I just returned from an incredible trip to the Mississippi Delta with my husband, Oren. I hadn’t been there for many years and wanted to meet the people I’d interviewed for my book–people like Lillie, Mattie, and Billy. I’d probably interviewed each of them on the phone 20 or 30 times over a period of three years, but I’d never met them in person. This was the time to do that, as well as make a video about the civil rights movement to take with me to school visits. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be blogging about this once-in-a-lifetime trip.

No sooner had Oren and I stepped off the airplane than we walked right into the new Medgar Evers Pavillion at the airport in Jackson. Since the title of my book A Thousand Never Evers is a tribute to Medgar Evers, I was eager to check it out. It’s a great exhibit with lots of primary source documents about Medgar’s work as NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi.

Bertha, at the airport bookstore, told us that Myrlie Evers had been in town just a few days ago for the opening of the pavillion, which was on the forty-sixth anniversary of Medgar’s death–June 12, 1963. While we were talking to Bertha, a tall man walked by and waved hello. “Oh, hi, Mr. Mayor!” Bertha said. So Oren and I asked, “Which mayor is that?” And she told us, “That’s Mayor Harvey Johnson. The new mayor of Jackson!”

I ran up to the mayor, introduced myself, and told him about my book. He was kind enough to listen and also help us find our bags, when they didn’t appear on the luggage carousel.

Well, not even out of the airport, and already we’d seen the Medgar Evers Pavillion, met the mayor of Jackson, and talked to the airport bookstore about carrying A Thousand Never Evers. We were off to a good start!

At the end of our trip, we’d go to the Medgar Evers House & Museum, where the Evers family lived, and where Medgar Evers was shot dead. But there was a lot of adventure to be had and fried chicken to eat before then.

I met Peter Stephan at a book signing I did in Lexington, Kentucky. I found out he taught in the Mississippi Delta and took some photographs while he was there. When I checked out the images online, I was riveted. They are gorgeous. Revealing. Intriguing. Peter not only let me share his pictures with you, but he also told me about his experiences living and teaching elementary school in Mississippi.

You’re such a good photographer. When did you start taking pictures?

I first started in ninth grade. My grandfather had dabbled in film, and he actually helped start the first television station in the United States. He was a technician. He loved film and got into photography at the end of his life. When he passed away, he left his camera to my mom and she let me use it. In high school, I took random photos around my neighborhood. Then I was photo editor for my college newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, and later, I did freelance work for the Miami Herald and some other papers.

Have you had any formal lessons or training?

I never took any classes. I just kind of experimented.

Why did you go to the Mississippi Delta?

I went to the Delta in 2006 because I wanted to join Teach for America. I had lived in Chicago for the last four years, and I wanted something different. I really thought going somewhere rural would be a different experience. I was attracted to the history of the Delta. There was so much history, so much intrigue. A lot of people don’t understand it. I wanted to understand it. It also happened to be in the worst performing state in terms of education. So for both of those reasons, I wanted to go there.

How would you describe your experience?

I lived there for two years from August, 2006 to June, 2008. It was very difficult. My first year, I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped in the classroom. If you don’t get your kids involved in the first couple weeks, you pretty much lose them. That’s what happened.

The next year, I taught second grade and I finally got the hang of it. That year my principal gave me Teacher of the Year, not just for my classroom work but for the soccer league I started and other extracurricular activities that I led.

Living and teaching in the Delta was both deeply enlightening and maddeningly frustrating. A lot of what really struck me was the poverty and the lack of development.

Sometimes my students would ask, “When is lunch?” Ninety seven percent of them were on free or reduced lunch. So I’d ask what they had for dinner last night. They’d say, “I don’t know.” I’d say, “Oh did you have noodles?” Noodles was the politically correct form of saying “nothing.” And they’d say, “Yeah, noodles.”

Stuff like that made me want to cry because I couldn’t really do anything about it. You have a lot of power as a teacher to influence the future, but you don’t have a lot of power to influence life conditions in the present.

What were some of your favorite times in the Delta?

Well, I loved seeing my kids outside of school. I was really interested in getting to know them. I saw them at events like the Crawfish Festival in Leland. It happens every May. They have a lot of crawfish boils and blues bands. They close off one of the streets, which is a big deal for Leland because they only have two streets running through the town. I saw my students and said hi and mingled with them and their families. It was great to be in a small town because I knew everyone—Molly from the coffee shop and Vernice from the upholstery store.

