The Unfinished Agenda

He made his way around the seminar table to stand at the podium and present the paper reflecting his semester-long wrestling match with challenges to everything he had been raised to accept without questioning.  “He” is a young white man – a law student – who looked as if plucked from Hollywood Central Casting for a crowd scene of stereotypic “Bubbas” attending a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.  We are around a rectangle arrangement of tables in a law school seminar with the title “Race, Gender and the Law” created by the first African-American woman faculty member at this flagship university in the heart of Dixie – me.  When he stepped through the door on the first day of class, one look told me to invite him to sit down right next to me.  With his three other white and four Black third-year classmates, I have shared a complicated and occasionally exhilarating journey through White Supremacy and patriarchy. He is about to reveal the terrain over which he has travelled and the destination to which he has arrived.  I fixed my face and took what I hoped were inconspicuous deep breaths.

I tell most people that I accepted the Associate Professor faculty position at this law school because it is only seventy-five miles away from my aging parents.  That’s enough of the “Why?” to make sense to acquaintances.  The rest of the “Why?” is shared over a glass of bourbon or two with friends and involves the intimate biography of a forty-five-years old Black woman, granddaughter of a proud land-owning-NAACP-founding Black man in Appalachia, raised in the segregated South by parents who showed their children we were fully human.  I came to this State twenty-three years before - first as a community organizer in the tradition of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.  For two years I was transformed by local people who lived their belief that they could change their world. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, known as an icon of the Mississippi Movement, also was very clear with me and the world-that-cared-to-know that she also fought for “women’s liberation” – to use her own words. Those years developed my commitment to become a civil rights lawyer. I returned sixteen years ago for a staff attorney position with a civil rights legal organization.  After several years, I had moved on to become partner in a San Francisco law firm. Accepting this particular faculty position meant not only being near my parents but fulfilling some piece of my responsibility for the unfinished agenda of the Mississippi Movement at this university with buildings built by enslaved people whose descendants were among my students and still denied their full humanity by every institution of the State – including this University.

I lived on Faculty Row, a little road on campus of ten simple white frame houses forming a community just a short walk from the back door of the law school building. With my young son and our dog, the University campus became our “neighborhood”. We easily made friends with our neighboring faculty members and their families who were also not from Mississippi. Our dog chased squirrels and romped nearby in “The Grove” in front of the law school – an oval of enormous shade trees that we steadfastly avoided on football weekends when it transformed into the Last Stand of the Confederacy with tailgating elevated into the bacchanalian absurdity of generator-powered chandeliers and tables laid with fine china, silver, and crystal glasses with, of course, Confederate flags flying.  From the windows of my law school office on many Saturdays, I heard the school band practicing “Dixie” in preparation for football weekends – prompting me to close my office door and crank up “Fight the Power” on my boom box.   I found myself humming “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (also known as “The Negro National Anthem”) to my son at bedtime – as much a soothing lullaby to myself as to him.  My journal from those days reports a recurring dream:  white students come to my office in tears.  When I ask “Why?”, they say with devastation, “Because the grades were just posted and the top 10 students are Black”.  Then, Black students come to my office, also crying.  When I ask “Why?”, they say with joy, “Because the grades were just posted and the top 10 students are Black”.  My journal continues, “And I managed to say something appropriate to both groups”. This is the recurring dream of a Black woman conscious of being the beneficiary of all the local Black folk who dared make a way out of no way – making it possible for me to now engage their children’s children sitting before me as students who have experienced the State’s contempt for them their whole lives.  It is the recurring dream of a Black woman conscious of being “out of place” to white students who are accustomed to seeing Black women in our “rightful place” in the kitchen or cleaning up their homes. 

