The Struggle of Struggles

By Vera Pigee and Françoise N. Hamlin

Named one of five best books on women in the Civil Rights Movement by Wall Street Journal

From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924–2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County’s NAACP. Known as the “Lady of Hats,” coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state’s closed society. Fearless, forthright, and fashionable, Pigee also suffered for her efforts at the hands of white supremacists and those unwilling to accept strong women in leadership. She wrote herself into the histories, confronted misinformation, and self-published one of the first autobiographies from the era. Women like her worked, often without accolade or recognition, in their communities all over the country, but did not document their efforts in this way.

The Struggle of Struggles, originally published in 1975, spotlights the gendered and generational tensions within the civil rights movement. It outlines the complexity, frustrations, and snubs, as well as the joy and triumphs that Pigee experienced and witnessed in the quest for a fairer and more equitable nation. This new edition begins with a detailed introductory essay by historian Françoise N. Hamlin, who interviewed Pigee and her daughter in the few years preceding their passing, as well as their coworkers and current activists. In addition to the insightful Introduction, Hamlin has also provided annotations to the original text for clarity and explanation, along with a timeline to guide a new generation of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496844651

Vera Pigee

Vera Pigee (1924–2007) managed Pigee’s Beauty Salon in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and worked as a civil rights activist, serving as branch secretary to the Coahoma County chapter of the NAACP, a chapter she helped organize with Aaron Henry. She was an advisor to the Mississippi state NAACP Youth Council, taught citizenship classes, trained activists, and ran voter registration drives. She later became an ordained Baptist minister.

Book preview

THE STRUGGLE OF STRUGGLES

THE STRUGGLE OF STRUGGLES

Vera Pigee

Edited, annotated, and with a new introduction by Françoise N. Hamlin

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Cover design by Frank Marin.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 1975 and 1979 by Vera Pigee

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pigee, Vera Mae, 1924–2007, author. | Hamlin, Françoise N., editor, writer of introduction.

Title: The struggle of struggles / Vera Pigee ; edited, annotated, and with a new introduction by Françoise N. Hamlin.

Other titles: Civil rights in Mississippi.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2023. | Series: Civil rights in Mississippi series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022045945 (print) | LCCN 2022045946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496844637 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496844644 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496844651 (epub) | ISBN 9781496844668 (epub) | ISBN 9781496844675 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496844682 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Pigee, Vera Mae, 1924–2007. | National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Coahoma County Branch—History. | African American civil rights workers—Mississippi—Clarksdale—Biography. | Women civil rights workers—Mississippi—Clarksdale—Biography. | African American women—Biography. | African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—Clarksdale—History—20th century. | Civil rights movements—Mississippi—Clarksdale—History—20th century. | Clarksdale (Miss.)—Race relations—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC E185.97.P5935 A3 2023 (print) | LCC E185.97.P5935 (ebook) | DDC 323.092 [B]—dc23/eng/20221205

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045945

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045946

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: God Has Always Had a Time, a Place, and a People: Vera Mae Pigee (September 2, 1924–August 18, 2007)

The Struggle of Struggles, Part One

The Struggle of Struggles, Part Two

Timeline

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE TRENT BROWN FOR THE OPPORTUNITY to write the introduction to the 2016 republication of William McCord’s memoir (Mississippi: The Long Hot Summer) for the University Press of Mississippi that ultimately led to my pitching this project. Thanks to the press staff for their enthusiasm and assistance moving this along smoothly. I wholeheartedly acknowledge the work of StoryWorks (Jennifer Welsh, Nick Houston, Aallyah Wright, Layla Young, Charles Coleman, and others) in Clarksdale for representing the next generation invested in remembering, archiving, and celebrating those who came before. They give me hope for the future, and I know Mrs. Pigee and Mrs. Davis would have been thrilled with Beautiful Agitators. Thank you for sharing your experiences and lessons with me.

In terms of the project itself, I thank Cyprene Caines (a brilliant student in my Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement first-year seminar who became my research assistant, and an amazing scholar in her own right) for taking the first pass with the edits, researching biographical dates, and catching things I missed. I am grateful to Katherine Charron, Tammy Ingram, and George Trumbull IV, who read the introduction and shared their editorial wisdom. Thanks also to Frank Rivera-Marin for designing the cover to echo the originals. This is a labor of love, and ultimately any mistakes are my own.

