CRCL: Origin and Development

 

It all started with condoms. Even as early on as our first summer in Oxford, Jake and I were furious about the effects of a well-entrenched mantra of abstinence-only sexual education (Mississippi is the only state in which teenage pregnancy is on the rise - this is all too apparent when you monitor the halls during a class change at Jim Hill), and wanted to create a space in the building where students could speak freely after school about things they were prevented or dissuaded from discussing during the school day. However, it was apparent that - as newcomers and outsiders - it would be inappropriate (and perhaps ineffective) to start imposing a comprehensive sex ed viewpoint upon the children of a community we were here to serve - not evangelize. So, when the Mississippi Learning Institute (MLI) - a foundation affiliated with Jackson State University - offered $800 start-up budgets for teachers interested in creating an all-freshman extracurricular at Jim Hill, Jake and I decided to shelve our personal agendas, and secure the “safe space” aspect of our after-school ambitions. We created a group entitled the “Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Club” (CRCL) - “Civil Rights” to appeal to the historical motherlode we were knee-deep in by being situated in Jackson, MS; “Civil Liberties” to allow the process of cultural criticism to be pluralized, dehistoricized, and - frankly - more diverse in context. To fill the room, Jake recruited his freshman IB students to join, later realizing that their community service requirements made CRCL an attractive after-school venue. In all honesty, Jake and I figured it would be matter of weeks before the kids would have naturally (and quickly) gravitated towards reproductive rights (sex seemed to be a popular enough topic) - but, perhaps as a testament to our misjudgement of the issues of critical concern within a community we had so recently joined, it took a year and a half for a student to invite a speaker from the ACLU to come talk about Plan B contraception - and at this point reproductive issues were just a single figure in a pantheon of topics that the CRCL kids were researching, discussing, and participating in.

 

Our first meetings were a mess. We didn’t know who we were, what we wanted to talk about, or what we even meant by “Rights” and “Liberties.” This was, of course, a good thing. The MLI money - once we figure out the red tape - did not allow us to provide the social magnet of juice and chips (this reluctantly came out of pocket), and a handful of kids eventually started to show up just to “see what a couple of white guys thought they could teach me about Civil Rights” - as one student leader remarked later. We spent the first few weeks pretty much screaming at each other - in a healthy way - about the demographic history of Jackson, the legacy of racism, educational inequality, the social consequences and ownership of the word “nigger,” civil responsibility, the relevance of voting, and any of a long chain of articles or editorials I would print out during my planning period.

 

 

The second semester of our first year was the beginning of a process of translating information into action, and of narrowing down the thoughts and issues that would define our group. A steady stream of concerns - local, regional, national, global - floated in and out of our focus, and we became very good at not letting an issue stay with us past its shelf-life; we only focused on a topic so long as it interested us, and there were always new things to throw in front of the CRCL group and see if they stuck: if not, time to move on. Also, as we realized that we needed to start acting upon those concerns that kept returning, the first step we took was to bring speakers from the community to lead us in a more informed discussion about something that piqued our interest. Jake and I basically started jumping up and down screaming “what is important to you!?,” “what do you want to talk about?!,” “what are we doing?!” - and telling them we would get in the room anyone they wanted as long as they had something to discuss with them. One thing that infuriated the group early on was the legacy of Ross Barnett (the MS governor who stood on the steps of the Ole Miss admissions office to deny James Meredith access to the university; he actually nominated himself acting dean of admissions for this purpose), whose name lives on in a reservoir to the northeast of Jackson - a reservoir that is critical to the showering, cooking, and drinking purposes of a 70% majority black urban area, and who water is christened by the name of a man who once said “God made the Negro different to punish him.” As we got interested in segregation/desegregation, Ross Barnett, and the idea of perhaps changing the reservoir, Jake and I started to solicit an impressive list of guests - leaders in local politics, business, and culture - to talk about the political process from the voting level, to the legislative level, to the policy level. As momentum for more and more speakers grew, it was surprising to see (a) how many amazing and brilliant people were actually eager to get into our CRCL meetings, (b) how impressively the CRCL kids were able to go toe-to-toe with them on some heavy issues. I think it was when we realized that bringing a speaker in would almost always fill a room to capacity - and some crowds for guests even began to draw community members and require the use of the library - that Jake and I knew something important was happening to the club.