What did you learn from your students or from being there in general?

I learned a lot about some of the issues that affect our country, not just education, but race relations and the socioeconomic gap. I feel like I aged 10 years even though I was only there for two, just because I learned so much.

You said you learned about race relations. What did you learn?

There’s an open and honest discussion to be had. I grew up in an all white school. Even though I lived in a pretty diverse neighborhood, I never really associated with other ethnic groups. Being in Mississippi, I got a sense of black culture. I just felt more comfortable understanding black people. I always felt an invisible barrier between me and black people, but there wasn’t any of that in the Delta. Most people were very open and more willing to interact across racial lines than in cities like Chicago, which is incredibly racially divided.

Are the neighborhoods in Leland segregated?

Well, Leland isn’t divided so much by the railroad track as by the creek. People refer to it as the “white side of the creek” and the “black side of the creek.”

What about the schools?

Most of the white kids go to private schools. Usually those schools are as bad as or worse than the public schools. It’s one of those underlying currents of racial tension that still is a rub in the Delta. My first year, one of the black students at my school transferred to a what was an all-white private school, because his family had the money to do it. I heard through the grapevine that his going to this “private school” caused a huge uproar among the white parents there.

What is your favorite picture that you took in the Delta? Why?

In terms of story, the photo of my students in the classroom acting wild. That was in my first year. There’s a paper ball in midair. There’s another picture of a kid who caught a bird in his bare hand. He wasn’t my student. It was bizarre. I’d never seen anyone do that before. Luckily the bird was not hurt. He let it go.

In terms of beauty, there’s the iconic photo of cotton. Everything in the Delta is based on or relates to cotton, at least in some way. Also, I like the picture of the magnolia flower. Magnolias are the state flower of Mississippi. In the photo, you can see the stamen clearly and the different shades of white, the hint of the petals.

What if someone wants to own one of your photographs?

My website is: www.peterlstephan.com. When you click on one of the thumbnails on my website, it will show the picture in a frame. Most of the photos appear with a yellow button on the bottom left that says “Print Photo.” When you click it, you can specify the size and see the pricing. They’re all high resolution, and you can order prints up to poster size. Of course, they won’t have the watermark when they’re printed. Once you place your order, a professional company prints and ships to you.

So what are you doing now?

I still love photography as a hobby. But now I’m at law school. I want to affect a lot of change.

When Professor Ruben Flores told me about his research looking at the similarities between the fight for Mexican American civil rights and African American civil rights, I knew I had to interview him for my blog. Here’s our conversation:

So how did you get interested in this?

As an undergraduate I became interested in the civil rights movement and the NAACP school desegregation cases of the 1950s. I was interested in the use of social science in the federal courts and how anthropology and sociology were used to argue against segregation. For example, these sciences were being used to show that despite what many whites believed, there weren’t any differences in intellectual abilities among the different cultural communities of the nation. The researchers also showed that segregating black and whites created inferiority complexes among black children.

Well, okay, but what does that have to do with Mexican Americans?

As I was researching the NAACP cases, I found references in their files to a series of cases that involved not blacks but Mexicans and Mexican American students in the American West–California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. These cases were from about 1944 to 1951. I found a similar use of social science in the courts in both sets of cases.

I didn’t understand why there was no historical analysis of these cases in the American West, because they seemed so similar to the NAACP cases, especially because the same NAACP attorneys who later argued the Brown case participated in them.

Two examples of pivotal school desegregation cases in the American West were Mendez v. Westminster and Delgado v. Bastrop. Did you know that Mendez v. Westminster was the first case in which a federal judge ruled that separate but equal was inherently unequal? So it didn’t make any sense to me that there was a division between cases in the West and the Deep South. It seemed to me that you could integrate these things.

Where did the photos of the mural come from? What is this mural? (The photos are posted at the top of this page. Click on each one to see a larger view.)

These are photos that I took. The mural depicts the history of white American immigration to Arizona on the right, the history of Mexican American immigration to Arizona on the left, with the meeting of school children from each of the two cultures depicted in the center of the mural. In the background of the center portion is a public school set in rays of the sun. This is the community’s way of celebrating the mixing of cultures that occurred as a result of the federal Gonzalez v. Sheely desegregation case argued in Arizona in 1951. The mural is located on the handball courts of the Tolleson Independent School District in Tolleson, Arizona. Tolleson was the district that was sued in the Gonzalez case.

