Edited Article Appears in Jackson ADVOCATE, August 14-20, 2008 issue
gene young
DR. GENE CORNELIUS YOUNG
Historian/Activist/Freedom Fighter
"Live like you are going to die tomorrow; learn like you are going to live forever."
By Artaymis Ma’at
Who is Dr. Gene Cornelius Young? What has he done? Most Jacksonians know him as one who is living for the city and goes by his trademark name ‘Jughead.’ "It started while I was attending Mary Jones Elementary School. I was sitting in the barbershop one day and a guy stuck his head in the shop and said, ‘That boy’s got a jughead!’ I guess because I was real short with a big head. I was teased and it went through the neighborhood like wildfire." Unlike the meaning that suggests a dense person, it may well be a blessing of one who has loads of information in the head to give back.
Let’s paint a deeper, brighter, proactive picture of a dedicated freedom-fighter who has lived his early childhood days with the likes of Medgar Evers, Lena Horne, Fannie Lou Hamer and Mr. Charles Wesley Tisdale to mention just a few. It was a divine connection and destination that Little Gene ‘Jughead’ Young was arrested for his participation in civil rights demonstrations in Jackson, Mississippi. In
The Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, The Trial of Byron de la Beckwith and the Haunting of the New South, (Little, Brown & Company, 1995), writer Maryanne Vollers recounts an evening in 1963, when a twelve year-old, Gene Young stood in a chair to speak before a capacity audience at the Masonic Temple on John Roy Lynch Street, following his first arrest, just days before the assassination of Medgar Evers. Along with his older brothers, James and John, Gene Young attended the historic "March on Washington," where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous, "I Have A Dream" speech. These were the brilliant, genius days of smoke and fire where great expectations, courageous courage, self-determination and accomplishment were everyday conversations that were discussed with pride around the dinner table. It was always about turning the dream into reality. What’s more, it was something that most were willing to fight for. People remembered and respected what was, what is and what was to be and will be. It is a known fact and well said that freedom isn’t free and someone has to and did pay for it.
Young has been an active spokesperson who has addressed audiences throughout the U. S. since the age of twelve and had a message "Let freedom ring and justice prevail! He kids, talking in a rich, thunderous deep voice about living—not only for the city, not only from every molehill in Mississippi, but from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado, from the peaks of California, from the Stone Mountain of Georgia, from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee, from the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, from the mighty mountains of New York and he has done an about-face to a full spectrum of breaking free of wrong-sets because it is a new day. Insurmountable challenges still exist today and Young is more than ready to do positive new things to make a difference.
Dr. Gene Cornelius Young was born in Jackson, Mississippi, September 7, 1950 to Beatrice (Watkins)Young and James I. Young. His father worked for the Veterans Administrations Hospital for over 30 years. "I’m the third of ten children. It’s funny, all the rest of my brother’s and sister’s name start with J like Joe, Jackie, Jimmie, Jerome, Jeffrey and Jennifer. I was actually born on the campus at Jackson State University in the College Health Center at a time when Jackson citizens couldn’t use the hospitals in the city. We were born by either midwife or at the Jackson State College Health Center.
Dr. Young has a son and daughter. Joy Olivia and Julius Caza, who are graduates of Adhiambo Learning Institute for Children in Jackson. Says Young, "It’s the best learning experience and awakening in the world that could have happened to them. It’s the best kept secret. Their Afro centric curriculum does a whole lot for their overall development and it would do the same for quite a few children if they had a chance to be exposed to it. I am blessed that my children were always inquisitive about things. My son attended the University of Colorado. He celebrated his 20th birthday, October 1, 2002, but unfortunately he died two days later in an automobile accident in Boulder, Colorado. He and his roommate were driving to their destination from the University of Colorado. His roommate fell asleep and drove into a tree. He was laid to rest next to his his grandfather in Jackson on October 12, 2002
. Both of my children were born at St. Francis Medical Center, in Peoria, Illinois. It was the same hospital that Richard Pryor was born in. I had a chance to meet Ms. Juliet Whitaker, the lady that inspired Richard Pryor. She had a school similar to the Afro centric school Ahdiambo. On several occasions I spoke at their black history program. Dr. Carter G. Woodson started the observance of ‘negro’ history week years ago on February 7, 1926. Reason being, young people are not going to be interested in anything that doesn’t tell them anything positive about themselves. I remember growing up and singing the Black Negro Anthem. That meant a whole lot to us."