Professor Derrick Bell, the esteemed Black Harvard Law School Professor who authored the textbook “Race, Gender and the Law”, mentored me by phone and e-mail through the process of creating my seminar and managing both the students and myself throughout the semester.  The seminar was our joint tribute to the hopes and dreams of the men and women of the Mississippi Movement. The best advice he gave me was to have students submit one day prior to class a one-page “Think Piece” about each week’s assigned readings.  This proved to be an invaluable window into their hearts and minds as the semester progressed.  There was the classic “Southern Belle” beauty with luxurious blond hair and perfectly applied make-up.  While her “Think Pieces” reflected nuanced analysis and intellectual rigor, her silence during seminar sessions puzzled me.  I came to understand that she had been indoctrinated with the admonition to hide her intelligence and to conform to what was expected of a “Delta Girl”.  Her grandmother warned her that even going to law school meant that no man from the Delta would want to marry her. The unrelenting pressure to conform described by James Silver in his seminal work Mississippi: The Closed Society was determined to keep “Delta Girls” in line while coercing Black students to doubt their own value, their own humanity, and their own knowledge of what was true.

I suspected that some of the students in the seminar were there simply because it gave them some needed hours to graduate and/or fit in their class schedule.  I suspected that my “Bubba” was planted there by the Federalist Society to ensure that I received a scathing end-of-semester “Teaching Review”. I suspected some of the students were there to satisfy their hunger for a professor who would look up as they entered the room and actually see them as students who belonged there.  I had that hunger when I was in law school and it wasn’t satisfied until a Black professor looked at me. I never knew to what extent any of those suspicions were accurate.  But, I learned that all the students – Black and white - stayed through the semester because they knew or suspected or had a feeling that something was not right about the culture in which they were raised with such an intense requirement of conformity.  Their minds were trees that inherently resisted pleasing the bonsai gardeners.

To support their resistance, I had to do more than make challenging reading assignments.  Welcoming them into the opportunity to form an intellectual community, I invited them to share their thoughts in a space that would not always be comfortable.  “Comfort” is the unrelenting demand of a society that thrives upon the terror of conformity.  Instead of asserting my responsibility as “The Professor” to ensure a “comfortable” space, I assured them that our discussions would be “uncomfortable” and that we would, nevertheless, continue the discussion. And they stayed.

The most memorable “Think Piece” came the week I assigned a group of articles by radical feminists. My “Federalist Society” student wrote in his “Think Piece”, “This reading assignment of Catherine McKinnon and them offended every molecule in my body” . . .along with other choice nuggets.  He was reading the assignments and experiencing ideas that rubbed deep into the depths of his being.  This was the moment – a beginning - I wanted for every student. Students also needed an experiential way to free themselves to think for themselves.  Each student was required at the beginning of the semester to attach his or her self to a practicing attorney in the area who was engaged with a client on a matter concerning discrimination on the basis of race or sex or race and sex.  The seminar paper upon which most of their grade would be based was to relate the assigned reading of the semester to the case in which they were involved. 

As the semester wore on, I could see the ‘Think Pieces” changing – instead of paragraphs regurgitating like a school book report what had been read, I now saw questioning, criticism, disagreeing, wondering, glimmers of analysis.  The conversations during our sessions became lively.  We even laughed. The Delta Beauty dropped her demure persona and allowed her intellect to sashay out for all to see.  I saw the emergence of the first Black woman federal district court judge in the State.  White students stopped being afraid of saying “The Wrong Thing” and Black students rejected complicity in their own degradation – both began wrestling with “Closed Society” demons.

He made his way to the front of the room. As he came to the podium, he planted his feet in a wide stance as if ready for a fight, shifted his hefty weight from side to side as he settled his papers, lifted his head and gazed slowly around the seminar table as if challenging each potential opponent.  With the tone of a white Baptist preacher imparting truth to his congregation he declared, “Y’all know that stuff Catherine McKinnon and them are talking about?  Well, it’s happening right here in Lafayette County!”, as he continued with his feminist critique of the injustices experienced by his client.  And so, as Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision noted the dangers of school segregation to the “hearts and minds” of little Black children, there was for a moment in a law school in the Heart of Dixie a little seminar responding to the  consequences of conformity imposed by the Closed Society upon the hearts and minds of both white and Black law students.

-Barbara Phillips

Barbara Phillips is a social justice feminist, independent scholar, former philanthropy program officer, civil rights litigator, and law professor. She has previously published essays in "Tiny Love Stories", NYT; The Oxford Magazine; and Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Reflections from the Deep South, 1964-1980 (University Press of Florida 2017.) She lives in Oxford, Mississippi and Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. B.A., Macalester College; J.D. Northwestern University School of Law; J.S.M., Stanford Law School