Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  In 1844 Lusk, a swarthy, stock horse of a man, left the Kentucky legislature in search of fortune in the frontier country of the Yazoo Delta. He packed the family’s household belongings, his wife, Mary Catherine, their children, and an elderly slave woman aboard a flatboat and set out on the Mississippi River.

  After several days on the water, they arrived at a landing just south of Moon Lake in what had recently been christened Coahoma County. It was there Lusk decided to open a law practice and create the foundation for a cotton empire that would span generations. Within a decade, Lusk, his father, James, and his father’s brother, Randolph, controlled nearly a dozen plantations, with hundreds of slaves working tens of thousands of acres of Delta farmland.

  On the April day when young George and William Aristides Alcorn arrived at their father’s plantation, their cousin, Lusk, was nowhere to be found. With the nation erupting into civil war, Lusk went to Louisiana in an effort to purchase slaves. He came home a few days later, the proud owner of “a slave girl named Molly of yellow color and about fourteen years of age.” Molly would adopt the name Alcorn and spend the rest of her life at James Lusk’s plantation. Of her six children, three were fair-skinned sons named James, Governor, and Judge, possibly after their father.

  The two young brothers made a new home for themselves in the vast empire of their older cousin. They settled into the shade of wide porches and ate hog meat from polished silver. They rode horses along the edge of ripened cotton fields, careful not to lose their tracks. For just beyond the enchantment of their cousin’s plantation was a fierce wilderness, a lawless frontier ruled only by nature.

  Its thick woods of oak, gum, ash, and poplar were home to thousands of bears, panthers, wildcats, and wolves. In the still bayou waters, malaria festered and the brothers soon learned the taste of quinine and the metallic sweat of summer fevers. They grew to fear the Mississippi when spring rains caused the river stage to rise. They heard tales from nearby logging towns of a flood so strong it leveled the earth. Yet despite all the dangers of the wild, it was not the land that shaped the boys into hardened men. It was war.

  “The soldiers began to drill at the schoolhouse where there was a nice playground,” William Aristides recalled. “They started to form a company there, which I promised and did join.” Both George and William became lieutenants in the Confederate Army. Their cousin, James Lusk, was appointed the brigadier general for the Mississippi state troops.

  After Appomattox, George and his brother returned home to rebuild their plantations on the family land at Friar’s Point. Four years of civil war had cost Mississippi fifty thousand lives and left much of the state a desolate forest of chimneys. For George and William Alcorn, to rebuild was to reckon with the devastation of a world they once ruled.

  In 1868 George had a son. He named his firstborn child William Aristides Alcorn Jr., after his beloved older brother. The infant was born into a broken nation and a divided home. His father’s cousin, once a brigadier general, returned to Mississippi to denounce the Confederacy and, bearing a signed presidential pardon, pledged his allegiance to the Republican Party. For reasons his cousins could not immediately comprehend, James Lusk revealed a fervid passion for black political equality.

  The war had tested Lusk. It forced him to reckon with the cardinal sin of his people and his past. He had built an empire on the backs of enslaved men. He led children into battle to protect that empire. The longer he fought for the Confederacy, the less he believed in its cause. In private, Lusk discussed his admiration for the Union and for its president, Abraham Lincoln. Of all the hardship Lusk witnessed on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, he expressed the most suffering following Lincoln’s assassination.

  “My heart is so sad from this news,” Lusk wrote in his diary on April 20, 1865. “I see the future darkly, but oh the scenes of blood! When and where will this strife end?”

  In the spring of 1865, the strife was far from ending. Lusk’s eldest son, Milton, who had enlisted in the Confederacy at the onset of the war, was captured in Louisiana in 1863 and taken prisoner. Milton returned from the war a shadow of himself. He was nearly deaf and deeply disturbed. He drank to stave off fits of madness, and within a year of his homecoming committed suicide. Against his father’s wishes, Lusk’s youngest son, Henry, ran away in January 1865 to join his brother in the army. Less than a month after enlisting, Henry contracted typhoid fever and was dead by summer.

