Before the Blue Front

Before the Blue Front: 

Community Action Association (CAA) Sponsors Basic Education

By Photo-journalist Ken Smith - in the Yazoo (MS) Herald, March 1973

Jimmy Holmes checks the paper of his 88-year-old

student, Mrs. Ollie Little, who didn’t “miss a class" 

in an effort to upgrade her third-grade education.

The Community Action Association building in Bentonia was once a small store. It isn’t very big and facilities are sparse, but on Wednesday evenings there is a hum of activity and mood of earnest determination.

From the street it’s likely one could not correctly ascertain the number of people crammed between the walls, because there is a definite lack of automobiles in the few parking spaces in front. The people, nearly 30 most nights, do not own cars or much of anything else. They are the poor and illiterate folk who lived in Bentonia, who never got a chance for much education in Yazoo County before the 1970s.

With the help of a 24-year-old native son, the students, ranging in age from 22 to 88, are doing something about their plight.

Jimmy Holmes, a senior at Jackson State College, is leading them and from all accounts, they are most willing to follow.  An athletic looking young man--and well he should be for his major is physical education--Holmes sports a slight mustache and an Afro.  “Hopefully,” writes photo-journalist Ken Smith, “he is the ‘new breed’ of black leadership.”  He is a teacher and his 30 pupils have an average of only seven years of schooling.

Holmes dedicates his free time to helping the people of his community find a path from the darkness of ignorance. He called it teaching the “three R’s,” but technically the course was “basic education.”  Assisting him in this project were the center operators, Willie Mae Johnson and Vidine Hilderbrand.  

The students included Mattie Roberts, Ollie Little, Geneva Owens, Iola Gregory, Vernilla Wilson, Jerry Dean, Ira Hudson, Mattie Wilson, Cloritha Wilson, Georgia Hudson, Cliff Berry, Luretha Mason, Alberta Mason, Eva Margiu, Johnnie Walker, Fate Hammond, Christine Demus, Alfreda Shaffer, Lizzie Lee Hammond, Elvia Henderson, Matter Courthous, Vertistine Hubbard, Isaiah Johnson, Leslie Hudson, Flora B. Griffin, C.M. Harrelson, Josie Lee Anderson, Alma Williams and Ella Luckett.

One of these students, Mrs. Ollie Little, is 88 years old, “but she never misses a class” said Mrs. Johnson. The students have a thirst for knowledge, for the education they missed, Walking a few blocks—or a few miles—to get to the one room school house isn't too much, and they are grateful for the opportunity.

The Yazoo Herald, Mar 15, 1973.

The Legend of Blues Artist Sam Myers

Music Makes Money for Man Afflicted with Cataracts

By Denise Estes - 1980

Sam Myers has been in the entertainment business for a long time. He has worked hard and invested a lot of time to make something of his talents. At 44, he may not have reached the biggest of the big times, but, to him, "everyday brings a change when you're climbing up the ladder."

"I had a great struggle when I started out," he said. "Opportunities didn't come on a silver platter. You had to really put some hard work and time into it. I've been stranded in a lot of places trying to make a buck to get back home. But you've got to get that experience to really know how it is," said Myers, a local blues singer and musician.

Myers, who has suffered a cataract condition since age 14 that makes him almost blind, started in music at 10. As early as 14, he was spending his summers away from school on stage with established Chicago musicians and looking for work.

Although born in Mobile, Ala., he considers himself a Jacksonian be-cause he attended Piney Woods as a youngster. Piney Woods where he first became interested in music, was once located in Mobile, but later moved to Jackson.

"One day while at school I heard a band playing," he said. "I asked Jonas Brown, who, even though I didn't know at the time, had been placed with me to find out my interests, where the music was coming from. He told me that it was the band playing and asked me if I wanted to go and watch. I said yes, and from there I went off into music. It was some-thing that really inspired me to stay in school," he said.

In the meantime, Brown, now a minister in Jackson, went back to tell the principal of Piney Woods that he had finally found out what Myers was interested in, said Myers.

"At first," said Myers, "I kept saying to myself 'I'm going to run away from this place.' but after becoming interested in music. I never wanted to leave the school when my mother would come to get me."

During school he learned to play the drums, trumpet and trombone. He played with the marching band, swing band and sang with the choir.

"The swinging band was really something then." he said.

Myers, who recently returned from a tour of Europe has been performing around Jackson for the past 20 years. His fans are always' yelling. "Sing it Sam." And those that hear him for the first time after an ear of Sam's smooth blues, become loyal fans.

In Northeast Jackson, he has per-formed at the Lamar Emporium, George Street Upstairs, C.W. Goodnight and recently performed at the Sheraton's Pyramid Lounge.

Myers has written three albums and two singles. His three albums are on the T.J. Records label out of San Francisco. One of the singles was done on an ACE label and the other on the FIRE label of New York.

In 1957, he recorded a single. "Sleeping in the Ground" and "My Love is Here to Stay" under the ACE label. In 1959, he recorded, "You Don't Have To Go" and "Sad, Sad Lonesome Day," a single under the FIRE label.

While playing at Richard's Playhouse on Farish Street one night in 1978, an agent from T.J. Associates offered him a five-year contract with the company.

"It sounded good to me so I signed," said Myers.

Under his present contract he has recorded three albums, "Down Home Mississippi," his biggest seller, "Sam Myers Sings the Blues." and his latest release "The Worlds Wonder."

Myers has been in and out of recording studios and has traveled with popular musicians since he got into the music business. He has played and recorded with Muddy Water and other Chicago_ musicians.