Finally, this project genuflects and gives all praise to the Pigee family—particularly Mrs. Vera Pigee, Mr. Paul Pigee, and Mrs. Mary Jane Davis—for the gift of their sacrifices, stories, and lessons. I dedicate this volume to them in memoriam. They have left legacies that I hope generations to come (including my own son, Elijah) can learn from as they forge new paths toward a more just world.

Introduction

GOD HAS ALWAYS HAD A TIME, A PLACE, AND A PEOPLE

Vera Mae Pigee (September 2, 1924–August 18, 2007)

LEADERSHIP INVOLVES MORE THAN GRAND SCRIPTED SPEECHES AND television airtime.¹ Grassroots leaders often go unnoticed beyond their communities, yet without them figurehead leaders would not have a platform. Mrs. Vera Mae Pigee identified herself as a businesswoman, mother, and leader who worked to build local and statewide movements in Mississippi long before college-aged students came to the state to assist and propel activities forward in the 1960s. A beautician by trade, an avid churchgoer, and an activist mother, Mrs. Pigee supported and mentored youth through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and, as secretary of the local branch, she organized behind the scenes to ensure that the movement moved.²

Grassroots leadership like Mrs. Pigee’s hides in plain sight in photographs or in documents, as the media does not necessarily name those beyond the focal figure in their narrow frame. Nor does it perceive ordinary people as newsmakers even though they organize the newsworthy events. This means that finding and researching crucial local activists requires a more involved practice and more care. I had a foot in the door because of my history in Clarksdale (as an exchange student in high school in the early nineties). A former teacher invited me into her classroom, where I learned of students’ grandparents involved in activities in the 1960s. I found Mrs. Pigee after conducting quite a few interviews in Clarksdale as a second-year graduate student. Her name kept coming up in conversations, but I had never read about her in the then-few books that existed about Mississippi’s movements. Once someone finally gave me her phone number in Detroit, Michigan, I called her and received an immediate reprimand that half the people I had talked to had no business claiming a place in the history of the civil rights movement. She revealed a compellingly complex and rich story. I eventually traveled to Detroit during my spring break in my first dissertating year (2000) to meet her in person, and while I spent the week in her home talking to her extensively, she also watched me closely to determine whether I could be trusted.³

I respect that hesitancy. Why should she (or anyone else) gift her story to a stranger (and one with an accent and enrolled in a fancy East Coast university)? From her I learned about being a historian and a scholar, and the ethics of the work that I wanted to conduct, write about, and teach. This work takes time. It takes an investment in people to learn about them, to learn from them. Time. As scholars we have precious little of it, and it is all too easy to sit with someone for a couple of hours with a tape recorder and leave thinking that you have the full story. I learned that extraction of this kind does harm—to the histories written and to those whose stories scholars collect and often misrepresent. I ultimately wanted to write a history in which the people who had given me their stories could recognize themselves. I had a personal investment in the people with whom I went to high school who had no clue about their local history, and who took for granted that their grandparents had desegregated the very building in which we studied. Our state-supplied history textbooks inadequately addressed slavery, and the coverage of the mass movement for civil rights (which was long and bloody in Mississippi) focused primarily on out-of-state leaders.

Once I had met Mrs. Pigee and understood her immense role in the Clarksdale story, and beyond, I found more material to corroborate her story. The traditional archives hold organizational papers, more top-down information—from government sources to national civil rights organizational papers to a few personal collections of those involved in them. Individuals do emerge in the traditional archives, but it becomes more challenging to find the nuances of Black leadership, or those who did not leave papers, or how women led, or how local people used national resources for their own local use. The traditional archives hide such imperative details. Indeed, while researching the NAACP in Mississippi for what became Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, I spent time at the Library of Congress looking for the Black women, particularly Mrs. Pigee.⁴ Her name rarely appeared. I had to resign myself to relying on the scant scraps I had collected beyond the interviews and her books. Or so I thought.

