers would go out and finally go to work with the NAACP which Dr Howard was working with of course he was also had become the president of the Mississippi chapter of the Negro Business League as well he also started these was doing businesses he was also bringing businesses to Mound by and my my father Herman Johnson came and worked for them as well and so then I'm getting now the the story of Herman Johnson talking about Dr trm Howard he says to me that Dr Howard built everything large he did everything Lodge he grew everything large dad said that all of his watermelons was large he said he had corn that was larger than everybody else corn everything was large what he did and when he did it he did it large uh the way I got to my body is uh that uh my aunt lives here and uh I heard of all African-American City uh that we were black people jumping off the diving board like white people were and all that and no other place in in the southern part of the uh the states that I lived in enter the southern states and uh I'm saying I want to go to the place so I came here to visit my own body and that's how I got stuck so that's the way I got to mount by and then I went to school at Southern University of Baton Rouge Louisiana and uh my uh director of my department here when I finished school in business she uh asked me uh books I go and I told New York and Chicago and she said well I know you're going back to eight you got a wife in my body so I came to mount Bayou and uh she told me to see Dr Howard I saw Dr Howard and you see I got a job for you and the job that he had put me right then was the uh with Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company that Medgar Evers had just left and that was the position that he had before he went uh or sent to the state by Dr Howard as the field director for the nwacp so whatever the position that I took and I I worked with him and uh and matter of fact in the position that I had I also served pretty much a secretary for many of his organizations because he had several organizations that he had and he had both meetings in the office of Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance company so I was involved with him in a lot of these meetings and I have copies of somebody's handwritten notes that he took on a speeches that he made around and interesting things about him he wrote the speeches out at the same time he was conducting his other boarding meetings all the same time and never been missing the beat and I have pages of that but alcohol oh let me just uh he was my boss but it was a pleasure working with him he was he was an awesome person that would that everything he touched grew B now there are a lot of stories about how he why how he left here and uh even in the black in the book of the black Maverick they talk about the different ways the people said he left you and he said he left in the coffin and all that kind of thing but at least the the thing and it got so tight on him that they and they'd put the word out that they were going to kill him and he knew that nothing would be done to any white person that killed the black person so he he uh he uh moved on out and uh started a business in Chicago the other things I think a lot of people don't know is that Virginia Hoover and and Dr Howard had a I mean they had a thing they were always on each other because even the killing here for for like for Emmett Till the the FBI didn't do what they were supposed to have done and and Dr Howard talked about it and Jessica who was trying to do whatever he could to tear him down the interesting thing is that and I saw this in an article in the newspaper J Edgar Hoover praised him for what he had done in Mississippi and Dr Howard so I thought that was interesting and I thought there was something that people should know because nobody talks about that too much the museum that we started as as African-American in inertia Now by that so much history in all the museums around the country so many of them have not touched upon all the catastrophes that black people have gone through there are so many things that that we want to expand this Museum for example the black church there's so much that the black church has done for our black people's advancement that is not still not being told from the Underground Railroad to the Civil Rights struggle to where we are even and killed in the bombing and of the churches all that time the church has been involved in the safe haven to get us to where we are and all those things I'm saying that that we need to talk about that people need to know about that we don't have in all the other museums for example uh the cotton gin all of the inventions that the black people had needed to to use in order to better their condition and somebody else getting the name for it Eli wouldn't have didn't we know that he didn't invent it the cotton gin was invented by black people but they gave him the credit but done it because he was white but there were so many things that we invented that a lot of people don't know about and even if you know about it we didn't get credit for all these things we just need for us to know what we have done in order to get where we are that we didn't get credit for and I just think the more it's talked about the better we understand and appreciate ourselves because the white people have tried to keep us from appreciating ourselves and they try to make us want to look white like them until you know a few years ago when when uh that somebody said uh black is beautiful you know people didn't start appreciating themselves until then what happened and and uh we feel that they intend to do basically the same thing they did to Black Wall Street and and probably reason we don't hear about it too much because it didn't do it but anyways somehow we found out about it when the horses came in I understand the time the lights are off in the city and they were going to drive in and do whatever you want to do to it but we had found out about it and turn the lights on and had the goblin going over in one of those houses and people on top of houses all around it turned their lights off and started shooting and the people on the horses playing all about they turned around my back and then they came back so that's why we're still here otherwise we don't know what they would have done another thing a lot of people may or may not know but it is in the history book The Mountain by you for many years had the best breed of cotton in the world not just in Mississippi in the world now there's a story behind that that people don't talk about too much the reason they were able to have that best creative cotton is because the way the founders of non value got here and who they were when they got here black people have always been smart even the slaves that came over they were smart and that's why white people didn't want them to communicate with each other because they don't want them to know what they knew they didn't want them to share their information with others and teach them when when when the black people at Davis being and and and the uh the uh slaves on David's bed they were not only able to slip and read but the but but Davis allowed them and not only allowed them but provided books for them to read and write and they got so smart until they were able to run the stores negotiate the land by the cotton sell the cotton about everything they were able to have the books so when the Union Army came in and and started destroying all the white folk uh land the land had been turned over to the black boat so they owned the property for a while and then they uh and you know later on they came back and took it all back but by that time the black people knew how to do things and they found it my value and they survived and did a whole lot of things that they were doing in other places and that's why they were able to have even white folk who around was slipping that cotton into my body to get the mile by tag on it because it's the best grade of cotton in the world so those are kind of things that not only people don't know but if they do know they try to keep it quiet there was so much history I don't know if it's in the point and talk about that but maybe it is the point of talking about that because the more we talk about the more people understand how our history has been has been fired tried to keep out of this real history books that's being taught into the uh into the schools for example when Dad came here but when it came to go over here and picked up the history book to see how much about my body and he couldn't find it went to the index and it said my value and it had just a sentence in there about my body they didn't even happen to hear the book about the history of anything about how my body was founded and all of that so that's why I tried to tell said to everybody if you want to know the history of yourself you have to find it somewhere else you won't find it in the history books that's being told in the schools then that that's the way the defining history of black people is that you have to go over the search for it from from history books that have been written by black people uh uh or some other person that held the interest of us and heart and I mean there are some many books out and we have some here that share the uh introduction to to the struggles that we've gone through in others get where we are now you know and I'm not just saying the strongest of what we have gone through all most of the time all the all of our lives that we've been here for the most part they've been against my own body but she had to struggle and we and we had a saying that we had to do 10 or 15 times more in order to get what we got than other towns in in in in the county I've I've had quite a bit I could have a 300 page book if somebody wanted to write it so I know we don't have time to do that I just think about all the things that we've tried to do here in Mountain body and the struggle we've had to get to where we are in Mount value after the initial number of years for about 60 some years they've done everything they could to prevent but the struggle that the white people are doing right now is trying to stop us from voting and we know that's wrong but they want to try their own and let me just say what I've said to so many people around it's the same thing as many years when when the black truck drivers how they did him in California King and he said okay we all just get along this country would be a whole lot better place if we all work together [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Mound Bayou Museum

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Id: YTebOWnfEiI

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2022