OPINION: They came in suits

By Selika Sweet, MD

JA Guest Writer

I grew up in a green, Western-style house shaded by a magnolia tree and eight tall pine trees my father planted when my parents, sister, and brother moved there in 1955. Our home sat on the corner of Missouri and Guynes Street – later renamed Margaret Walker Alexander Boulevard. A few houses down lived the family of Medgar Wiley Evers. Up the hill was the home of Margaret Walker Alexander, author of Jubilee. These were not ordinary neighbors. These were names that carried weight in Jackson, Mississippi, a city that in 1968 was still deeply divided by the struggle for civil rights.

In 1953, two African American World War II veterans built thirty homes in the middle of a white neighborhood. With GI loans and sheer determination, they claimed ground where Black families had never been welcomed. My father, a Korean War veteran, was one of the men who bought a home there. Along with Medgar Evers, he became part of a small but determined enclave of Black homeowners in a segregated city.

On Sundays, the divide was clearest. Black families went to Black churches. White families went to white ones. The separation was routine – quietly accepted as the way things were. Even today, Sunday remains one of the most divided days in the Magnolia State.

Yet, everyday life sometimes blurred those lines. My father went fishing with a white neighbor who lived up Missouri Street. He would pull up in his station wagon, and they would leave together with their poles and tackle boxes. His daughters – one blonde, one brunette – came to our house in the evenings to paint furniture with my older sister. They spread white sheets across the carport floor and transformed old three-drawer dressers into something bright, painting them green and covering them with purple, yellow, and red daffodils. I sat nearby for hours, watching something worn become beautiful.

My mother became close with the older white woman across the street who kept a half-acre garden. She left baskets of peas, squash, and tomatoes on our front steps. In the evenings, she and my mother stood in the street and talked easily, almost as if race did not exist.

But in Jackson in 1968, race always existed – even when it went unspoken.

That spring, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the city seemed to hold its breath. Grief, anger, and fear settled over Jackson. Marches and protests were common. Some believed change was coming too slowly. Others feared it was coming too fast.

One evening, as the heat lifted and dusk settled in, my mother’s gardening friend rushed into our house, shaken and breathless.

“They came in suits,” she said.

My mother asked who.

“I don’t know. Two men. They came to our house and said we had to move. They said the schools were being integrated and we had to leave. They said we had to be gone.”

The fear in her voice lingered long after she stopped speaking. The word suits stayed with my mother. It wasn’t just clothing. It meant authority. Power. Decisions handed down without explanation.

In the days that followed, the neighborhood buzzed. Schools would integrate. Families would leave. What sounded like progress to some felt like a loss to others. To my mother’s friend, integration did not sound like opportunity. It sounded like a warning.

Years later, what my mother remembered most was not the policies or the politics. It was the terror in that woman’s voice – and the certainty with which she spoke, as though the clothes alone told the whole story.

“They came in suits, Grace. Suits.”

Only much later did we have a name for the kind of power she had encountered. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, created in 1956 in response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, was a state-run agency designed to resist school desegregation under the banner of “state sovereignty.” Though it presented itself as a defender of local control, it functioned as Mississippi’s official machinery for preserving segregation – monitoring, intimidating, and undermining families caught in the path of change.