Mrs. Pigee literally left her mark all over the archives. It seems so obvious now, but as the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, she handled pretty much all the branch business and correspondence, from its newsletter, entitled Cryer, which documented the details of the local movement, to the letters between it and the national office. She organized everything. I returned and started comparing the handwriting from samples I had—and there she appeared, hidden in plain sight. Given the many conversations I had with her in person, I could triangulate events, people, places, and campaigns but also focus on how she assessed her own life’s work. In short, finding Mrs. Pigee required multiple methods to produce an in-depth portrait of her centrality to the movement. Sometimes it is less about stubbornness in the archives and more about changing our vision about what an archive is and how we should read differently. She taught me that too.

During the intervening years, I wrote to her regularly and thanked her for her time, but it took nearly five years to see her again. By then she had moved out of her historic home on Edison Avenue, after the death of her beloved husband in 2004, and moved into assisted living. She had aged considerably and mourned the loss of the man she had partnered with since she was a teenager. I also met her daughter, Mrs. Mary Jane Davis, and spent long hours talking to her, learning more about her mother and her own activities. At that point I asked Mrs. Davis about the primary sources I knew Mrs. Pigee had accumulated in the sprawling house but had not moved to the small, compact apartment. When I had stayed with Mrs. Pigee in 2000, she had shown me a room filled with files, papers, certificates, and awards. I distinctly remember seeing the original framed Coahoma County Youth Council Charter on her wall. My mistake then was that I did not ask her to let me explore this material, and this was before I owned any portable smart devices that might have enabled me to document some of the primary sources without removing them. I cringed when Mrs. Davis informed me that she had promptly cleaned out the house, and everything had gone to the landfill to prepare it for sale. She had kept some photographs, which she kindly gave permission for me to print in the book, but the rest was gone. Mrs. Vera Mae Pigee died in 2007 and rests next to her husband in Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery.

I kept in touch with Mrs. Davis by phone and mail, and I sent her the completed manuscript for Crossroads at Clarksdale before it went to my editor. Her approval and confirmation that I had represented her mother fairly and accurately encompassed my ethics of care. With her blessing the book went to the press, and she received one of the first printed copies. Mrs. Davis died in 2014, which I found out a couple of years later when her widower wrote to tell me to stop sending my annual holiday card. She had no children. The Pigee line of strong, determined women ended with her.

I have taken time to narrate this account not only to gratefully acknowledge the time I spent with these amazing women who now walk with the ancestors but to show what they taught me, and to again reiterate the time it takes to tell stories with care. My book argues that the civil rights movement was a mass of local, organized movements, not a singular phenomenon, and that a local study approach enables a close analysis of the range and effects of Black leadership. Local examples and situations provide models for larger contexts. I reinstate women’s roles as paramount to local success, recasting our understanding of those roles in their own terms, using the trope of activist mothering to reinterpret leadership in contrast to more formal male models. I show how local people deftly manipulated organizations and campaigns to serve their activism and goals at particular moments, not how organizations set the tone for local movement activity. The book’s chronology also recalibrates the standard accounts of this era. By extending the narrative beyond the mass movement years—in part an outcome of adopting a biographical approach—I demonstrate how the stories are intricate, that the characters are flawed and complicated, and that many campaigns mattered when it comes to acknowledging the extent of change and progress that occurred. In other words, I argue that the story of the Black freedom struggle is not yet finished. Mrs. Pigee’s life gave me the tools to think about women’s leadership on their own terms, and her books illustrated just how messy organizing becomes.

WHY AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

These books, republished here in one volume, reveal the foundations of why this history matters. Mrs. Pigee wrote to set the record straight, to make sure that her work and that of her collaborators did not get erased. When I asked her directly why she felt the need to write, she answered, Well I saw a lot of stuff from a book that was wrong. I saw something that Aaron Henry told them that the Freedom Riders came through Clarksdale and sat in the bus station, which is the biggest lie that a person could tell, because my daughter and two more kids I sent to the bus station held the first sit-in in Clarksdale. She continued with a warning: "You read a lot of things that are not true. And I certainly hope and pray that your book [Crossroads at Clarksdale] will be as truthful as humanly possible. Because mine is, it has nothing in it but the truth."⁵ All autobiography is self-serving in a myriad of ways, and Mrs. Pigee’s is no different. In order to document her mettle, and the extent of her investment and its cost, she filled pages with local minutiae and politics. Personal details and descriptions of family life take a backseat due to her ultimate goal of telling her truth about the movement and her place in that history.