  The war had taken two sons from James Lusk. It reshaped his morality and tested his faith. The great depths of depression and guilt that plagued Lusk transformed him. He became determined to make up for the sins of history. He declared himself a Republican and resolved to guide his state and its people out from slavery.

  A politically ambitious man, Lusk also understood that if he wanted to hold office, he had to capitalize on the state’s newly enfranchised freedmen. In the winter of 1867, the United States Congress passed a sweeping Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. For readmission into the Union, the act required Southern legislatures to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and write new constitutions granting universal suffrage to black men. In Mississippi, the act created a new political majority almost overnight. More than eighty thousand black voters were registered by federal officials, as opposed to fewer than sixty thousand whites. These former slaves, liberated by Lincoln, joined the Republican Party.

  James Lusk’s reinvention as a Republican turned him from a war hero into a martyr. On December 8, 1868, Klansmen raided one of his plantations, inflicting an estimated $6,000 worth of damage. William Aristides Jr., living at a nearby plantation, was less than two months old.

  George feared for the life of his infant son and spoke with his cousin. As Klan violence escalated, Lusk considered fleeing Friar’s Point. On January 1, 1869, he wrote to Illinois representative Elihu Washburne: “I thought it best to guard the remainder of my plantations as well as I can until I see what Congress may do under Genl Grant’s administration. Should there be no improvement, then I will make the best disposition of my estates, and leave the State.”

  But Lusk did not flee. Instead, he ran for governor on the Republican ticket, campaigning on the pledge that “society should no longer be governed by the pistol and the Bowie knife.” His cousins stood firmly beside him. George Alcorn began publishing a newspaper, titled the Weekly Delta, which fully endorsed Lusk and consistently defended the Republican Party. His brother, William Aristides, ran for sheriff as a Republican.

  Despite threats on their lives and their property, the Alcorn men held firmly to their positions. In the wake of the announcement of Lusk’s candidacy, full-scale riots erupted in several Delta counties. Lusk’s wife, Amelia, tried to persuade her husband to drop out of the race, believing that he “would fall at martyr under a cloud that would cover [his] grave.”

  James Lusk won the election by an overwhelming majority and was inaugurated governor of Mississippi on March 10, 1870. For the first time in the state’s history, a black electorate had chosen its leader. “Secession,” Lusk remarked in his inaugural address, “I have ever denounced as a fatal fallacy.”

  Throughout his time in office, Lusk remained true to his base. The centerpiece of his administration became a radical education platform, which would establish a system of public schools for both races. Free to all students, the governor’s new education program consumed more public money in 1870 than all other government programs combined. The program proved to be remarkably successful, establishing the state’s first university for blacks, Alcorn State University, and enrolling half of all Mississippi’s children in elementary classes by 1875.

  In developing the state’s most successful model for public education, Lusk unwittingly brought about his own political demise. He built a school system that ran like a trip wire from the Piney Woods to the Yazoo Delta. All across Mississippi, clapboard classrooms fell victim to the aftershocks of war. In the words of Lusk’s biographer, “Public education
brought to the foreground the delicate and unresolved problem of race relations.”

  The Alcorn system of education, as it came to be known, proposed no integrated schooling, but the fear of such an idea sparked riots across the state. The Jackson Clarion warned that “a fund will be raised by taxing the property of people to build up a gigantic system of ‘Public Education,’ under the control of the imported amalgamationists.”

  Before the end of 1870, the Mississippi Klan surpassed all others in the South at purging public school teachers from the state. On November 30, 1871, Governor Alcorn resigned to accept an appointment to the US Senate. His dreams of ushering in a new era of racial equality ended in failure. After serving six years in the Senate, Lusk returned home to Friar’s Point, where he endured yet another tragedy.

