June, 1999
In Memoriam: Mae Bertha Carter, 1923-1999
by Michael Flug
In the 1960s, Sunflower County, Miss. became known for two worlds—one
exemplified by the notorious racist Senator James O. Eastland, the other
by the civil rights activist and liberation thinker, Fannie Lou Hamer.
It was in the life and death struggle between these two worlds that Mae
Bertha Carter rose up. Born at the north end of the county, virtually in
the shadow of Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary, Mae Bertha Carter and
her husband Matthew worked as sharecroppers for more than two decades.
Mae Bertha Carter joined the NAACP in 1955, years before Mississippi's
civil rights movement made national headlines. The murderous repression
that swept the Mississippi Delta that year did not intimidate her;
throughout her life, repression never stopped her quest for freedom.
In September, 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the
Carters made a decision to enroll seven of their children in the all-white
schools of Drew, Miss. Even to SNCC activists working in Fannie Lou Hamer's
nearby hometown of Ruleville, Drew had a reputation for terror.
When verbal threats did not force the Carters to withdraw their children
from the white schools, their house was shot up. Not long after, they were
evicted from the plantation and prevented from getting farm work anywhere
around Drew. Even when they remained the only Black students in white
schools in Sunflower County, they persisted. Connie Curry's 1995 book,
SILVER RIGHTS, tells the story of her struggle.
Mae Bertha Carter became a tireless activist in the Civil Rights Movement,
speaking everywhere about her experience of struggle, and successfully suing
the state of Mississippi over its sham integration scheme. But when Black
students finally attended the white schools in numbers, whites set up private
schools, leaving the public schools virtually all-Black, and stripped of
resources and funds.
This turn of events didn't stop Mae Bertha Carter either. She began exposing
the fraud of a bankrupt education system and campaigning for resources in Drew
schools. In 1993 she wrote in NEWS & LETTERS, "Education in Mississippi has
taken so many steps backward that our children can't compete in this world....
There's a teacher shortage here in Sunflower County because teachers are so
underpaid. A teacher in Drew makes about as much as at McDonalds....The same
government that doesn't see the need to educate our children still wants to
send our children to war and put them in the ground. Mississippi had more
young Black people in this last war (Persian Gulf) than any other state, just
because they couldn't find a job at home. We got a long way to go down here."
When I talked to Mae Bertha Carter last fall, she was still trying to get a
librarian for the school library, still speaking out about the "crime" of
schools without funds. She repeated what she had said in 1993: "We got a long
way to go down here." But she added: "And we're not going to stop till we get
there." Mae Bertha Carter died April 28. We honor her memory.
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