Most autobiographies written by African Americans in the Jim Crow generations narrate some kind of racial awakening—usually during childhood or adolescence—some kind of traumatic racist experience that explains or set the course for their life journey. Mrs. Pigee did not follow that convention: rather, she spent time describing her parents and the lessons she learned from them. From her father she learned about self-sufficiency and the will to thrive rather than merely survive. As a sharecropper, barber, and tailor, he hustled to make ends meet. The household, albeit poor, was plentiful, with a garden and livestock. She noted, I didn’t know we were poor—we always had plenty food.⁶ From her mother she witnessed and absorbed religiosity and faith, alongside a knack for organization that amounted to her own hustle. Mrs. Pigee remembered her mother’s blunt honesty and forthrightness, which did not waver when facing bigotry, and resulted in a begrudging respect for her integrity and hard work. So, although Mrs. Pigee chose to stay with family in her early years, rather than take the opportunity to attend high school in Philadelphia, she multiplied the gifts inherited from her parents. She was street-smart long before she got the credentials that attested to her book smarts.⁷

Mrs. Pigee’s books were (until now) self-published, out of print, and not readily available. She had sold them at NAACP conferences and when she traveled to speak, but they were never uniformly distributed. I inquired about the decision to self-publish. She answered, I did approach publishers. One of the publishers wanted to publish the book, but he made me feel like they were dictating what they would do, and how long the book would be in print and go out of print and all that stuff. And I put it in the wastebasket. I said, ‘My book doesn’t ever need to go out of print.’⁸ She insisted on control and ownership of her voice in every way. Republishing these books creates a more permanent space for her as one of the first in the slew of civil rights autobiographies that have emerged since. She explained the necessity of part two: I wanted to do a follow-up on the first book. And it’s somewhat different and still it isn’t. Because the people I’d asked I’d wanted to know would they do it again. All of them said yes. She continued that the second book reiterated what the first book had said, and then you had the action from the people who had been involved.⁹ She created sources where there were none available to her for the historical record and to authenticate herself.

Mrs. Pigee does show up in a few published spaces beyond the local paper, the Clarksdale Press Register. Grace Halsell, a white author and journalist, disguised herself as a Black woman and documented her experiences in Harlem and Mississippi as a soul sister. Mrs. Pigee mentions her in her autobiography as a friend and one of those who convinced her to write her story. In Soul Sister, first published in 1969, Halsell reveals she stayed in the Pigee house in Clarksdale while the family was out of town. She describes Mrs. Pigee’s home, from its cozy size to its home comforts. In contrast, she then mentions the bullet hole delivered by night riders, explaining what she called a gaping reminder that terror is a companion of every black man and woman in Clarksdale.¹⁰ Mrs. Pigee had trusted this stranger and left the key in the mailbox. Indeed, Mrs. Pigee did this frequently, allowing youth and other activists to access her home for respite as she did her work as an activist mother. She did it for me decades later. She confirmed that her home served as a central meeting place for NAACP workers too and that her daughter got used to sleeping on the couch to accommodate guests, noting, And they’d say that the NAACP told me when I get here to call you. So that was the way we lived. She chuckled, And sometimes I’d go home, and I’d hear the air-conditioning running, and I knew my husband would be at work and I’d be at work, but they’d be up in there having a meeting … the lawyers from Jackson, they all came to my house.¹¹

Sexism and the expectation that men led the movement also motivated Mrs. Pigee’s autobiographical endeavors. Her image appears in photographs illustrating civil rights activities, with her name often misspelled or completely missing. For example, the February 14, 1962, issue of Jet magazine has a photograph of her, Rev. Willie Goodloe, and Aaron Henry alongside aid supplies for distribution by the committee she codirected, captioned with Vivian Pigees and crediting Aaron Henry for the campaign. It is not surprising, then, that she might feel the need to correct the record.

The audience for her books therefore consists of those interested in the local movement history, those in Clarksdale, and those less familiar with the copious details she includes to document her role at the center of the local movement. The specifics mirror the depth and breadth of her activism and illustrate the messiness of local movements. Yet for readers unfamiliar with Clarksdale’s movement, her narrative does not move chronologically and does not provide a clear view of events and people over time. For this reason, this republication includes a brief timeline organized around and from the text to orient new readers.