Dr. Young attended Mary Jones Elementary from the first through the six grades. In the seventh grade at Lanier, "For a time I played string music. You name it…violin, cello, bass; but I really didn’t pursue it." Young went on to discuss the summer of 64’. "I testified about police brutality along with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Then, at a most significant point I got a haircut that made national attention. The big deal about the haircut? The day before the Civil Right Bill was signed they didn’t want to cut my hair at this particular hotel where I was staying. The white guy said to me, ‘We don’t cut black people’s hair.’ It was legal. That was the law of the land, because things were still segregated. I was to attend the national meeting of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). It just so happened that the day that I was trying to get my haircut, Lyndon B. Johnson was signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was July 2nd, 1964. The next day after they protested about me not getting a haircut, the word came that the Civil Rights Bill had been passed and I was entitled to get a haircut in that hotel. A day ago I couldn’t get a hair cut. I went back. He cut my hair. Oh yeah. He understood he had to cut my hair with that new law being made. The picture of me getting a hair cut made national news. In fact that picture I showed you was featured in Time Magazine, July 10th 1964. It brought an end to discrimination of all hotels, barbershops, restaurants, movie theaters…on and on and on.
"Dr. Young reminisces and explains how he made the most of his day many summers ago when he didn’t have any money. "I used to go down to the black library and check out a book. To me reading was fundamental. There were and still are so many successful black stories that you can read and get inspiration from. I found myself reading about other blacks like Jim Brown, Paul Robeson—blacks that gone on to achieve things in life. I was inspired by it, you know. I also read about Booker T. Washington and his humble beginnings in enslavement and how he moved forward and founded Tuskegee Institute. Look how Sammy Davis Jr. overcame poverty and became one of the most highly paid and talented entertainer that this country has ever produced. Look at Dick Gregory who was born in poverty in St. Louis, Missouri and took a track scholarship at Southern Illinois University. I was also always inspired by Malcolm and Martins words. I read so many biographies because there was so little in the public schools about us. Today, we still have the same problem. Now it’s more of the instant communication and instant gratification in all that we do. I find that young people are not sitting down and reading. It’s a big problem. I see it all the time. I am stressing that we all need to sit down and read because the communication is lost. Many of the youth don’t even know who Medgar Evers is."
"Medgar Evers lived and died in this community. Medgar Evers made countless contributions and supreme sacrifices to the struggle. Did you know he tried to segregate the University of Mississippi before James Meredith successfully enrolled there? Medgar investigated the killing of Emmett Til. He also encouraged lots and lots of people to come out and vote when it was dangerous to do so and ultimately paid with his life. He was ahead of his time and it just hurts me on a personal level for people to tell me that they are not registered voters. I knew Medgar Evers. I knew Fannie Lou Hamer.."
Medgar inspired her to become a registered voter. Fannie Lou was a powerful woman. Here was a woman that worked on a plantation all her life. When she decided to become a registered voter, they threw her off the plantation she was on. I think that was the best thing that happened to her. She went on to become involved in the Civil Rights Movement and inspired others get involved. In 1964, she was became a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She challenged the seating of an all-white Mississippi Delegation. So what I am conveying is she tried to make a positive difference and it may not have been as successful as she wanted but politics would not be the same again. So again, she didn’t have a formal education. She worked on a plantation most of her life, but yet she had a sense of right and wrong and she had a big heart. She had the courage to stand up and say how she felt."
"After six cold winters I decided to come back home. Then I taught speech and English at Jackson State for about 27 years. You’d be surprised to know how many people are afraid to stand up in front of an audience and give a speech and you’d be surprised to know how many people cannot sit down and write a grammatically correct sentence. I have a profound respect for people who have a good command of the English language, rather it be spoken or written. I know people who have college degrees that still can’t write, speak effectively or make some sense of it. In the summer of 64’ I was part of a group of people who went to Washington to testify about the conditions in Mississippi. I talked about how I was incarcerated at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds. I met Mrs. Fannie Lee Chaney when I was in Kansas City when they were searching for her son’s body along with Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They were organizing a place for Blacks to register to vote. I realized then that it was a woman’s son that had possibly been lynched. They all had been missing for a few days. She told me it was a pleasure to meet me because I too was from Mississippi. She died about a year ago, May 2007, but was able to see one of the murderers convicted."
