Memories of civil rights struggles still fresh in Mississippi town...
By Patricia Zapor Catholic News Service GREENWOOD, Miss. (CNS)-- A pane of cracked blue glass above the front doors of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Greenwood helps ensure that nobody forgets how their parish, its founding pastor and the religious who staffed it stood up for them during a polarizing, often brutal time.
As this summer marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, parishioners at St. Francis have a vivid reminder of the related events in their town. They can look up and see where a bullet went through the window, one of many acts of violence and serious threats to a faith community that was active in promoting civil rights, both behind the scenes and in the streets.
For people who lived in Greenwood at that time, however, the broken window pane doesn't seem necessary to remind them what their town has been through. In interviews with Catholic News Service in early June, parishioners at St. Francis and the town's other Catholic church, Immaculate Heart of Mary, spoke vividly of incidents from those years.
They lived with the blatantly racist way of life epitomized by the White Citizens' Council, a Greenwood-founded segregationist group that actively championed the Jim Crow system. Greenwood, now with a population of just 15,000 and then around 20,000, found itself divided even more in the mid-1960s by a months-long merchant boycott in protest of how blacks were treated. A few years earlier and 10 miles up the road, Emmett Till, the black Chicago 14-year-old who was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, was found -- tortured and killed -- reportedly for flirting with a white young woman.
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