TOUGALOO - There sat Unita Blackwell like a tall African queen, her dark face an onyx gemstone set against her regal shiny emerald-green, gold-trimmed African style dress.
At her feet were her minions - four black women mayors of small Mississippi Delta towns. They had come to pay homage to Mayersville's Blackwell, who 30 years ago paved their way by becoming Mississippi's first black woman mayor.
Of course there was another important reason for the gathering for a supper in the president's home at Tougaloo College. Marian Wright Edelman, now national director of the Children's Defense Fund, who first made her mark as a 1960s civil rights attorney in Mississippi, was back for a visit.
Edelman came to get a briefing, and a show-and-tell, from leaders of Freedom Schools that were first born in Mississippi's civil rights movement. Now, a revival of the schools is helping black children and their parents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
While Edelman (who in 1967 had met and later married Peter Edelman, then Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's closest aide when RFK came to Mississippi on his historic tour to see firsthand poverty in the Delta) was supposed to be the chief attraction, Unita was no doubt queen bee of the evening.
It gave Unita a good chance to plug publication of her remarkable life story, "Bare-footin,'" an autobiographical memoir, which Joanne Prichard Morris pulled out of Blackwell in her own words over three years and put on paper. Crown Publishers of New York will release it in May.
I say "remarkable" to describe the life of Unita Blackwell. What other single word encompasses the story of the black girl who went from the Delta cotton fields, with only eight years of formal schooling, to be feted by three presidents in the White House and treated with regal deference in China?
Not to mention the fact that she was one of Mississippi's leading freedom fighters in the 1960s civil rights era, whose witty spirit and persuasiveness later broke down resistance of former white racists to work with her on major low-cost housing development projects.
Or that she was the recipient of the coveted MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" that provides $350,000 over five years. Or that at age 50 she gained a master's degree in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts, leaping over her lack of an undergraduate degree, and at best, having only a high school equivalency certificate.
The term "bare-footin'" needs some explaining. It's Unita's favorite word, a metaphor for keepin' on keepin' on tearing down roadblocks, be they racial, economic or otherwise, yet all the while not forgetting your shoeless days of squishing gumbo Delta mud through your toes.
First you need to know where and what Mayersville is. It's the very old county seat of Issaquena County (among the state's poorest), tucked in the lower Delta just inside the levee on a Mississippi River bend, a place that wasn't even an incorporated municipality until Unita Blackwell went to work in the mid 1970s to make it one.
Not surprisingly, after setting up a biracial committee on incorporation - the first time whites in the town ever sat down with blacks to solve a problem - Unita in 1976 became the town's first mayor, a job she held for the next 20 years. (Significantly, later she was named president of the National Conference of Black Mayors.)
Born in 1933 in a cotton plantation shack outside Lula, Coahoma County in the upper Delta, she spent her early years picking and chopping cotton with her mother and grandmother (Big Mama) for the "man," as white plantation owners were called.
Her daddy, not unlike many Delta black men, took off after three years to live in Memphis and never came back. She and her mother moved across the River to West Helena, Ark., where the family had kinfolks and a little better place to live. But back to the cotton field: By age 12 she could pick a whopping 200 pounds a day.
"Little fast girl" was what Big Mama called Unita growing up, not because she was flirtatious, but because of her constantly inquisitive mind.
Her marriage to Jeremiah Blackwell, a light-skinned black man who worked as a cook on a Army Corps of Engineers boat, took her to Mayersville to live. Jeremiah's family once owned a little land but lost most of it for taxes. In 1957 her only child, Jeremiah Jr., was born, and afterwards Unita almost died from hemorrhaging.
She became bored with life in sleepy Mayersville until the early 1960s, when civil rights workers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to town, and inevitably she joined up with the movement.
Arrested with 1,000 others in a voting protest march she helped stage in Jackson, she was locked up for 11 days in the livestock barn at the State Fairgrounds, where women were herded together and strip-searched by men. Unita made the building's restroom her "office" to bolster other women's spirits, her first time to become a civil rights leader.
Movie star Shirley MacLaine, who somehow had picked out Unita as a sturdy example of rural womanhood, spent a week in Mayersville recording interviews with her for a book. In 1973, she took Unita with a group of other women on a three-week, expenses-paid visit to China, the first of Blackwell's 17 trips to China. But her later visit to Lhasa, Tibet, became her most bizarre.
Tibetans who had never seen a black person ganged around Unita as though she were a black goddess and would not let her leave in the travel van until, in an improvised language, she extended her arms and gave them a "blessing."
That was "barefootin'" half way round the globe.