"Later I came to know Dr. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander very well. Margaret Walker was a gifted writer and a beautiful woman. Matter of fact, she was a brilliant woman! I could sit and listen to her talk all the time." In 1971, Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander selected Gene Young and several other Jackson State students to attend the first national conference on Black Arts and Letters, hosted by Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago. " I’m pretty sure everyone is familiar with her poem, ‘For my People’, her best known novel was called ‘Jubilee’. It takes you back from the whole enslavement period and talks about the early involvement of African Americans in this country all the way through the emancipation period. Jubilee…that’s a classic in black literature. I’ll tell you, Margaret Walker and my mother are two of the most brilliant women that I have had the chance to encounter. My mother didn’t have a formal education that Margaret Walker had, but she is a very intelligent woman. She inspired me to learn and look beyond who you were."
There was also a lot to learn from Charles Wesley Tisdale, the late editor of The Jackson Advocate. Funny people didn’t really know how much of a true southern gentleman he was. A lot of folks might not see that. I would say he was a well-read and learned person. I had a great deal of respect for him. There wasn’t a subject or topic that he couldn’t speak on or had not experienced. People who inspired me were people who stood up against the status quo and who were not going to sit back and be quiet. Mr. Tisdale was that type of person. I was at a memorial program that they recently held for him on the 7th of July. Many got up and spoke about some of the things that he did throughout his life. A woman spoke about how he helped her and her sons. Mr. Tisdale probably would not have told anybody about it because this was something that he did out of the goodness of his heart. These were some of the things that we never hear about. Last month was the first year anniversary of his death. It did me good to sit there and hear how people talked about how they knew Charles Wesley Tisdale."
During Dr. Young’s senior year at Lanier High School, he served as student government president and attended the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Upon graduation from Lanier H. High School in June of 1968, Dr. Young was arrested in the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. While being a student a Jackson State University, Dr. Young was instrumental in organizing and coordinating demonstrations to protest the campus murders of Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green. "I was there when those two students got shot in May 1970." The author, Tim Spofford mentions Gene Young in his book, Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College (Kent State University Press, 1990). In his memoirs, To Survive and Thrive: The Quest for a True University, (Town Square Books, Inc., 1995), Jackson State University President-Emeritus, Dr. John A. Peoples credits Gene Young for calming a crowd of students in the aftermath of the May, 1970 murders at Jackson State.
Young graduated with honors from Jackson State in 1972 in speech communications.. He then went on to graduate school at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he received, both, the Master of Arts in counseling and a Ph.D. in education. In the summer of 1966, Gene Young participated in the Meredith March Against Fear, which included Hollywood stars, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Tony Franciosa and other leaders in the fields of entertainment and human rights. "In 1971, I remember the opening reception in the first Johnson Publishing Company building on Michigan Avenue. It was hosted by John Johnson, Publisher of Ebony/Jet Magazine. Lerone Bennett Jr. was the Executive Editor of Ebony Magazine. He’s a native of Clarksdale, Mississippi and a graduate of Lanier High School as well.
During Dr. Young’s graduate studies at the University of Connecticut, he was arrested in April of 1974 along with 200 other students in a library sit-in, protesting the teaching of theories of genetic inferiority. "They were teaching classes of Blacks being genetically inferior. There were enough of us to take over the library and protest about it." For six years, Dr. Gene Young served as the Director of the Black Studies Program at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he developed and taught courses on the African-American experience. Upon returning to live in Mississippi, Dr. Young served as Chairperson for the Lanier Class of 1968 Twentieth Reunion Committee and, during the 1990-91 academic year, he served as the acting director of the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center at Jackson State University. Gene Young served as the chairperson for the May 15th Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration Committee, and over the years, he has spoken at the annual May 4th commemoration program at Kent State University in Ohio.
As a former assistant professor of Speech and English, Dr. Young has worked in numerous academic and administrative positions at Jackson State University and in the Jackson community. He is the former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the West Jackson Community Development Corporation, a member of the Martin Luther King Holiday Commission for the State of Mississippi, the Medgar Evers Statue Fund, and the Board of the Alamo Theatre/Smith Robertson Museum. In 1991, Dr. Young served on the host committee for the 30th Anniversary Freedom Riders Conference and the national steering committee for the 1994 30th anniversary Freedom Summer Revisited Conference at Tougaloo College.
Dr. Young was the keynote speaker at the 25th commemoration program at Jackson State University and he was featured in a May 5, 1995 article in the prestigious "Chronicle of Higher Education." In October of 1995, Dr. Young chaperoned a group of Jackson State students to the "Million Man March" in Washington, D.C.. In the spring of 1996, Dr. Gene Young was presented with a Gold Medal by the Mississippi Association of Broadcasters in the category of special programs, for his reading of excerpts from the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," on WJSU-FM on January 15, 1996. In February of 1996, Gene Young was Jackson State University's representative in a special edition of Black Excellence Magazine devoted to alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities who were active participants in the Civil Rights Movements.