Was the segregation against Mexican Americans similar to the segregation faced by black Americans in the early 1900s?

It’s difficult to make easy comparisons about practices that were so deeply entrenched, but I do think that it’s important to pay attention to differences as well as similarities. From the moment blacks came on the continent, for example, they were slaves. By 1950, you’re talking about 350 years of American social practice that discriminated against blacks.

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Last month I met prize-winning poet and children’s book author Richard Michelson at Austin’s Jewish Book Fair. We were both part of “Civil Rights Sunday.” As soon as I got home from the event, I read my copy of his book, As Good As Anybody: Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom.

As Good As Anybody has a beating heart. It describes the friendship between African American Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jewish Abraham Joshua Heschel. In it, Michelson explains how both men channeled their past experiences with discrimination to fuel their life’s work and devotion to justice.

It was only after I read this beautifully-told and gorgeously-illustrated picture book that I learned the extraordinarily powerful story behind the story: namely, what led to Michelson’s passion for civil rights in the first place. Like the men he writes about, Michelson too transformed a horrible childhood experience into a future devoted to justice. In a fascinating article published on jbook.com, Michelson explains:

When I was born in 1953, my area of East New York, Brooklyn, was 90-percent Jewish. A short 12 years later, while King and Heschel were sharing an historic and stirring moment, symbolizing the coming together of race and religion, less than 10 percent of those living in the neighborhood were Jews. And by the time my Dad was shot on Pitkin Avenue during a robbery attempt, he was just one more Jewish exploiter to the black man who killed him.

Today Michelson is a true educator in every sense of the word. He writes:

I have spent many of my adult years writing books for young children that attempt to address and heal society’s racial wounds; though as likely I am trying to heal the rift within myself.

His outstanding picture book, As Good As Anybody, deserves an audience far beyond elementary school. Any middle, high school, and college students would find plenty to think about and appreciate. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls As Good As Anybody, “Gentle, powerful, and healing.”

As Good As Anybody, written by Richard Michelson, Illustrated by Raul Colon, Knopf

The participation of young people made a critical difference in the outcome of the recent presidential election. CIRCLE, The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, reports:

An estimated 23 million young Americans under the age of 30 voted in Tuesday’s presidential election, an increase of 3.4 million compared with 2004…. This year’s youth turnout rivals or exceeds the youth turnout rate of 52% in 1992, which is the highest turnout rate since 1972 (55.4%).

Likewise, back in the 1950s and 1960s, young people played a critical role in charting the future of our nation. During the civil rights movement, children and teenagers bravely faced down police dogs, staged lunch counter sit-ins, and filled jails while parents who couldn’t risk getting fired went to work.

In a recently-released transcript of a 2004 interview, Barack Obama commented on the influence of the civil rights movement on his worldview.

The way I came to Chicago in 1985 was that I was interested in community organizing and I was inspired by the civil rights movement. And the idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things.

With that in mind, I want to shine the spotlight on a book for young readers called Witnesses to Freedom: Young People Who Fought for Civil Rights by Belinda Rochelle. In just 85 pages, this little book shows how ordinary young people achieved extraordinary things. A review from Reed Business Information says:

While adult leaders’ contributions to the civil rights movement have been well chronicled, those made by young people have not received as much attention. Rochelle relates the pivotal roles played by young African Americans in nine major events, including the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the lunch-counter sit-ins at Woolworth in North Carolina.

Published a decade ago, this book is simple, straightforward, and compelling. The author includes interviews with the courageous students who risked a great deal to improve our world. One chapter is devoted to the story of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine, who integrated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. Eckford says:

Every day it was something, and often I cried because of the torment that my parents and I went through.

Another chapter describes what happened to 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who lived in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Colvin says:

When I refused to get out of that bus seat, I knew that I was going to be arrested. The bus driver and the policeman thought that it was just about a bus seat. It wasn’t just about a seat. I felt the Jim Crow laws were unfair.

Readers may be surprised to learn that Colvin did this months before seamstress Rosa Parks did the same.

Witnesses to Freedom will remind young people—even those too young to vote—of the important role they can play in civic and political life.