JACKSON - What are the odds the daughter of Mississippi's bitter-end segregationist 1960s governor and the hero of Mississippi's civil rights movement 45 years later would become fellow teachers in the same black high school?
A million to one? Ten million to one? Or, impossible?
Sometimes the Lord works in clever ways, bridging a yawning civil rights divide and one day bringing two persons from diametrically opposite ends of the racial spectrum into common cause.
Such a remarkable happening has taken place right here in Jackson, Mississippi. Here, in a town many in the early 1960s would describe as Fortress Barnett. As in Ross Barnett.
Keep the name Barnett in mind, because one principal in our modern miracle bears the Barnett name: his daughter, Ouida Barnett Atkins.
The other principal in our town's unlikely happening is a light-skinned Harvard-educated black man named Bob Moses, the brilliant soft-spoken Freedom Summer strategist and key activist behind Mississippi's civil rights movement of the 1960s.
And, amazingly, while such other civil rights icons as Medgar Evers were gunned down, Bob Moses survived.
Then three decades later, Bob Moses would come back to Mississippi to lead another crusade, this time to unshackle the minds of black youngsters and teach them the key to learning algebra, long their insurmountable task.
Teaching is what would bring together Ouida Barnett Atkins, now a tall, lean 70-year-old, and Moses, 69, the revered African-American icon of the civil rights struggle. He today much prefers to talk about his Algebra Project rather than his days breaking down Mississippi segregation.
Fate in the mid-1990s brought both Ouida Barnett and Bob Moses to teach at the same Jackson inner-city Lanier High School.
Each teaching on a different floor, their starkly different backgrounds had been unknown to each other for several years. She didn't realize who Moses was and that he taught at the same school until it was pointed out to her by a news reporter doing a story on Ouida's new career in 1999.
The intersection of their lives has been made a chapter in a forthcoming book by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter John Blake, entitled "Children of the Movement," published by Lawrence Hill Books of Chicago.
Blake evidently discovered Ross Barnett's daughter was teaching in the same black high school as Moses when he did his research for a chapter on Moses and his daughter, Maisha. He reveals some previously unknown opinions of Ouida's reflecting a sharp break with her father's segregationist beliefs.
Blake writes that when Ross Barnett's massive resistance to admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss in 1962 precipitated bloody violence on the university campus, Ouida still supported her father's position.
"At the time I did," Blake quotes Ouida as saying, "I grew up that way. We thought it would wreck the schools if they were integrated."
But her views on the segregation culture began to change in the 1970s after her marriage to the late Homer, La., lawyer Ross Atkins collapsed (after five children), Blake writes. She expanded her circle of friends, indulged her passion for travel and earned a master's degree in ancient world history.
Travel and exposure to different cultures helped her break with her former racial prejudices, Ouida tells Blake.
"You could always see she was out there searching for something new and different in her life," her son, Ross Barnett Atkins, now a Washington lobbyist, says of his mother in the Blake account.
She may have freed herself from her father's segregationist dogma, but as this writer recalls from a scathing late-night phone call from her in the early 1980s, Ouida can be highly protective of the late governor if a journalist writes anything she views as critical of him.
(An attempt by this writer to reach her by telephone to discuss the Blake book was unsuccessful.)
Blake writes in his forthcoming book that Ouida rejects the notion many commentators have expressed over the years that Ross Barnett was a racist. She insists, Blake adds, that while her father was a self-admitted segregationist, by her definition he was no racist.
As for Bob Moses, Blake accurately characterizes the aura, the mystique, which until today surrounds the imprint the scholarly, one-time Harlem kid has made on the history of Mississippi, both in the 1960s civil rights struggle and now as an extraordinary algebra teacher.
Moses survived head bashings and arrests by hostile officials in Amite County, but two local blacks he enlisted to work with him - Herbert Lee and Louis Allen - were shot to death and their killers were never charged or prosecuted.
As was evident in Moses' remarks recently when he was an honoree in a ceremony here marking black achievements in Mississippi over the past half-century, Bob Moses is yet haunted by a nagging sense of responsibility for their deaths.
Moses had conceived the idea of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, as well as the Freedom Democratic Party challenge of the state's all-white regular delegation at the Democratic National Convention the same year.
Those two events focused unprecedented national attention and news coverage on Mississippi's tightly segregated society and became the launching pad for blacks gaining political clout in the state.
Think of this, for a moment: The quiet black genius who played a key role in toppling white supremacy in Mississippi and the daughter of the man who triggered an insurrection to preserve it, now jointly help blacks break the bonds of educational deprivation.
Must be a Biblical symbolism here.
