By JOSH FOREMAN
Staff Reporter
About 10 teen-agers wearing solid orange shirts shuffled out of the Neshoba County Courthouse Wednesday afternoon.
“This should be a time for us to curse,” 15-year-old Cornesha Ward said. “I’m mad.”
Ward and 17 friends had driven over from Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta that morning. They planned on attending the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, but ended up standing around on the steps of the courthouse for a while, then driving off to see some of Neshoba County’s other historical landmarks.
The teens are part of a six-year program called the Freedom Project. As part of the program, they spend weeks every summer for six years engaged in aggressive, interactive educational supplements. They spend about six weeks in Sunflower County studying math, reading and electives such as media production, then go to Ole Miss for several weeks to study.
“The Freedom Project is focused on academic enrichment,” said Freedom Project worker Carmen Harris, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The program, begun by Dr. Chris Meyers, recruits college students each summer to spend time teaching children in the Mississippi Delta.
“Their main focus is just to bring these kids up to par just to give them the opportunities that other kids have,” Harris said.
The idea for the program was gleaned from historical events; Harris said it’s based on the Freedom Schools of the civil rights movement.
“We learned about Emmit Till,” 14-year-old Genola Thomas said. Thomas was one of the eight visitors from Los Angeles. “It’s totally different from L.A.”
The Wednesday trip was part of the civil rights education segment of the six-year program.
The ninth graders, which included eight students from Sunflower County and eight visitors from a leadership school in Los Angeles, couldn’t get into the courtroom to see jury selection at about 1 p.m. Their orange shirts, until they turned them inside-out, displayed the white Freedom School logo. Circuit Court Judge Marcus D. Gordon said the teens couldn’t come in with the shirts because it may sway jurors, Harris said.
So they turned their shirts inside-out. They still couldn’t get in. Harris said they were told the solid orange shirts made them look like a unified group, which was not allowed in the courtroom. A few minutes later a law enforcement officer stepped outside the courthouse and told the kids that the ones with pants could come in. The ones wearing shorts would have to wait outside, he said, because shorts weren’t allowed inside.
A few minutes later, as Harris and the children were preparing to leave to visit some other civil rights-related sites in Neshoba County, a court official rushed outside and said that all of the kids could come into the courtroom. By that time, however, the kids had to get back on the road, Harris said.
But they weren’t sore, despite their grumbling.
“All you can do is chalk it up to experience,” Harris said. “I think it was definitely worth the experience.”