On February 28, 2001, Dr. Gene Young spoke at the African-American History Program at the United States Department of Justice in Washington, and he was welcomed to the podium by former United States Attorney General John Ashcroft. On February 10, 2004, Dr. Young was presented with a resolution by the City Council of Jackson, Mississippi, citing him for his many contributions to Black History and human rights. On January 20, 2005, Dr. Gene Young was the keynote speaker for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Convocation at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky and he was featured the in the documentary, "Saving Our History: Voices of Civil Rights," which aired on the History Channel in February of 2005. Dr. Young was the guest speaker for the Omega Psi Phi Carter G. Woodson Scholarship Luncheon in Windsor, Connecticut in April of 2005 and he spoke at the 35th annual May 4th Commemoration Program at Kent State University in May of 2005.
Dr. Young updates his thoughts the election. "The election that’s going on now? I’m not happy. I’m thrilled! I’m ecstatic. I think we still have a lot of people in Mississippi who are not registered to vote or they don’t vote. With the election in November, we can make history if we get more people out to register to vote and then get people out to vote in November. I think we can witness the election of Senator Barack Hussein Obama as the next president of the United States. I just think that he will be a refreshing change, not to mention history making. It can’t get any worse than the way things are now as far as education, gas prices, the war et cetera. He can’t do anything but improve our present situation. It has got to be better than the last eight years of the Bush Administration, with the economy and the senseless war that’s going on—that a lot of people don’t talk about. Many of us don’t even know why they are dying over there. Do we? Many people don’t even think about the millions, the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have died over there. We had no business going over there. Look at the crime in our communities. Look at the high drop-out rate in the schools. We’ve got more youth dropping out of school than we do that are graduating. This is in most of our major cities. Why? In my opinion, the youth are not being motivated. A lot of them are forced out of the system. You don’t have many teachers who are really genuinely concerned about them learning. I grew up in a time when teachers believed in us. We might have been poor…nappy-headed and didn’t have anything, but they believed that we could learn—and we were going to learn. We had teachers with that kind of dedication—shooting for excellence, at all times. This is definitely time for change of leadership in our society. Barack Obama represents the best change for the future. It is time for a new day and we must make room for it to happen."
"I think Obama should be a wake-up call for all white America, because there’s so much about us and our history, our culture, our spiritual beliefs that they don’t know about. As far as Jeremiah Wright and what he might say on Sunday is hypocrisy. It was a time that white people would not even let us come to their churches. We had to learn their history, their culture and their beliefs, so I think it will be good for them learn about our beliefs, our culture, our history and the overall African American experience. I also heard Howard Dean speak recently here in Jackson. For those that don’t know, he is the former governor of Vermont and he ran for the presidency. He is now the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He was recently here on a bus tour to get people excited about the upcoming election and to support the candidacy of Barack Obama. His most important message conveyed was motivating people to register to vote.
Martin Luther King said ‘Let Freedom ring from the Snap-Capped Rockies of Colorado. This year…45 years later…on August 28th …in Denver Colorado…in the shadows of the Snap-Capped Rockies of Colorado, Barack Hussein Obama will be accepting the Democratic party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States. So I’m saying that we have gone 45 years exactly from the dreamer talking about the dream to that dream almost being realized. Barack is part of the dream. I didn’t think I would still be here to witness it. Along the way we’ve had Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson and many people to try to make a political dent in the political process in our country. I think Barack Hussein Obama has a realistic chance of not only getting the Democratic Party’s nomination, but ultimately winning the candidacy of the United States."
"If he wins many black people will have to look at themselves differently and review how they feel about themselves. A lot of people who didn’t believe in themselves will have to reframe and perhaps paint a bigger picture. From now on they won’t have to look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a place that’s reserved for whites only, because a black man will be occupying the presidential residence in Washington D.C. Many people worldwide may take it as a personal message that "I CAN too" hopefully in a positive way. They can start believing that they can be doctors; they can be lawyers; they can be scientists and much more. We can be more than basketball players, rappers, actors and drug pushers on the street. I ‘m hoping that he will motivate a whole generation to look at their unlimited possibilities. Therefore it can only be limited by one's own imaginations.
"E
verybody says ‘Gene you have been so blessed to have had so many unique experiences.’ I’m not getting any younger so I hope to get some of my writings published one of these days. Dr. Young speaks much on knowledge, how important knowledge is and never settling for less than your best. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." ------------Martin Luther King Jr.
