By John Howell Sr.
It’s been a week of retro overload, first with the reunion of civil rights veterans from Freedom Summer of 1964 who came together during a panel discussion last Thursday as part of the Como Reads week organized by librarian Alice Pierotti.

I had the privilege of facilitating a panel comprised of three men native to Panola County, Curtis Ellis, Arrece Webb and Willie Johnson, who as teenagers 50 years ago became active in the movement that brought voting rights to previously disenfranchised black citizens and challenged the status quo of apartheid that we then lived under.

Joining the three was Jim Kates, a New York native who came to Panola as a worker for COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations that recruited almost 800 college students from around the country to come to Mississippi that summer.

The panel discussion attracted an audience that packed the Como library’s meeting room, and for more than an hour we heard memories, questions and discussion, all reminding us what a dominating and oppressive social system we lived under then and of the vestiges that remain.
The fifth panelist was Eva Joyce Roberson, another Como native and singer who closed the remembrance with gospel and Movement songs, beautifully sung a cappella.

 That year — 1964 — was also the year that Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles to the U. S. on his television show, bringing with it a societal change in another direction. The Beatles’ television appearance on February 9, 1964 is a shared memory of that generation that stands out because most of those shared memories were of tragic occasions — the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and, in 1968, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

The weather forecast for north Mississippi reminds me of another year, 1994 and the Great Ice Storm that began almost exactly 20 years ago today. That’s another shared memory of an experience that those who were in it will never forget.