This story was produced in collaboration with the Institute for Public Service Reporting.
As volunteers, Stuart Mitchell and Jim Paley spent the summer of 1965 living with poor Black farm families in rural Fayette and Tipton counties. The Ivy League students came here as part of the West Tennessee Voters Project, an organization of student volunteers who aimed to register disenfranchised African Americans to vote and to battle local Jim Crow laws.
Both white, both privileged, they were initially unprepared for what they would experience.
“I was struck by the by the poverty. I was also struck by the spirit of the people we lived with because their (life of) poverty did not affect their spirit,” Paley said.
Activism by the northern students inflamed local racists. Mitchell recalls one terrifying night when it seemed he might not survive.
“I had a cross burned in front of our house one night,’’ Mitchell said. “The Black men from the community surrounded our house and stayed with us for the rest of that night.’’
Now, 61 years later, Mitchell, 82, and Paley, 79, are active again in West Tennessee. They were energized after the Tennessee Legislature voted to split Memphis’ majority-Black District 9 congressional district into three Republican-majority districts that stretch hundreds of miles from Memphis to the Nashville metropolitan area.
Their aim is to give Black Democratic nominee Justin Pearson a fighting chance against white Republican nominee Brent Taylor.
“Rather than send in a check of support for Justin Pearson’s campaign, we’re doing our contribution in other ways,’’ Paley said.
The pair has sent more than 5,000 postcards to potential voters in heavily Democratic neighborhoods in Memphis’ Frayser and South Memphis areas, encouraging people to vote. Some of the cards were sent into Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District, where Democrat Chaz Molder faces Republican Charlie Hatcher.
The cards feature a quote, “Our justice is in the ballot box,’’ from the late John McFerren, who led a rural civil rights movement in Fayette County that spanned three decades. The Tent City movement started in the late 1950s and early 60s when Black sharecroppers were kicked off their land for registering to vote.
The six-by-ten-inch cards also feature photographs by famed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, who documented the Tent City movement with inspiring pictures and who also secretly doubled as a paid informant who helped the FBI spy on activists flooding into Fayette County.
During the summer of 1965, Mitchell and Paley, both Cornell University students, also worked to desegregate Fayette County’s public schools, a sandwich shop in Covington, and a public pool in Memphis. The duo also helped with Freedom Schools, which were free educational programs that taught the importance of political action and Black history.
After leaving West Tennessee at the end of Summer 1965, the duo continued their advocacy in the Northeast. Mitchell founded the PathStone Foundation, a Rochester, New York-based nonprofit that provides services to low-income families across the Northeast and Midwest.
Paley founded Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven, a Connecticut-based nonprofit organization that builds low-income housing and provides training for first-time home buyers along with other programs.
Paley said the get-out-the-vote drive this fall involves a new civil rights struggle in which much is at stake.
“It was sort of similar to what we did all those years ago In that, we’ll say, ‘Okay, well, let’s do a voter get-out-the-vote campaign and drive and be able to make a difference and hopefully serve to counteract the partisan gerrymandering that the legislature gave right to.’ ’’
The duo had mailed about 5,200 postcards as of Thursday. According to the Tennessee Secretary of State, 125,312 people have voted early or by absentee ballot in Shelby County as of Monday, which is the most of any county in the state. Early voting is about 60% ahead of the number of early votes counted during the same period in the 2022 Tennessee election cycle.