Kokomo march

Kokomo, Miss.-Well over 1500 people marched on July 9 in 99-degree heat to the tree where 17-year-old Raynard Johnson was found hanging in his parents' front yard. We marched because we don't think his death was a suicide, but that he was murdered because he dared to date whites and have white friends.

The way the tree branches were, it would have been impossible for Raynard to get up on that limb and hang himself. Where did he get the belt that he was hung with? It didn't belong to him or anyone in his family. The authorities tried to bury him before his family could do a second autopsy. People speculate that he was hit from behind and that killed him, and then he was hung on the tree, because there were no signs on his body of a struggle. The information I had heard on the news we were hearing firsthand from Raynard's mother.

This was the most emotional march I have ever participated in and the most tiring, because we marched seven miles in terrible heat. There was a white lady there with a picture of her child that the Mississippi police had murdered two years ago. She said she had to put her cause in with ours because she experienced the same corruption of the police. Raynard's classmates marched with us, white and Black. People from all over Mississippi came and started showing pictures of loved ones who had been missing two or three months, one year, two years, five years. It wasn't just Raynard Johnson.

Jesse Jackson stopped at a poor-looking house where this group of elderly white men were standing on the front porch. He approached them. You couldn't believe anyone would live in a house like that. One of the men told Jackson that if he didn't have heart trouble, he'd be marching with us, because the sheriff's department killed that boy.

The FBI was everywhere, and the local police were trying to say that the FBI had no jurisdiction; this was their investigation. Jesse Jackson was saying, we don't want the state of Mississippi to investigate anything; it should be out of their hands.

There were threats on our lives. Someone had threatened to throw dynamite in the middle of the march. Six white boys were arrested with .38s. Most of the time we had there was very emotional, but you could see the drive in the community for support from both Black and white.

-Doris Bradshaw