New book chronicles Black man’s attempt to integrate Mississippi college

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — There are some stories that simply need to be told to a wider audience. For Sherita L. Johnson, it was the tragic yet ultimately inspiring tale of Clyde Kennard.

Johnson, director of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Africana Research Center and associate professor of English at Penn State, co-wrote the new book, “Mixing: Race, Higher Education, and the Case of Clyde Kennard,” published by the University Press of Mississippi.

In the book, Johnson and co-authors Cheryl D. Jenkins, chair of the Mass Media Studies Department and associate professor in the School of Humanities and Fine Arts at Talladega College; Loren Saxton Coleman, assistant professor in the Communication, Culture and Media Studies Department at Howard University; and Rebecca A. Tuuri, associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, examine the life and death of Kennard, a Korean War veteran whose attempts to enroll at Hattiesburg’s then all-white Mississippi Southern College — now the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) — in the 1950s were met with the institutional racism of the late Jim Crow era.

Johnson and her collaborators make clear in the book that Kennard’s struggle inspired generations of African Americans to fight for racial equality in higher education. It also led to the eventual integration of Mississippi Southern in 1965, three years after James Meredith became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

“This is a good story to tell because so much came out of this tragic circumstance,” Johnson said. “So many African Americans followed his lead and became students at Southern Mississippi — and were committed to completing their education — because of Clyde Kennard. And they committed to keeping his story alive. As tragic as the story is, it’s inspiring. We didn’t want to just talk about his death and what happened, but what came out of it.”

Coleman said she, Johnson and the other co-authors strove to “tell a story of Kennard’s humanity," while also stressing his role in the broader fight to integrate higher education in the South, which Tuuri covers in-depth in the book.

“(The book) highlights the strategic nature of his activism and how his strategy created the conditions of emergence for Black activism at USM for years to come,” Coleman said.

Johnson was a faculty member at Southern Mississippi when she and her co-authors formed the Freedom50 Research Group there in 2015, the same year as the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The interdisciplinary group conducted a semester-long faculty seminar on race relations and civil rights, which led to working with a film crew to make a short documentary about Kennard’s life that features interviews with Hattiesburg-area residents who knew and remembered him.

From there came a series of public lectures about Kennard, which provided the foundation for the book, Johnson said.

“We did those lectures in a community space, which was important in order to get the input and buy-in from the community, because they would come in and provide information that added dimensions to the story,” she said. “We were constantly being fed new information. All this public engagement was so critical to our project.”

Kennard was taking classes at the University of Chicago when he decided to return to Mississippi in the summer of 1955 to help his mother run the family farm in the wake of his stepfather’s death.

“He wanted to complete his education, and the closest school just so happened to be the all-white Mississippi Southern College,” Johnson said. “Was it naïve for him to think he could go there? Perhaps, but he had already been enrolled at the University of Chicago for two years. He didn’t want to cause an uproar; he just wanted to complete his degree, no matter what.”

When he approached the college, its administrators told him he would need to receive recommendations from five alumni. While that would prove impossible, Kennard nonetheless kept at it — to the point where the school conspired with local law enforcement to plant liquor in his car and have him arrested for possession of alcohol in dry Forrest County, named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate Civil War general and Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan leader.

“The community was very upset,” Johnson said. “They were like, ‘This guy doesn’t drink. He’s a teetotaler and devout Christian.’ Everyone knew that it was a lie, but nevertheless he was arrested. After making bail, they arrested him again a few months later when Kennard was framed for stealing chicken feed for his farm.”

Kennard was imprisoned at Mississippi State Penitentiary, notorious for its hard labor practices. While there, Kennard grew seriously ill but never received proper medical care. He was eventually diagnosed with stomach cancer, which had fully advanced by the time it was detected.

A series of articles about his plight published in Jet magazine, the popular African American-focused periodical, put enough pressure on state officials to release Kennard from prison early so he could receive proper medical treatment. But by then it was too late, and he died on July 4, 1963.

Johnson and her co-authors relied on numerous archival documents to piece together Kennard’s case, including civil rights materials, segregationist records, and media accounts preserved in student publications and especially in Jet, which covered the story from beginning to end and even for decades after Kennard’s death.

“During the writing process, we learned so much from each other and were surprised at the synergy between the chapters of the book as it developed specifically around media texts,” Jenkins said. “From the historical significance of Jet to Kennard’s editorials to student publications and activism, media and media practice is a consistent thread throughout.”

The book also includes firsthand testimony from Kennard, via a series of letters he wrote and had published in the local newspaper, the Hattiesburg American, with the intention of getting through to the city’s white population.

Johnson compared the letters to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“Kennard’s letters are like biblical epistles, which shows just how much his faith informed him,” Johnson said. “It also shows how he was thinking through the problem of race. He was trying to inform the public why integrating higher education was beneficial. He was saying, economically what does that do for your state when you’re not educating 50% of your population? He’s pulling together all these different philosophical threads into his argument about freedom and justice and equality in ways that just blows my mind, especially because these are letters then printed in the white local newspaper.”

Despite the tragic circumstances of Kennard’s life, his story proved inspirational to civil rights activists like Meredith, who publicly acknowledged his debt to Kennard when he integrated the University of Mississippi.

To this day, Kennard remains a beacon for students at Southern Mississippi, now one of the most diverse colleges in the state. Student-led campaigns there have resulted in a campus building being named after him and the state expunging his criminal record.

Johnson and her fellow Freedom50 Research Group members were instrumental in successfully petitioning the school to award Kennard a posthumous degree and erect a historical marker in his honor. The state has also renamed a stretch of highway adjacent to the university in his memory.

The book is the latest chapter, and for Johnson, “a real passion project.”

“So, I guess now we’re just waiting for a movie,” she said with a laugh. “This was a story we were just really intent on telling. Mr. Kennard was quiet, mild-mannered, and small of stature. He was not who you think of as a revolutionary. He was ordinary, but extraordinary. Once you learn about Clyde Kennard’s story, it never leaves you.”