The Fighter

By Mollie Mansfield

t wasn’t hard to spot Margaret Block as she prowled the streets

Iof Charleston in her red shirt and coveralls, the classic Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee uniform, trying to help black folks register to vote. Suddenly a big black hearse pulled up.

“Get in the back,” ordered Birdia Keglar, president of the local NAACP and owner of the black funeral home. Keglar had been tipped to a Ku Klux Klan plan to murder Block. In Tallahatchie County, not far from where two white men killed 14-year-old Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman, death threats were not to be taken lightly.

Block crumpled the leaflets she had attempted to pass out, climbed in and lay down in the precise spot where the dead usually ride. Her sharp inhale of the stifling air in the rear of the hearse was only slightly less painful than the suffocating air of 1964, Freedom Summer.

“This shit ain’t even real.”

The getaway car carried her to the safety of Keglar’s home, 15 minutes away. Cooped up in the dark quarters of the hearse, it felt like an eternity.

“I was mad. I was going. ‘Why?’ Then I was mad. And then I was amused, too. If you’re going to do something to somebody, you don’t go and warn them,” Block said.

At age 72, there is no sugar in Margaret Block’s words. She has always been a fighter. Instead of going to college, she did the hard work of registering black people to vote when that could cost you your life. She mixed Molotov cocktails to throw at the Klan, joined the anti-Vietnam War movement in California, and had a run-in with the Black Panthers.

And she’s still mad. The 1960s may be long gone, but this tough woman who fought for civil rights is still ready to rumble. Luther Brown, director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, calls Block a “foot soldier for freedom.”

– MARGARET BLOCK

Now, she lives in Cleveland in the same house she grew up in. After 31 years in California, Block returned to the Delta in 1997 to care for her dying mother. African art, books that include her story (We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement), freedom song pamphlets – including some that she’s written – and numerous awards, occupy the small living room just inside her front door. She’s proud of them all. And, just down the block sits the house of the late civil rights leader Amzie Moore, one of her heroes. She’s proud of that, too.

In the 1940s her father told her that she could be somebody. She believed him. But she’s black.

So in 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered, Block realized her daddy’s words meant nothing unless someone fought for freedom. She wanted to fight. She wanted to drop out of school to join the movement, but her mother said no. Education came first.

When Block graduated from East Side High School in Cleveland in 1961, even her mother couldn’t stop her. She immediately joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Then, a year later, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s newly formed Cleveland chapter.

She taught citizenship schools and how to pass the literacy test administered by the white clerks who controlled the voter registration rolls. She taught people how to sign their name – many elderly black people in the Delta only knew how to sign “X.” She even taught them to pay taxes so that the government wouldn’t have a reason to take their property.

It particularly frustrated her to watch white registrars devise tricks to disqualify blacks from registering to vote. They would require applicants to read out loud and interpret a section of the Mississippi Constitution. If that didn’t work, registrars usually had a backup plan. Block’s older brother Sam fell victim to that.

During his literacy test, the clerk asked, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?”

“I don’t know. What you should do is get some liquid soap, stick it in the bathtub and pour it,” Sam Block said.

Through it all, Margaret Block saw how precious votes were. To this day, Block has never missed voting in an election. “I’d go vote even if I was just voting for dog catcher.”

Originally, Block and her brother worked together for SNCC. They taught non-violence but eventually were assigned to different parts of the Delta. He went to Greenwood after Mississippi Valley State University kicked him out for his voter registration work. His fierce approach to justice reflected the tough town he worked in. While he was there, the SNCC office was burned to the ground and he was constantly arrested, but he kept at it.

Even though Sam died a few years ago, his memory still drives Margaret Block to persevere.

Block returned to Tallahatchie County the same summer the Klan chased her off in a hearse. She was living with the Brewer family on their farm off of Sharkey Road. Block had tried to help the Brewer brothers register to vote over in Charleston.

One dark night, a bunch of Klan vehicles waited for them just down the road.

“I guess they thought we were just going to let them shoot us up,” Block said.

She preached non-violence. She religiously followed Gandhi’s teachings. But, in her mind, “self-defense was the first law of nature.” And, since the Brewers were a hunting family, they had

plenty of guns. They shot warnings into the air.

We will shoot back.

The Klan refused to leave.

Mrs. Brewer, 87, had an idea.

“Let’s make Molotov cocktails.”

“I don’t drink, Mrs. Brewer. I’ll have a Pepsi.”

Mrs. Brewer brought the gasoline to the kitchen while some of the others kept watch outside. Her hands shook as she poured the gasoline into Coke bottles. It spilled onto the table and all over the floor. Block smelled the fumes and looked around. They were all thinking it.

Damn, if the house burns down, they’re gonna give the Klan credit for this one.

They grabbed the bottles and ran outside, throwing explosives into the night. They flashed harmlessly, well short of the target. The Klan was too far away. But they finally left.

A warrant for Block’s arrest arrived the next day. Supposedly she had been shooting deer out of season. “I had never seen a live deer in my life,” much less shoot one, she said.

In 1966, Block left for San Francisco. She was tired. She still hadn’t been to college and a constant stream of death threats (“We’re coming to get you”) made it hard for her to get and hold a job.

While in California, Block worked in early education and continued to fight for justice through the Vietnam anti-war movement. She even joined a spin-off Black Panther group.

One day, the organization had a fish fry to raise money when in walked Huey Newton’s Panthers, guns raised. Newton had a message to deliver: there could only be one Black Panther Party in Northern California. He gave Block and the others three choices: join, disband, or change their name. Nobody answered. One of Newton’s Panthers shot a burst into the air.

“You can have the damn name if that’s how you feel!” Block said.

She returned to the Delta in the late 1990s, caring for her mother until she died. It made sense for her to stay here. She already owned a house in Cleveland and she missed the Delta.

“She’s a good example of someone who you might have expected to leave Mississippi permanently because of some of the grief they were given when they were young,” Brown said, “but instead they decided to come back to the Delta and live out the rest of their life. People who grew up in the Delta tend to think of the Delta as home.”

Now, Block campaigns for more integration in the local schools. She recently marched in a protest against the school district’s refusal to consolidate the two public high schools -- one all-black, one half-black.

White flight is the town’s fear, but she doesn’t care.

“Why are you worried about what the white kids are going to do? You ought to be worried about justice for everybody,” Block said.

For her, it all comes down to justice.

That same theme echoes throughout the “freedom songs” that mean so much to her. They are haunting melodies and chants that black people used to lift their spirits in the face of oppression and to fire up protesters on long, dangerous marches. Block tries to preserve them in a song book that she has compiled.

When she talks about “freedom songs,” her tone softens. Block calls those gospel songs with civil rigwhts lyrics “the glue that kept the movement together.” She still teaches them to whoever will listen. Everybody, she says, can identify with music.

And right there in the middle of the African art, books and awards, right there in her small living room, she closes her eyes and sings her favorite song, a defiant anthem of the movement. “Ain’t gonna let no-body turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round;

Ain’t gonna let no-body turn me ‘round;

Gonna keep on a-walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom land.” Design By Savannah Pounds