"At that time it was hard for me to get off into nightclubs as a solo performer,” he said.

A lot of musicians have influenced Myers music. He has worked with Jimmy Smith an organist. and Charles Brown. a blues and jazz musician, both great artists of the 40s. "They influenced me to hang in there.' He also has also worked with Elmore James, a famous jazz guitarist and was also inspired by the music of trumpet player Broff Davis of Jackson State University, he said.

After retiring from the road for a while, Myers started working full-time in a factory at the Mississippi Industry for the Blind and has worked there for the past 14 years.

“But,” he said, “up until then I had always been able to make a living in the music business."

Outside of entertaining, the work at the Industries for the Blind was the only other job he has ever had.

"In fact, it was the first time ever having a Social Security card," he said.

For 10 of his years at his new job, Myers was out of the music business, but he never got it out of his blood.

He said, “It wasn't fun living out of a suitcase, doing one-righters, but when the guys (musicians) would come to town and I'd chat with them and ask them how it had been going and they'd tell me it was 'OK man' or when they'd get on the bus and leave. I’d get homesick.”

Mamie "Galore" Davis Memorial Dedication

Capturing Black Culture on Film

Capturing Black Culture on Film

By Bill Nichols - 1982

Roland Freeman is driven by dreams that can hide in the guise of demons.

Just watch him as he talks. He coils and uncoils in his chair, tenses his body or tosses back his head in a horselaugh, all depending on the mood of the moment, as a stream of ideas flow forth, racking his body like the pains of labor.

He's a man driven by a vision of history.

Southern Roads/City Pavements, the exhibit of this acclaimed photographer's work on display at the Old Capitol Museum, offers a major clue toward understanding Freeman's artistic obsession. It's the latest compilation of work from an artist/documentarian who intends nothing less than crystallizing the black experience within a lens frame before it is buried like a relic of a lost civilization.

That dream pushes this young black photographer all over the world in search of black culture. Southern Roads/City Pavements pairs pictures shot in 13 counties in southwest Mississippi with photos of urban New York, Baltimore and Chicago, and Freeman is certain of the similarities, the shared tradition, even of the most dissimilar places.

He's developed an eye for the black soul. But it wasn't always that way.

Freeman was born some 44 years ago in Baltimore in the midst of the Depression and lived the street life to the fullest until he was 13, when he was sent to live on a Maryland tobacco farm. It was there he learned the love for the land that is so evident in his pictures of rural farmers.

He grew up some more, joined the Air Force, won a Brownie camera in a crap game and became interested in a growing American civil rights movement. One march led to another until Aug. 28, 1963.

The march on Washington occurred that day and would forever more change Freeman's life.

"I was so choked up watching that march that I knew I wanted to say something," Freeman said. Photography quickly revealed itself as his voice.

The Poor People's Campaign March

"Most people starting photography don't know what they want to say," Freeman said, reminiscing about his start. "I knew from the beginning." He studied the work of Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, tried and experimented for about five years and in 1968 found himself documenting the Poor People's Campaign march from Marks to Washington, D.C.

The Farm Security Administration documentaries from the Depression fascinated this young artist. "I thought to myself, `If white people were hurting this much, hell, what were the black folks doing?' "Freeman said.

He went on to work for Life Magazine, string for the prestigious Magnum photographic service in Washington and generally become "a pretty hotshot Washington photographer," in Freeman's words.

Yet his real vocation had yet to begin. He always had been fascinated by black traditions in Baltimore, and began photographing street scenes during off-hours. "I didn't even realize what I was doing was folklore," he said as he laughed about his beginnings in the documentary trade.

The Smithsonian Institution knew better. In 1972, Freeman was asked to contribute pictures to the Smithsonian's yearly folklore festival. That association led him to a job in 1974, shooting pictures in Mississippi for the 1974 festival, and finally his own project in 1975, called the Mississippi Folklife project, which Freeman worked on with folklorist Worth Long, a man Freeman calls a brother, "one of those elusive geniuses."

All of which led Freeman down the path to Southern Roads/City Pavements, an extension of the work he began with Long in 1975. The exhibit opened in the New York international Center of Photography before coming to Jackson and New York Times photo critic Gene Thornton described his work as going, "beyond reportage to express something that is universal and lasting."

That pleased Freeman immensely, but the drive goes on. Much remains to be done. After all, this is a man who describes his creative process as "working on raw guts. I work on a lot of nervous, mad energy."

He wants to catalog a black heritage he is intensely proud of, a tradition he maintains exists in spite of the black migration from the South to the economic opportunities of the city.

A city boy by birth, Freemen loves the simplicity and honesty of farm people and that love shines forth in his work.

"What some people call hick is hipper than the people who think they're hip," he said.

The anger he felt in the civil rights period has transformed into the objectivity of the documentarian. "I'm interested in how black people have survived. We've been subject to a mass conspiracy through the Western world, yet we've managed to educate people, sustain a culture and move into mainstream American life," he said.

Southern Roads/City Pavements will remain at the Old Capitol Museum until March 14, but Roland Freeman's work will go on the rest of his life. Commercial assignments, for clients like the World Bank, pay his bills, and his documentary work keeps the energy flowing.

Freeman leaves you certain of his belief in his art. His eyes glaze, the hands swirl in an inadequate attempt to describe what only a photographer's eye can conjure.

The demons subside, the dreams are given form, molded with the press of a finger, the quiet click of a tiny shutter.