Raylawni Branch was born in 1941 right here in Hattiesburg, about five blocks north of our offices in downtown Hattiesburg – specifically, over on Whitney Street in the same house in which her mother was born.
She was the oldest of 10 children.
Like many black families in the south, her parents migrated north to Chicago after World War II, but life there wasn’t easy. Her family found themselves homeless on several different occasions while her father struggled to find his footing in a new city.
By the time she graduated from the eighth grade in Chicago, she had moved 11 times and attended eight different schools - including several predominantly white schools, where she encountered teachers who refused to even speak to her.
But she would not be deterred.
Despite the many obstacles she faced, Raylawni excelled in school and when her father died in the Cook County Jail in 1955, the family returned to Hattiesburg.
She was midway through her eighth-grade year, but enrolled in the ninth grade on her arrival here in Hattiesburg and managed to graduate in just a few short months.
That fall, she began her sophomore year at Rowan High School, where she first learned about political activism, pride, and how to navigate the system – all from her history teacher, Miss Marjorie Chambers, affectionally known to her students as “The Hawk.”
As a teenager, she worked before and after school – and most weekends – at Fat's Kitchen, a restaurant in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street black business district.
There she met a regular customer named Clyde Kennard, whose tragic attempt to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi played out before Raylawni’s young eyes.
In 1959 she saw Kennard on the morning of his appointment with Dr. William David McCain, president of (then) Mississippi Southern College, to discuss the idea of enrolling in classes.
McCain, for whom the library at Southern Miss was named – and, by the way, still bears his name - was a staunch segregationist who was so well known for his views that in 1964 James Meredith made his attempt to enter Ole Miss rather than Southern, thinking success more likely in Oxford.
Raylawni remembers hearing diners that morning trying to talk Kennard out of going to meet McCain and urging him to take someone with him.
But Kennard, she recalls, believed that if you did the things you were supposed to do, everyone else would do the things they were supposed to do.
In an oral history interview conducted in 1993, Raylawni talked about that morning with Kennard, which was the last time she ever saw him.
“He just had no idea of how evil and how entrenched the devil is in people's minds and bodies," she said. "So he went off, and subsequently, was arrested. And he died.”
Raylawni graduated from Rowan High School with the Class of 1959.
She married young and had three children, but never forgot the inspiration of her former teacher, Miss Chambers, and as a young wife and mother, she sought out opportunities to support the burgeoning local civil rights movement.
She soon began attending NAACP meetings at the home of Vernon Dahmer, who had been active in defense of Clyde Kennard and his attempts to enroll at Southern Miss.
It was through those meetings that she became acquainted with several state civil rights leaders including Aaron Henry, Charles Evers and, of course, Medgar Evers.
On June 12, 1963, the night Medgar Evers was gunned down in his Jackson drive, Raylawni and others drove to Jackson and sat with Myrlie as they mourned the loss of their friend and leader.
But she was not deterred.
Later that fall, she traveled to our nation’s capital for the March on Washington and on August 28, 1963, was among those standing on the national mall to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talk about his dream that “one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”
Back in Hattiesburg, Raylawni, who was still a child by many accounts, went to work.
She integrated the Greyhound Lines and the Trailways Transportation System bus stations in Hattiesburg and was the first African American ever hired at the local Big Yank clothing factory.
She also became the first African American ever offered a position as a switchboard operator at the local telephone company.
By 1965, at the age 24, she was elected secretary of the Forrest County NAACP and was serving in that role when the organization recruited her to help integrate the last major holdout of the Mississippi university system, the University of Southern Mississippi.
On September 6, 1965, she (then Raylawni Young) and 18-year-old Hattiesburg native Elaine Armstrong became the first African American students enrolled at the university.
The two women attended classes accompanied by six bodyguards, one of them a local policeman who had once violently attacked her in a civil rights confrontation.
Branch has acknowledged that she was treated fairly as a student, but trying to raise three small children under the age of six was difficult and so was trying to overcome what she eventually realized was a substandard segregated high school education.
Struggling to make ends meet, she often relied on assistance from friends within the black community – including her friends Vernon and Ellie Dahmer – for everything from childcare to groceries.
In fact, in January 1966, on the evening before Dahmer’s home was firebombed by the KKK, he had sent her several boxes of groceries to help feed her family.
Heartbroken from the loss of such a profound leader in the local civil rights movement and struggling to maintain her grades, Raylawni withdrew from USM after one year.
But she was not deterred.
After separating from her husband in 1966, Branch left Mississippi for New York, where she had a scholarship to study nursing at St. John's Episcopal School of Nursing.
While a student there, she became active in protests against the Vietnam War and in October 1968, was one of 35,000 anti-war protestors who gathered for a demonstration at the Defense Department called the “March on the Pentagon.”
She received her bachelor's degree in Nursing from the University of Miami in 1969 and a few years later joined the Air Force Reserves, where she rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
In 1987, she returned home to Hattiesburg and enrolled in a master's degree program at Southern Miss, and in 1993 graduated with an advanced degree in Community Health Nursing, with a minor in Education.
She served as a nursing instructor at Pearl River Community College and for several years, served as the coordinator of nursing for the American Red Cross of South Central Mississippi.
Eventually, she made her way back to Southern Miss – this time as a nursing instructor – and in March 2004 she retired from the University of Southern Mississippi.
Raylawni Branch not only broke the color barrier at three different institutions in her hometown of Hattiesburg, but she lived a life of service that continues even today.
She had a front-row seat to some of our nation’s most important – and most tragic – moments of the civil rights era and through it all, she was never deterred.
And why?
Perhaps it was because of one singular moment.
Because that’s all it ever takes really.
Shortly after the end of World War II, as a young girl no older than four or five, she was attending school in Mount Carmel when a storm came through the area, forcing teachers to dismiss the students early.
Without phones to let parents know about the early dismissal, they had no choice but to send the students on their way, and despite being so young, she started out on the mile-long walk down Highway 84 followed by another one-third mile trek down a dirt road to her house.
She recalled the incident in her own words in that 1993 oral history interview:
“That last stretch was a Mississippi red-clay dirt road,” she said. “It was raining so hard that it was just pushing me right down to the ground. I had enough sense to get in the ditch.
In the distance, I could hear this engine coming down the road. It was a school bus. I guess the white students were also being turned out early.
I had never even seen the school bus on the road before.
In fact, we didn’t have school buses; we walked.
But I saw that the bus was coming along and I got up off the ground and started flagging it down. It roared right past, flinging mud and dirt all over me. I got back in the ditch and I cried and cried.
I stayed there until I could finally hear my daddy’s voice. He came along the road calling me.
I got up and we walked home.
I said, 'Daddy, do you know the bus when right by me?'
He said, 'oh, it did?'
“Yes,” I said. “I flagged it down, but it didn’t stop and pick me up.”
He said, 'Baby, one of these days, that bus is going to stop.'"
Raylawni Branch never forgot that moment.
She grew up believing that bus would stop someday – even if she would have to make it stop herself.
Change, as she came to find out first hand, only happens when people take an active role in their communities.
Change only happens when people take an active role to change the attitudes of others.
Change only happens when people take an interest in the lives of their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin.
Change only happens when people, like Raylawni Branch, are not deterred.
Gustafson is the not-so-mild-mannered editor and publisher of The PineBelt NEWS and its affiliated publications.