 

Besides the ridiculous list of guest speakers we’ve been able to build in two years as an extracurricular, the component that has really defined the success of the CRCL group is the fact that current membership includes not only students from Jim Hill, but also  a core group of students from two other JPS high schools - Murrah and Bailey - as well as a local Episcopal high school, St. Andrew’s. Right now, the group is so well established that little phone tag is necessary to secure a room full of familiar faces from up two four different high schools - even if we’re meeting at Millsaps College, as we have been once a month - and each week everyone kind of trickles in from different points in Jackson to see what’s going on. The first school to start coming to Jim Hill in this manner was St. Andrews; race and education had been an early focus area for our Jim Hill kids - who attend a high school that is 99.9% African-American - so Jake and I worked with some students and parents and St. Andrews (which is predominantly white) to have a CRCL meeting there one week in the spring semester of our first year. Two student leaders and I went to St. Andrews to explain the CRCL phenomenon and brought with us an article to argue about, and the concept was attractive enough to the St. Andrews kids that they began to drive across town to come meet at Jim Hill every week - eventually developing their own student-leaders and frequent participants. Murrah high school started participating en masse in our second year - a group of students having been initially drawn in by a visit to Jim Hill from former MS Governor William Winter, and curious enough to start showing up each week.

 

At this point - at the end of our second year with CRCL - the club seems to more or less run itself. Speakers are booked weeks in advance, we always seem to be juggling about three issues at a time, and an ad hoc Executive Board meets independently once in a while to make sure everything is in order. Furthermore, we’ve become visible enough around the city of Jackson that groups have started calling us asking for representative or group participation for organizational or advocacy purposes. The most impressive element, however, is the level to which the day to day operations of CRCL is student run; Jake and I provide a lot of direction, of course, but the primary contact with all of our speakers is a student, the person who fills out all of the paperwork for a field trip and bus order is a student, and the even the person who secures funds for group activities is often a student. The benefits of this is threefold: (1) learning how to do stuff like write up an invoice or talk to a governor are life-skills, and its better that the kids learn it now (I never did), (2) sustainability is the name of the game, and (3) when they do it we get more done.

 

CRCL has been so successful, and has brought me so much joy, that a significant portion of my job next year - as an employee of the William Winter Institute to Racial Reconciliation - is built around the conviction that similar spaces - where students can talk about things they can’t talk about in class - should be available to students and teachers throughout the state. Of course, CRCL isn’t a cookie-cutter model, so it will take a lot of trial and error nailing down those decisions we made at Jim Hill that allowed so much growth these past two years. However, with a lot of help, I’m certain that I’ll be able to begin developing avenues that will effect student empowerment in other schools and communities; thereafter, it’s just a process of giving the empowered students everything they need to get the job done.

 

 

 

 

Daniel Johnson, Rainbow Grocery Co-op Community Involvement Coordinator

Kamikaze, area Hip-Hop artist

Gus McCoy, Jackson NAACP Chapter President

Derrick Johnson, MS NAACP Congress President

Dana Larkin, Director, Jackson Parents for Public Schools

James E Graves, MS Supreme Court Justice

Ray Maybus, former MS Governor

Dick Molpus, former MS Secretary of State

 

 

Irene Jones, JPS Bond Issue Campaign Manger

Derrick Johnson, MS NAACP Congress President

Pat Weis, Jackson Circuit Court Judge

 

 

William Winter, former MS Governor

Brent Cox, Public Education Coordinator of MS ACLU

David Bickham, MS Activist

Shauna Davies, Coordinator of MS ACLU

Annette Holowell, Ole Miss Law Student

Rims Barber, Freedom Rider and Movement Activist

Lawrence Guyot, SNCC member and  Movement Activist

 

 

 

Beth Israel Synagogue, Jackson: Holocaust Memorial Service

Murrah High School, Jackson: Black History Celebration

End-of-Year Trip to Oxford, MS and Memphis, TN

 

 

JPS Bond Issue Campaign Headquarters: Campaign Assistance and Election Day Rally

Jackson State University: Bond Issue Promotion and Voter Registration

Eudora Welty Library, Jackson: MS Coalition for Racial Justice

Millsaps College: MS Coalition for Racial Justice

 

 

Robinson AME Church/Genesis Food Bank: MLK Day of Service

Millsaps College: MS Coalition for Racial Justice

JSU E-Center: MS Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement Convention

End-of-Year Trip to Selma, Montgomery, & Birmingham, AL