Operation Shoestring created in tragedies' wake

Fifty years ago, unthinkable waves of hate led to the unexpected, giving birth to one of Mississippi’s beloved charities — Operation Shoestring.

Fifty years ago today, James Meredith began his 220-mile March Against Fear. Wearing a yellow pith helmet, he set out from a sidewalk outside the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, clutching his ebony and ivory walking stick.

The next day in Mississippi, as he neared woods outside Hernando, three shots rang out, and he collapsed on the asphalt.

An ambulance screamed up the highway. Not long after a Memphis hospital admitted him, The Associated Press reported that Meredith was dead.

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More than 60 shotgun pellets had struck him, but he survived the attack. In his absence, other civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., took up the march.

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T.W. Lewis, who was then teaching religious studies at Millsaps College, and others decided to respond. They belonged to the Layman’s Overseas Service Board of the Methodist Church, through which the late Bob Kochtitzky had begun to put Methodist volunteers to work in different cultures all over the world.

These Methodist leaders met with the NAACP in Jackson, Lewis recalled. “We asked, ‘How can we help?’ ”

NAACP leaders pointed them toward voter registration work with True Vine Missionary Baptist Church on Pleasant Avenue.

After the work began, Lewis said neighbors told them what they needed most of all was playgrounds — safe places for their children to play.

The city of Jackson had shut down swimming pools and parks rather than let black children and white children play together.

“With help from the community, we found three or four vacant lots and cleaned the lots,” Lewis recalled.

Donated steel became swing sets and seesaws.

This kind of cooperation across racial lines led to forming the Community Development Group, which sought to improve conditions in the neighborhood bordering the south end of Bailey Avenue

The creek was so polluted it would catch on fire, Lewis said. “We watched the creek burn.”

The Ku Klux Klan, which had already burned dozens of black churches across Mississippi, expanded its attacks to include synagogues and the home of civil rights leaders.

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Kochtitzky, who died last month in Okeechobee, Florida, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, helped form the Committee of Concern, raising money to rebuild the churches.

Because he welcomed black leaders into his Jackson home, rumors spread, and the white Citizens’ Council falsely reported that future Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael had met U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy there.

Before midnight on Nov. 19, 1967, the KKK bombed Kochtitzky’s home, where he lived with his wife and baby.

Glass shattered, spraying the room with their infant son, who somehow avoided injury.

Days later, the KKK bombed the home of Perry E. Nussbaum, rabbi for the Temple Beth Israel of Jackson.

In the face of such violence, Lewis said the task of healing became more urgent.

“We had to continue to have dialogue between the black and white communities,” he said. “The feeling was, if this really got bad, it could blow up.”

Many white Mississippians didn’t agree with the KKK or the white Citizens’ Council, but they were afraid to speak up, Lewis said. “The social pressure was awful.”

When the Rev. Russell Gilbert of the Wells United Methodist Church approached those working on racial reconciliation, they began meeting in Wells, forming Operation Shoestring, the first major project of the Fund for Reconciliation sponsored by the Mississippi Methodist Conference.

In political circles, cooperation across racial lines became the kiss of death.

Lewis said Dick Barnes, treasurer for the city of Jackson who was also working with Operation Shoestring, lost his 1969 race for city commissioner to the “racist campaign” of Ed Cates, who later faked his own death.

Lewis worried when the Rev. Keith Tonkel became Wells’ new minister in 1969, replacing Gilbert.

Meeting with the group, Tonkel asked if  Wells church members knew what they were doing.

When they answered no, Tonkel told them, “We need to tell them.”

He told them the only way for Shoestring to work would be if everyone worked together.

By a majority of one, Wells members voted to support Shoestring, and they continued to support it over time.

For the next 12 years, Shoestring operated out of the basement of Wells, running a medical clinic out of the fellowship hall.

Nancy Gilbert, who became the first director to run and develop programs for Shoestring, oversaw the clinic, an outpost where food stamps and services could be delivered to the needy.

“We had lots of enthusiastic volunteers,” she said. “They all wanted an opportunity to make Jackson a better place for everybody.”

Many other churches, charities and foundations began to join Wells in supporting Shoestring.

Shoestring Executive Director Robert Langford described these early leaders as “courageous people who were trying to create a more just world against great odds.”

Shoestring is now located in The Ellen Harris Center, 1711 Bailey Ave., and 100 percent of high school seniors in its Project Rise after-school and summer college- and career-readiness training program successfully graduate.

Marqueta Perkins Washington of Jackson credits the program with making a difference in her three children’s lives.
With how much school curriculum has changed in recent years, she appreciates the support both for her children and for her, she said. “I’m having to get a few tutorial sessions myself.”

This summer, her children, ages 8 to 12, are attending summer camp to ensure they retain knowledge and continue learning, she said. “They’re staying ahead, rather than being couch potatoes all summer.”

The after-school and summer program, which works with Galloway Elementary School, Rowan Middle School and Lanier High School, has proven so successful that Jackson Public Schools, Alignment Jackson, United Way and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation have joined forces to aid all 10th graders.

“It’s just amazing what happens when you give the young people the opportunity to share the space,” Langford said. “It has helped kids and adults grow.”

Contact Jerry Mitchell at jmitchell@jackson.gannett.com or (601) 961-7064. Follow @jmitchellnews on Twitter.

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