On March 20, 2003, Quinn Keating Collins made his grand entrance on planet Earth. On April 29, 2003, his grandfather, Clinton Clarence Collins, Sr., took his final bow. My two oldest sons, Joseph and Alexander, knew their grandfather and heard, probably more times than they wanted to, the stories of Mississippi cross-burnings and ducking bullets on Omaha Beach, homemade bootleg brew and the “come to Jesus” meetings between me, my father, and his dancing leather belt. Those stories are now safely fermenting in their minds for all the family retellings yet to come.
Alas, Quinn, the newest Collins, will not have his own personal memories of his grandfather. So it will be left to our family and particularly to me to conjure in Quinn’s mind his grandfather’s life and legacy. I’ll start right now with this column.
Clinton Collins, Sr., was born in Wiggins, Mississippi, in either 1923 or 1924, depending on whether you believe the old, weather-beaten family Bible or the birth certificate that mysteriously emerged from the bowels of some bureaucratic computer about a decade ago. His mother was named Judia and his father was a “professor” (which is what any black male teacher with even a whiff of college was called in those days). My dad thought his last name was Johnson. “Professor” Johnson never married Judia, who died when my father was four or five years old. Judia’s brother, Isaac Collins, took him to Laurel, Mississippi, and raised him there.
Clarence was his “Sunday-come-to-meeting” name, but his everyday name was “Boy.” No, not “boy” as in the white put-down. “Boy” as in “ain’t you one of them Collins boys?” In fact, the name stuck so hard that even when he made his last trip to Laurel a few years ago, he was still “Boy,” albeit “Mr. Boy” Collins. Boy Collins lived the life that black people lived in Mississippi in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. He attended segregated, dilapidated schools, went to the Mississippi state fair on “Colored Day,” and tried to avoid the ire of “white folks.” Unfortunately, that was a very hard thing for a young black manchild coming of age in the “Solid South.”
He dropped out of tenth grade, picked cotton for a hot minute, and was ultimately drafted into World War II. During the war, he landed on Omaha Beach and drove trucks for the famed Red Ball Express, a group of black soldiers that kept Patton juiced during his dash to Germany. After the war, he came back to Mississippi determined to make sure that his native land gave him his due as an American citizen and as a man.
By 1949, he had finished high school and college, earned an officers’ commission in the newly integrated Army, and was applying to the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) law school. Ole Miss rejected him because he was black. After a year at an all-black law school in Missouri, Mr. Boy went back to Mississippi and became one of the youngest public school superintendents ever. Now, because Mississippi was still caught up in the fallacy of “separate but equal,” he was only responsible for the “colored” students in his district. Outraged at the substandard equipment and poor treatment, Mr. Boy bought an hour on a Laurel radio station in the 1950s, a time when most Mississippi blacks were afraid to even look a white man in the eye, and told those crackers exactly what he thought of their racist world.
In 1957, he married Carrie Beatrice Holloway, a kindred spirit who did not take any abuse from racists either. Together, they risked everything to take in young Freedom Riders who traveled Dixie’s bus lines to break segregation’s chokehold on the South. In 1962, Mr. Boy became the first black man to run for public office in Mississippi since Reconstruction. He told his terrified neighbors that if he was going to die, as his good friend Medgar Evers did in the awful, bloody summer of 1963, he was going to do so on his feet, not his knees. Even after the Klan burned a cross on our front lawn, Mr. Boy took no unanswered blows. He simply ran for public office again.
Like most sons, I had my “issues” with my father. He was not perfect. Yet, not a day passes, when I do not gain a deeper appreciation for the many life lessons he taught me. The most crucial, one that I have taught Joseph and Alexander and will teach Quinn, is this: You gain nothing by blaming white people, the world, whoever, for giving you crap. And you have no one to blame but yourself if you take it.
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