Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African-Americans across the South were denied the right to vote through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other tactics of suppression.  In 1964, David Kendall was a 20-year-old Indiana college student. In this episode, he recalls coming to Mississippi to participate in the voter registration drive known as Freedom Summer.

Over the course of that summer, Kendall would be jailed multiple times. He shares his memories of that first arrest and being introduced to the best cheeseburger in Holly Springs.  In preparing for Freedom Summer, Civil Rights workers received extensive training in a variety of tactics, but he explains how growing up on a farm proved surprisingly useful in helping to gain the confidence of black farmers in the Delta.

Image: Voter Registration Holly Springs, McCain Library & Archives, USM

Thad “Pie” Vann was head football coach at Southern Miss from 1948 until 1968, racking up an impressive 19 winning seasons and two national championships. But in this episode, we learn that coaching was not his first choice.

Growing up in the small town of Magnolia, Vann wanted to play professional baseball more than anything. It was his high school football coach that encouraged him to go to college before trying out for a minor league team. During his four years at Ole’ Miss, Vann excelled at football and baseball, hoping to play in the big leagues after graduation. He credits Coach Pete Shields for helping him prepare for a different career path.

Vann was still considering major league baseball after graduating college in 1929, but jumped at the chance to coach football at Meridian High School because of a desire to help his younger sister to attend college. It was while he was at Meridian, USM Coach Reed Green asked him to come to Southern Miss as an assistant. Eventually, he became head coach and achieved national recognition over the next twenty years.

Pie Vann was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in 1971 and National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1987.

After graduating college in California, Dolphus Weary returned to Mendenhall while job hunting.

In this episode, his wife Rosie Weary recalls their decision to join the Mendenhall Ministries. She describes how the Mendenhall Ministries established a 150 acre farm to teach their young people a good work ethic and explains how the food they grow benefits the entire community.

The programs developed by the Mendenhall Ministries have been designed to address specific needs within the community:

• When local African-American children needed constructive recreational activities, it was the Mendenhall Ministries that found the solution.
• In the early 1970s, The Mendenhall Ministries recognized a need for their own medical clinic. She recounts how they met that need.

• As Mississippi schools integrated in 1970, black parents realized the children were not as prepared as their white counterparts. Weary discusses the formation of the Genesis One School.

Weary concludes by pointing with pride to their many success stories. To learn more about the Mendenhall Ministries, go to http://www.mendenhallministries.org .

The Illinois Central railroad and eight affiliated Harriman lines had traditionally dealt separately with each craft union (boilermakers, blacksmiths, etc.) giving the companies an unfair advantage during contract negotiations in the minds of the unions. When the unions formed a "System Federation" in June of that year, the companies refused to recognize the group and began preparing for a system-wide strike.

Harry Marsalis was a seventeen year old machinist apprentice working at the Illinois Central railroad maintenance shop in McComb when the strike began on September 30th.  In this episode, he describes how the company prepared in advance of the strike by building walled compounds and hiring northern strikebreakers.  According to Marsalis, when the strikebreaker train arrived in McComb three days later, 100 strikers responded to the rock-throwing strikebreakers by shooting the train cars to pieces before the train would escape to New Orleans.  Reports of 30 dead and 100 wounded strikebreakers were denied by the company

Marsalis describes how the town became an armed camp as martial law was declared by the governor, complete with hundreds of state militiamen, machine gun towers and searchlights around the company offices.

After two long years the strike was considered a failure and many of the strikers including Marsalis were forced to leave town looking for work.