Ed Battle’s one of the bravest people I ever met, and if you don’t believe me, keep reading.
The aptly-named Lynn resident was a warrior against hate and prejudice before most of the people protesting today were even born.
He told me this story about serving in the Air Force in the mid-1950s and what happened when he was stationed outside Biloxi, Miss., and went into town with another airman to get photographed wearing their uniforms.
“We came out of the store and saw two fine ladies. They turned around, looked at us and started screaming. We were wondering, ‘What are they looking at?’ All of a sudden, five cruisers showed up. They threw us in the cell with 10 other guys. They ended up charging us with ‘reckless eyeballs,'” he said.
Nine years later in 1964, Battle flew to Jackson, Miss., as a delegate from the Lynn branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He answered an appeal for help in what a Daily Evening Item story announcing his trip called the “fight for freedom — Operation Mississippi: Hands Across the Cotton Curtain.”
Stop right here for a few seconds and try to imagine the drive and the conviction motivating someone who was jailed while serving our country to return to a place of racist hatred and work to bring about change.
“My wife, Amelia, was crying, ‘Don’t go,’ but I had to find out what was going on. I’d read about kids going down and helping out. They were white kids,” Battle told me.
The haters in Jackson were ready for Battle and the other crusaders who dared to come down to Mississippi. They put a bullet through the windshield of the car Battle and other volunteers rode in.
The volunteers teamed up with Charles Evers, NAACP Mississippi field representative and brother of Medgar Evers, an NAACP field secretary who was murdered for his beliefs and his work in 1963. Medgar Evers served in the U.S. Army in World War II.
In an interview with the Item after his return from Mississippi, Battle described how Charles Evers was under around-the-clock protection with his car, home and office under guard.
Again, stop for a second and contemplate an America where someone aspiring to a free life faced certain death.
Battle described how NAACP counterparts in Mississippi canceled telephone service to their homes to cut off the stream of verbal threats and filth from racists.
He described how blacks who attempted to register to vote at county offices were told “… the register was out on business and the books were closed.”
Mississippi authorities sought out any pretext to stop people attempting to vote. They arrested people standing closer than 10 feet apart, claiming they were agitators, and they quizzed people seeking to register with questions about the state constitution.
Battle painted an ugly picture of teenagers steeped in hatred attacking blacks and their parents staying silent for fear speaking up would target them with attacks from hate groups. He described how Jackson police and the newspaper of record ignored local racial hatred and the fight by Jackson and others to end it.
Battle didn’t go down to Mississippi thinking he was going to change a society that wasn’t much different than many other parts of America in 1964. He went there, in his words, “to improve the future of my children,” who were babies and toddlers when their father risked his life for change.
I will never forget how Battle described Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrival in Jackson and how he met King at Charles Evers’ house. He described King as “frustrated and tired.” Battle was a volunteer at the rally King headlined in Jackson and he stood on stage as King displayed his oratorical brilliance.
“He pumped everybody up. The place went berserk. I was proud as hell and scared as hell,” he recalled.
Battle was NAACP Lynn chapter president in 1969 when he addressed racism in America in a speech to Rotary Club of Lynn members. He said the riots and looting that raged across the country in summer 1967 were “the personification of the nation’s shame and failure in dealing with racial problems.”
In a letter he wrote in 1969, Battle condemned extremism while denouncing “… White America’s historic racism” and he wrote these words which echo across the decades: “The time for silence or muted voices is past.”