Growing up in Hernando, Miss., in the 1950s, a young Leslie-Burl McLemore would often forgo heading to the playground with other students during his lunch breaks at McKay Elementary School and instead enter the school library, searching the shelves for biographies of famous Black history makers. Fascinated by accounts of the lives of men like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, McLemore yearned to learn more and more, a desire that followed him when he enrolled in high school at Delta Center School in Walls, Miss., which has since become Walls Elementary School.
Upon entering the only recently desegregated Delta Center School, however, McLemore soon learned that the school’s library did not stock any biographies of famous Black leaders like those he had enjoyed in middle school. The school’s principal, Elias Johnson Jr., had also appointed a number of faculty advisers to the student council, for which McLemore served as president, in a bid to control student activity and prevent further efforts such as protests and boycotts intended to integrate additional aspects of the institution.
McLemore took initiative after seeing the conditions at his school, and began looking for a way to organize a protest under the faculty advisers’ noses. He crafted a large number of leaflets detailing his plans and passed them out to students as they got off the bus at school, before they entered the building. The leaflets contained instructions for students to assemble at the gymnasium in protest instead of going to class.
Leslie Burl-McLemore (center back row, seated) served as president of both the Rust College Student Government Association and the college’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Photo courtesy Leslie McLemore
For the next several days, a large number of students spent the entire day in the gym singing songs and speaking to one another. Eventually, the principal relented and agreed to stock Black history books in the library and to reduce the number of faculty advisers, giving students more freedom at the school. The experience proved to be McLemore’s first foray as
Read original article by clicking here.