GREENFIELD — Stories can be powerful reminders of how we got to where we are — to inspire others into action today, or to convey important lessons of caution — and Amherst storyteller Onawumi Jean Moss put that tool to work for civil rights at Greenfield Community College’s downtown campus Tuesday afternoon.
Jean Moss, a former dean of students at Amherst College, took an audience of about 50 on a journey through the historic marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to the shores of Africa and through a traumatic experience during her childhood in Jackson, Tenn., that helped shape her identity as a black person.
The legacy of the Jim Crow laws, the erosion of the civil rights that black people fought so hard to secure in the last century and the fight to regain them today were themes throughout the college’s two-hour Senior Symposium.
She called them the “changes made, changes reversed, and changes that need to come.”
“I think in the 21st century, now, with what’s happening and what a reflection it is, that it’s important to look back on history and pick up the best that was there and bring it forward to put things back in order,” Jean Moss told the audience.
Jean Moss led the symposium in a church-style format, complete with singing and plenty of proclamations of “Amen!” when a particularly sound point was made or audience members told their own tales.
She started by recounting the story of Sheyanne Webb, the youngest person to take part in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches at just 8 years old. The marches are 51 years old this month.
She described how Webb became involved with the movement when she found herself drawn to a local church, Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma — the launching point for the marches — and listened to Hosea Williams, one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s top aides, speak about the importance of voting rights.
Soon after, she found herself scooped up and whisked away from the dangerous situation that erupted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by that same man, Jean Moss said.
She said Sheyanne’s story has inspired her to approach the fight for civil rights with the courage and commitment that Sheyanne did, despite the protest of her mother, even though she was only a child.
“She’s my icon, my ‘she-ro,’” Jean Moss said. “She keeps me clear on what I needed to do. She’s my warrior-sister who keeps me able to stay involved.”
Jean Moss also relayed a traditional African story about a monkey who was tempted to the shoreline by a shark and a lion who lured a donkey in its den that, when contextualized, served as a warning to both adults and children not to venture too close to the shore — people had been disappearing, taken by the slave trade.
She spoke about the importance of song among black people fighting for civil rights, describing how it was used as a code to help escaped slaves navigate the Underground Railroad and to ward off fear in dangerous or frightening situations over the years.
“They were thanking God for helping them make it from one Sunday to the next,” she said, of song in church.
Jean Moss also recounted a powerful tale of her uncle’s beating at the hands of white men who had accused him of stealing tires, though he hadn’t, and the effect it had on her family.
“I was a sophomore in high school when that happened, and it forever changed my life,” she said. “For a long time I didn’t like white people. It didn’t matter whether I knew you or not.”
But, she said, she began to change those views after seeing the large numbers of white people marching in civil rights protests and working to change the nation’s culture of racism.
“It was my first lesson that it wasn’t all of them,” she said, noting that she believed much of the racism was embedded in the legal framework, making it difficult for some people to buck the trend.
She began instead to embrace all people, regardless of their views, she said.
“I embrace you, hoping that a closed place can open up and you can be more open-minded,” she said.
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