I was not much more than a tyke during the height of the 1960s civil rights era. The movement going on around me didn't make a lot of sense to a kid still in grade school. But my child's mind was aware of how much things around me were changing, especially when it came time for me to go from elementary to junior high school.
I'd attended the historically all-Black Eureka Elementary School. However, after Mississippi finally obeyed federal law and integrated its public schools, Black children were allowed to attend the schools of their choice. I chose the predominantly white — at the time — Hawkins Junior High.
After graduating from Hattiesburg High, I wanted to continue my education. I'd always admired The University of Southern Mississippi as a kid, riding a city bus past its beautiful Hardy Street campus. It was where I wanted to go to college. At the time, I didn't think much about how easy it was for me to apply and get accepted, taking my ease at enrollment for granted.
But the teenager who still lives deep inside me looks back and sees the road that was paved for me. In 1973, I hadn't even considered that only 10 years earlier, it would have been impossible for me to attend USM. I could thank Clyde Kennard for my new normal.
Kennard's name is familiar and should be, to my fellow alumni of USM. Last month, I returned to the college campus of my youth to attend a discussion and book signing of the new book, "A Slow Calculated Lynching" presented by its author, Devery S. Anderson. His biography and discussion gave me a clearer understanding of the sacrifices Kennard made, clearing the way for future generations of Black students at USM like me.
Kennard was born in 1927, just a year before my mother. I'm sure the two of them grew up facing the same kind of state-sponsored apartheid I'd witnessed only the tail end of during my youth. His story, in fact, reminds me of my mother's, since they both had a thirst for knowledge.
Growing up in pre-World War II America, Kennard faced this nation's entrenched racism. Still, he proudly served his country as a soldier during World War II and the Korean War. After military service, the quest for knowledge that always lived inside him came to the forefront of his life.
Kennard spent some time living in Chicago and, while there, attended the University of Chicago. He later returned to his native Mississippi to help his mother, tending their family farm in the Kelly Settlement community, north of Hattiesburg. Always an avid reader, the desire to learn was a fire that still burned inside him.
Eager to continue his education, Kennard had the "audacity" — that’s what it would have been considered at the time — to seek enrollment at Mississippi Southern College, now USM. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had passed the historic Brown v Board of Education in 1954, outlawing public school desegregation in America, Mississippi, along with other southern states deliberately drug their feet, maintaining segregated public schools.
Kennard's repeated attempts to enroll would fail every time. Mississippi employed a methodically planned team effort to keep Blacks from becoming students at its segregated state institutions of higher learning. That team included Mississippi Gov. J.P. Coleman, and the school's president, William McCain, joined by the efforts of local judicial and law enforcement officials. Keeping Black students off all-white college campuses, at any cost, was that important to the state.
Backup was provided by the most heinous of groups, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, created in 1956, in direct response to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision. The commission's goal was to maintain segregation in our state's public arenas including, of course, public schools. Mississippi's white power structure would not dare allow Kennard to attend Mississippi Southern College. Coleman, working in concert with the school's administration and the Sovereignty Commission, made sure his attempts to enroll would fail.
An offshoot of the Sovereignty Commission was the fiercely anti-integrationist White Citizens Council, made up of white professionals, with branches statewide, including in Hattiesburg. The council received its revenue from membership dues as well as public funding provided by the commission.
Officially eschewing violence on their own, the Citizens Councils, in effect hiding their hands, privately condoned the violent acts performed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Dudley Conner, head of the Hattiesburg chapter, reported to the Sovereignty Commission that, in Kennard's case, what Mississippi needed was "a good lynching." Anderson said those groups, working together, would have, indeed, murdered Kennard, if need be, to prevent him from attending Mississippi Southern College. But they found another way.
Kennard had no criminal record but was framed for stealing feed for the chickens kept on his farm. He was convicted in a kangaroo court held at the Forrest County Courthouse, then sentenced to seven years in the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary known as Parchman Farm. In Mississippi, a convicted felon was automatically disqualified from attending the state's colleges or universities. With Kennard in prison, the state had gotten what it wanted.
While incarcerated, Kennard became gravely ill and was later diagnosed with colon cancer. He was sent to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson for surgery, where the medical staff recommended he be placed in their custody for further care. Instead, he was sent back to Parchman, forced to continue hard labor.
With the cancer progressing, Kennard became even more ill and was finally released from Parchman in early 1963. Six months later, he succumbed to his illness and died on July 4, 1963. Here, the title of Anderson's book becomes instructional, "A Slow Calculated Lynching." That's exactly what Kennard's death was.
There's not enough to say about the opportunities lost in the life of Clyde Kennard, a life we were robbed of seeing mature. By all accounts, he was a kind and gentle soul. He could often be found sitting beneath the shade of a giant oak tree in Kelly Settlement, with a good book in hand.
Kennard has been rightfully honored posthumously by the University of Southern Mississippi. The Student Services Building, as it was called when I attended USM, was renamed Kennard-Washington Hall in 1993, in his honor, and that of Walter Washington, the first Black student to receive a doctoral degree from USM. In 2018, Kennard was also awarded a posthumous honorary doctoral degree by USM.
Though a tragic loss, Kennard's life was not lived in vain. Two years after his death, in 1965, Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong became the first African Americans to enroll at USM.
Eight years later, on a pleasant September morning, I stepped off the Hardy Street bus to begin my freshman year at USM. Now, 50 years later, I can see how the road on that bus ride down Hardy Street was paved for me, all the way to The University of Southern Mississippi campus, by the life of Clyde Kennard.
Elijah Jones is a proud Hattiesburg native who enjoys writing. Email him at edjhubtown@aol.com.
