The ‘Ayers vs. Waller’ lawsuit is 50 years old this week

January 28th marked 50 years from the day a group of Black Mississippi citizens filed suit against the governor and the higher education establishment in Mississippi. It is important to recognize that day because it was the most significant challenge to the Jim Crow higher education system in state history. It is significant because the group had assembled such staggering and convincing data that it convinced a three-judge panel of the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and was not able to be denied by the Supreme Court. Furthermore, the crux of the matter can still be witnessed today.

Because of the skill and wisdom of the original plaintiffs’ lawyers – Isiah Madison, Alvin Chambliss, Charles Victor McTeer, Johnny Walls, Willie Bailey, Lewis Myers, Jessie Pennington, Constance Slaughter, Andrew Gambrell, Solomon Osborne, Leonard McClellan, and Lawrence Young – it is important to identify and thank them for standing in the gap for us. None of them became wealthy as a result of those efforts. As a matter of fact, some suffered as a result of the opposition of the white power elites.

The Ayers vs. Waller suit was filed at a time when Black citizens sometimes risked economic opportunities, if not life and limb, by challenging policies of Jim Crow. For that reason, it is important to identify the courageous Mississippians who were the original plaintiffs in the case. Those plaintiffs were Jake Ayers Jr. and Sr., Hattie and Margaret James, Leola and Lillie Blackman, Shirley Porter, Kenneth Spearman, James Holloway, Dave Collins, Lewis Armstrong, Darryl Thomas, Albert Joe Williams, George Bell, Johnny Sims, Thelma and Randolph Walker, Bennie Thompson, Virginia Hill, B. Leon Johnson, and Pamela Gipson. We are forever indebted to these heroic brothers and sisters of ours. 

Although the Supreme Court upheld their position, based upon vestiges of the Jim Crow system, Alcorn State University, Jackson State University and Mississippi Valley have not received fair funding, program development and other elements of higher educational institutions. As the case was settled, those institutions did not achieve what the plaintiffs had sought on 1975. (In the original filing, Coahoma Junior College and Utica Junior College were also a part of the case, but were separated prior to the case reaching the Supreme Court.)

The Ayers birthday recognition is still worth noting because of the effort that was advanced and because of what can possibly be revived and won for Alcorn State, Jackson State and Mississippi Valley. 

We therefore challenge the faculties of those institutions to organize with and behind their faculty senates. We challenge the students of those institutions to organize with and behind their student governments. We challenge the alumni of those institutions to organize behind these obvious political and economic needs of the universities. 

Together these impacted entities can inform the public and build a movement to finally fulfill the dream of Jake Ayers, Isiah Madison and the other Black plaintiffs, lawyers and citizens that was expressed January 28, 1975.