A symposium at Mississippi Valley State University has emphasized the significance of the historically black university’s setting in the middle of the U.S. cotton kingdom.
If not for African-Americans in the Delta, who picked and chopped cotton with little to no compensation, presenters agreed, the cotton economy would not have prospered. And if not for that history of oppression and strife, black culture as we know it — including the blues, R&B, country music, spirituals, rock ’n’ roll and even hip-hop — would not have become another of America’s most valuable exports.
The sixth annual “Sweat Equity Investment in the Cotton Kingdom” symposium, held Friday, focused on “Field Hollers and Freedom Songs,” cultural expressions of inner strength, faith and resilience, and was represented by writers, filmmakers, actors, musicians, folk artists and fine artists from the Delta and across the country.
Keynote speaker Avotcja, a spoken word poet and musician from Oakland, California, held up Mississippi bluesman Howlin’ Wolf as one of those Mississippi treasures for whom everyone should be grateful, especially musicians.
A “gigantic, strong guy” who had a reputation for his “mean, tough character,” Howlin’ Wolf was a savvy businessman who organized musicians into unions to assure fair payment, Avotcja said.
“He was an amazingly brilliant man. All of his musicians, before health care existed, had health care.”
Avotcja told students, faculty and guests that Mississippians needed to stand up for their great gift to the world, the Delta blues.
“When I first heard it, it tore me up on the inside. At one point, it was our only newspaper, our way of communicating the circumstances of our lives,” she said.
“I had never heard the blues in my home coming up. But I knew the first time I heard it that I was home. Cultural memory is a real thing.”
Avotcja admonished young people for being ashamed of the blues and the history of slavery and oppression from which it emerged in a poem she read aloud, “Too Proud to Sing the Blues.”
She also warned against a color caste system that she described as a “great evil” among young black people, urging them instead to embrace blackness of all shades, and to embrace black history, including its troublesome roots.
“Somebody somewhere in a cotton field, a corn field, prayed us into existence,” she said.
A conversation about the importance of appreciating history, especially here in the Delta at a historically black university, continued throughout the afternoon as films were screened and artists showed their wares, chronicling a history of sharecropping within a racist system.
Dr. Delridge La Veon Hunter from Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York said educators and students needed to look even farther back, prior to slavery in America, to find the source of the blues and call and response music he termed as “Ring Shout” in the Congo, Angola and Ethiopia.
“Spirituals came from graduate students at places like Fisk University, recognizing music they’d heard in the church and smoothing it out,” Hunter said.
Those refined spirituals, he said, became the freedom songs of the civil rights movement.
Blues singers, Hunter said, were the lyric poets of the plantation, “singing in a mean tongue about what was really happening.”
Hunter’s presentation led to a discussion of the importance of African-American and Africana Studies throughout schooling, and especially in colleges and universities.
Hunter urged black scholars and students to teach their people’s history in order for young people to understand, embrace and feel proud of their identity.
Symposia such as “Sweat Equity Investment in the Cotton Kingdom,” they agreed, help further that cause.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