CONTEXTUALIZING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I have used Mrs. Pigee’s autobiography in undergraduate classes several times over the years as a primary source document by a Black woman at the local level. Students are often taken aback by her bluntness and what they deem an emasculating view of many of the men she encountered. Context then becomes important. In the world of autobiography and biography, Alex Haley’s groundbreaking book Roots, published in 1976, garnered enough attention for Mrs. Pigee to mention it to authenticate her own work.¹² The seventies also ushered in women’s voices more forcefully, beginning with Toni Cade’s publication of The Black Woman, a collection of essays that includes Frances Beal’s essay Double Jeopardy. This anthology contextualizes Shirley Chisholm’s run for president in 1973, where she unabashedly refused to ally solely with her race or her gender and demanded that the electorate and her congressional colleagues deal with her as a Black woman in her entirety.¹³ Mrs. Pigee published part one in 1975, the UN’s International Women’s Year, which followed more than half a decade of a multifaceted women’s movement that saw women at the podiums demanding safety for and control over their bodies while also chipping away at laws and policies discriminating on the basis of gender. Although racism muted Black women’s voices on the national stage, they also organized to address gender inequity and the double jeopardy they faced.¹⁴

Mrs. Pigee always anchored her identity to her role as a mother, both to Mary Jane and the youth, and similarly began her book with her own mother. She fully embraced her femininity from the beginning of her activist life by claiming and using its strength. In July 1954 the Clarksdale Press Register reported on the fourteenth annual meeting of the Mississippi Independent Beauticians Association (Black beauticians) held in Clarksdale. It indicated that the five hundred participants openly declared their support for the Brown decision handed down two months previously and rejected segregation. It would not be a stretch to assume that Mrs. Pigee attended that meeting and probably had a hand in its organization.¹⁵ As such, while she did not embrace the term feminism, often viewed as too white and middle-class, she understood gendered dynamics and had exploited them when useful (her activist mothering), but by the point when she wrote the book, she had felt the bite of sexism in the movement’s memorialization.

By the mid-seventies the few books that existed on the civil rights movement focused primarily on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy, or men who had later risen up the ranks of government or the private sector once the mass movement began to ebb and the Black freedom struggle moved into a different phase with the next generation. Mrs. Pigee worked in the trenches, person by person for four years in the late fifties, to gather enough members to charter an NAACP youth council in Coahoma County. She worked full-time for the NAACP without compensation but with her family’s blessing and her husband’s unwavering support, and she leaned on her thriving business equipped with a manager and staff while she organized the local movement. In contrast, Aaron Henry, the branch president for most of the years and also the state conference president, did the public-facing work and got most of the credit. It is no accident that Dr. Henry makes his first appearance about a third of the way through part one of Mrs. Pigee’s recollections—he operated at a different tier and with a different leadership style. The mass of movements needed both but recognized his.

Even so, an internal memorandum between national NAACP officers that Mrs. Pigee would have never seen corroborates her value within the organization. In 1963 Calvin Banks, NAACP program director, wrote to executive secretary Roy Wilkins about Mrs. Pigee’s visit to New York that May to appeal to the Independent Community Improvement Association and the national NAACP office for emergency relief. Banks reassured Wilkins of her loyalty, saying that her commitment to the Association is total…. She requires very little guidance. She is articulate and effective and at all times projects a proper NAACP viewpoint.¹⁶ Mrs. Pigee was no wallflower. In this context her gendered voice, tone, accusations, and berating make more sense: she intended to set the gendered record straight with some home-truths, buoyed by the spirit of the moment in which she wrote.

The title of her autobiography, The Struggle of Struggles, embeds the overall lack of recognition. What is the struggle of struggles? Mrs. Pigee identified many other areas, especially while she actively organized, that constituted struggles within the struggle beyond the gendered and historical misremembering. For one, she had a lot to say about the generational conflicts among the movement’s constituents. Readers might find her scolding of the younger generations surprising and heavy-handed, but in the context of her organizing and mentoring youth in Mississippi in the fifties when Black people died for less, she deserves some grace. I had asked her explicitly about her feelings for the youthful Student Nonviolent Coordinating