  In 1878 a devastating epidemic of yellow fever swept through the Delta, killing thousands. In the river town of Greenville, more than a fifth of its twenty-three hundred residents died from the virus. “Criers went through the streets, shouting ‘bring out your dead,’” wrote one historian, describing alleyways packed with burial wagons. The fever was a gruesome killer that “struck without warning,” one Deltan recalled. “First, the flushed yellow face, the drunken look, the chills . . . then the delirium, black vomit, hemorrhage—and miraculous recovery or merciful death.” For George Alcorn, who caught the virus in the fall of 1878, the illness brought “merciful death.” His son, William Aristides Jr., was ten years old.

  With no father in his life, the bright, impressionable boy was raised by his uncle and his second cousin, James Lusk. William spent his youth in the wide halls and high-ceilinged rooms of his cousin’s Victorian mansion. His bare feet touched walnut floors, his bare hands Italian marble. Above him sparkled ornate crystal chandeliers, imported from Europe.

  His life was a world away from the tenant cabins, clustered around his family’s cotton fields. But there was something about the way Lusk spoke about his past that changed the way William saw his future. There was a great legacy left to be filled by the Alcorn family. It began with Governor James Lusk and would end with Judge William Aristides Jr.

  Just four days before Judge Alcorn was to hear arguments in Brewer’s case, the trustees of the Rosedale school board filed a demurrer. Their hope was that the case would be thrown out before even going to trial. The justification for excluding Martha Lum, the demurrer stated, was rooted in Mississippi’s own constitution, specifically Section 207, which called for “separate schools for the white and colored races.” The trustees argued that because Martha was colored, she was subject to the same laws that applied to colored children. The race of the child was reason enough to prove there was no legal basis for the suit.

  “The bill shows on its face that complainant is a member of the Mongolian, or yellow race,” the demurrer read. “Therefore, [she is] not entitled to attend the schools provided by law in the State of Mississippi for children of the white, or Caucasian race.”

  Had any other judge been assigned the case, the demurrer would likely have been granted and the suit discarded. The school board clearly had Mississippi law on its side. But Judge Alcorn was once Willie Alcorn, a fatherless boy of ten, who fell into the care of a cousin who believed that all children deserved to be educated as equals. Judge Alcorn’s ruling on November 5, 1924, reflected that past. He ordered the board of trustees to admit Martha Lum into Rosedale’s segregated white school.

  “It is by the court ordered that the demurrer . . . is hereby overruled,” Alcorn wrote in his decision. “The Clerk of the Circuit Court of the First Judicial District of Bolivar County, Mississippi, is hereby ordered and instructed to issue a writ of mandamus as prayed for in the petition . . . to admit petitioner, Martha Lum, as a pupil in the Rosedale Consolidated High School.”

  Judge Alcorn gave Brewer the victory he so greatly needed. Martha would be able to return to Rosedale Consolidated. Brewer told his clients they could send their daughter back to school, but he counseled them to wait for a short while, until tensions quieted down. Brewer didn’t want to risk Martha’s safety by sending her into the classroom while emotions ran high. He also had a sinking feeling that the school board would file an appeal to the state supreme court.

  The board understood that the longer the litigation continued, the longer Martha would be forced to stay out of school. Without a verdict, she would be trapped in the indeterminate middle between black and white. Martha, and every other Chinese child in Mississippi, would have to wait for a judge to decide their social status, their race, their identity. As long as the case remained in court, Martha was neither black nor white. In a society with room for only two races, Martha belonged nowhere.

  On December 5, just as Brewer feared, Rosedale’s school board filed an appeal. The defendants, “feeling aggrieved at said judgment,” demanded the case be heard again in Jackson, before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The appeal was signed by a new lawyer, a man by the name of Rush Knox, the state’s attorney general. With the board’s motion granted, Brewer’s fight was far from over. In fact, it had only just begun.

  The doors of the birdcage elevator whined to a close. An impeccably dressed colored man stood at the controls, cast in the tinted light streaming through the stained glass windows lining the elevator shaft. The controlman waited for Brewer to request a floor. For four years of his life, Brewer had given the same destination, the third floor, Office of the Executive. Now, on April 6, 1925, nearly a decade since leaving office, Brewer gave a different answer. He requested the second floor, the Mississippi Supreme Court.

