A downtrodden minority group from four Eastern European countries visited Mississippi Valley State University Friday to learn about the struggle for equality of a once-persecuted population in this country.
The Roma people, an ethnic group with origins in India, have historically been second-class citizens in Europe. They have been labeled offensively as "gypsies," and they still live mostly in ghettos on the outskirts of cities, segregated from mainstream society.
In an effort to break the group free from its suffering, about 15 Roma and non-Roma social workers from Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland are visiting the United States, mainly Mississippi, for five weeks.
The trip is sponsored by the Jackson-based Mississippi Consortium for International Development, or MCID.
The foreigners' mission is to model their efforts after the successes of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, says Zuzana Pobocikova, a white Slovakian who works for a Roma non-profit organization.
"Our goal here is to learn more about the work and about the good things minorities here went through, and also about the mistakes they made," she said through an interpreter. "We are not trying to create a new United States of America in our countries."
She and her colleagues sat through a crash-course discussion of the movement in the Delta, focusing primarily on the events of 1964, a milestone year that included the Freedom Summer push to register black voters.
"When we talk about 1964, I would say Slovakia in its civil rights is in the early '70s compared to America," Pobocikova said.
Although the time lines are different, the similarities between the Roma and black experiences are striking, says MCID Executive Director Ally Mack.
"If you go through the entire list, you will find that pretty much they are suffering from the same situations that blacks have suffered," Mack explained.
One of the main problems for the Roma is access to equal education, according to Metody Dimitrov, a Roma from Bulgaria.
"Despite the fact that we don't officially have segregated schools, Roma children go to de facto segregated schools and receive a lower quality education than other Bulgarian children," he said through an interpreter. "That means we are not able to compete in the workplace later on, and we end up doing most of the grunt work."
Dimitrov works for a nonprofit called Romani Bakh, which translates to "Roma happiness." Last year, the group bought a school bus and paid to send 100 Roma children to mainstream Bulgarian schools. The government offered no support for the initiative, Dimitrov said.
Mack said she saw similar inequities during a recent trip to Hungary and Poland.
"Roma children are not provided with the kind of education they should be getting," she said. "In some instances the governments aren't even providing the teachers for them. I was in one school where a teacher was a volunteer.
"And in terms of employment opportunities, they just really aren't there for them."
Even with the strides blacks have made in this country, Pobocikova still notices a pattern common to both the Roma in Europe and many black Mississippians. "The main similarity I see is that in real life there is still segregation," she said.
But the improvements made in last 40 years give her hope. "When we see the long-term process you had to go through and you are still going through, I can see we are on our way," she said.
