A Radical Seed Grows in Jackson, Miss.

Waging Nonviolence - When Iya’Falola Omobola first crossed the Mississippi state border 10 years ago, she felt uneasy. A friend told her that she was “feeling the energy from all those bodies hanging in the trees.” Yet, Omobola’s feeling soon changed. Born into a family of civil rights and labor organizers in Cleveland, Ohio, Omobola came to see Jackson as the Phoenix that rises from the ashes. She came to feel increasingly connected to the city’s rich civil rights history: Jackson was the place where NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963; where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did much of its organizing for Mississippi’s Freedom Summer; and where Stokely Carmichael delivered an important speech in 1966 about black power as a psychological response to fear. Now, 50 years later, Omobola’s has become one of the many residents who has helped launch Jackson to the forefront of today’s civil and economic rights movement.  Read more.