  The operator pulled a lever and the steel carriage shot upwards, past white tiled walls and a blur of colored glass. When the elevator came to a stop, its doors opened onto an alcove. Brewer stepped out, turned to his left, and entered a broad corridor. A line of gleaming Italian columns extended like sentries along the walls. Brewer followed the hallway to its eastern end, where four pillars of marble marked the entrance to the state supreme court chamber.

  The small courtroom had already begun to fill with spectators. The majority of visitors were more voyeuristic than concerned with the outcome of the case. The trial was seen as a novelty, the first of its kind. “This is the first case of this nature ever to be brought to the courts of Mississippi,” wrote a local reporter. “It is believed there has been no case similar to this one ever brought in the courts of the United States.”

  The swarm of onlookers milled about between the columned entryway and a gate of varnished wood. Running across the center of the room, the gate divided the audience from the bench of judges, an imposing semicircular row at the far side of the chamber. Brewer crossed through the crowd toward his seat beside the bench.

  It was only when looking back on the public that the edges of the room became visible. There, standing quietly in the corners, dressed in the nicest linens poverty could afford, were members of the Chinese community. They came to see what would become of their children. Mothers held hands of daughters. Fathers held shoulders of sons. They waited.

  Inside the marbled depths of an elegant statehouse, the fate of a young girl would now determine the fate of thousands. A future would be decided that day, and with it the future of a generation. Brewer took his place at the counsel’s table as, with the crack of a gavel, the trial began.

  Unlike most cases to reach the Mississippi Supreme Court, the verdict of Rice v. Gong Lum would be decided en banc. This meant that every judge would be present, a distinction reserved only for cases of significant importance. The full bench was composed of six judges: Chief Justice Sidney McCain Smith, John Burt Holden, William Henry Cook, William Dozier Anderson, James McGowen, and George Hamilton Ethridge.

  Of the six men seated before Brewer, there was only one judge whose opinion would likely determine the outcome of the case. Judge Ethridge, unlike the other five justices, had experience in the field of education. He was a former teacher, who entered into politics to serve as the state’s assistant attorney general during B
rewer’s administration. During the end of Brewer’s term, as Theodore Bilbo ruthlessly forced Brewer out of office, Ethridge rode Bilbo’s rising tide of popularity into a seat on the state supreme court. He had been there ever since. Brewer was keenly aware of the pull Ethridge would have in the court’s decision, so much so that he planned to call the man out by name.

  A cold and serious personality, Ethridge believed that a strong democracy was forged in the classroom. The role of education served only to shape and control the nation’s electorate. “We must educate those who are to have the right of selecting the agents who are to exercise power and discharge its functions,” he once wrote. He believed that public schools should be employed strictly to foster a dominant white political class that would determine the future of Mississippi.

  Ethridge, like most statesmen of his day, was a steadfast segregationist. His father, Mark Ethridge, fought in the Civil War as a member of the Confederate Cavalry Corps under General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who’d risen to the highest ranks of the Ku Klux Klan. Ethridge saw segregation as the only means of maintaining a civil society, the best defense against another deadly war.

  “The races are doomed to live side by side,” Ethridge once wrote, “but must have separate associations and education. . . . No racial mixture has ever been satisfactory or produced good results for society. We are now living in harmony in the same land but in separate social spheres and this must continue for all time.”

  The chief justice selected the state’s assistant attorney general, Elmer Clinton Sharp, to begin the trial by reading his oral argument in defense of Rosedale’s school board. Sharp was a tired-looking man with gray eyes, a gray complexion, and thick, graying hair. It was evident from his build that he had not always been so frail. The years had merely caught up with him. Back in college, Sharp played right guard on the varsity football team. The team’s captain was a young law student named William Henry Cook, who was now staring at Sharp from his position behind the supreme court bench.