You never know when something’s going to happen that will change your life completely. If I had stayed in Florida canning tomatoes, I wouldn’t have been here when the civil rights workers came to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. But here I was in Mayersville, chopping Jimson weeds and Johnson grass out of Mr. Wilkerson’s cotton for $3 a day. It was 1964, and I was 31 years old. We were living in our old two-room shotgun shack without indoor plumbing.
