stories on Segregation

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent th...

Desegregation was one of the big goals of the civil rights movement. “Separate but equal” in the South became “separate and unequal.” The disparities were in things as small as water fountains and as ...

In 1830, the Indian Removal Act led to what’s known as the Trail of Tears, in which almost fifty thousand indigenous people were removed from the southeastern United States and relocated west of the M...

In 1973, Voice of Calvary Ministries, the ministry Vera Mae and I started after we moved back to Mississippi in 1960, opened a health clinic in the black section of Mendenhall. We had an X-ray machine...

People like me, Martin Luther King Jr., and a few others sometimes earn a hero status for things we did during the civil rights movement, but really the daily, faithful acts of ordinary black and whit...

In Mendenhall, where the schools have actually integrated, we are seeing real equality form in the hearts of members of this new generation, and it is enriching for the entire community. When the scho...

Reporters Alex Alston and James Dickerson tell a sad story about a church that sought to integrate its ranks: The Mississippi Delta was in a tizzy over rumors that blacks might show up at white church...

Six of my children—Spencer, Joanie, Phillip, Derek, Deborah, and Wayne—were among the first black children to attend the all-white school in Mendenhall. But while they were there, their white teachers...

I’ll never forget one Sunday in 1964 when a bunch of kids met up together and decided they were going to integrate the movie theater in Mendenhall. This was fairly early on in the integration efforts,...

Desegregation was one of the big goals of the civil rights movement. “Separate but equal” in the South became “separate and unequal.” The disparities were in things as small as water fountains and as ...

In this excerpt by Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy, explains the origins of racial identity and difference, necessitated by a slave-based (American Christian) socie...

In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...