At the age of 44, Joyce Parker had spent almost her entire life in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville. But she had almost no sense of the way local government ran. Without children of her own, Parker saw little reason to attend a school board meeting and could count on one hand the number of times she’d visited City Hall. On the surface, she appeared to be the most unlikely of community organizers.
“I didn’t look at the schools,” she said. “I didn’t even look at the parks. I thought that things were OK because I was OK. Things had continued without my input for so long, I didn’t even know I had a right to be involved.”
Situated in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation, Greenville, nevertheless, had a privileged class – one observer calls them “the Gatekeepers” – many of whom were accustomed to running town affairs without any pushback from outsiders. Parker herself had never considered questioning the status quo.
That was before it began to affect her family. Her brother, discussing the upcoming week at Sunday dinner, grumbled about plans for his son’s high school. Two existing campuses were to be consolidated under one name but remain on their respective sites. One of those schools had a shining new science and math wing. The other barely had a functioning microscope. Parker was stung.
“It immediately brought to my mind those days of ‘separate but unequal,’” she said,. “My concern was who was going to go to which school?”
Now, 10 years after the fact, the substitute teacher who avoided challenging authority has become a powerful organizer in the Equal Voice campaign, leading a coalition of parents to improve education access, public services and basic civic involvement in Greenville. It has been a long – sometimes lonely – road but Parker has learned which battles to fight and how to win them. She has grown adept at collecting answers before opponents ask their first questions. In so doing, she has helped change the very face of government in her Deep South community.
“Joyce is an amplifier – she has definitely given a voice to people,” said Mayor Heather Hudson, the first black woman elected to that position in Greenville’s history. “We’ve had some disagreements, definitely, but I highly respect what she’s been able to do in bringing the needs of everyday people to the attention of government. She’s been a voice for people who felt like they did not have one.”
At the beginning, Parker thought all she needed to do was stand before the school board with like-minded parents and ask for a hearing. That was the beginning of her long education. School leaders looked at her group, murmured a few words and returned to business. In Greenville, that meant operating with virtually no outside input, Parker says.
At the time, she was puzzled. Didn’t the board want to hear from parents? And where were her friends, all the people she had expected to stand by her side? Almost none of them had shown up. Parker shrugged and pressed on, watching as her brother telephoned staffers at Southern Echo to ask for advice. Organize, they said.
Over the next year, trainers from the social justice and grassroots development group in Jackson, Miss., tutored Parker on exactly what “organizing” means. She learned how to research the history of her town, understand the connections between its power brokers and produce the data necessary to rebut phrases like “It can’t be done.”
“This was basically governance 101,” said Leroy Johnson, executive director of Southern Echo, recalling the day Parker first burst into his office, demanding recognition. “These were students who didn’t come from the ‘right’ families. They were from rundown neighborhoods and the wrong families, and education leaders in the Delta had said ‘that’s a population we don’t want to spend our money on.’ Power had decided that they didn’t exist.”
Parker, recently laid off from her job as a training supervisor, was incensed by that attitude. She turned her brother’s barbershop into a meeting place, supported herself by spending her 401k and spent weeks studying education law, parents rights and whom to call at the state level.
To her great surprise, it worked.
Greenville school board members received a visit from the Mississippi Department of Education, which demanded that the district put twice as much money toward renovating its broken-down science lab as had originally been planned.
“We were like, ‘Wow!’” Parker recalled. “That was a major success and something that these parents had never experienced, nor had I. It all goes back to organizing – investigate, educate, figure out how to negotiate, and demonstrate. Without that, we would have just been spinning our wheels.”
By 2001, the parents group had incorporated as Citizens for a Better Greenville, but they still had a long way to go. First, came the parks. Greenville’s had deteriorated markedly from the days of Parker’s youth, so the Citizens group began tree-planting on those forlorn plots on weekends.
“We used this as an opportunity to build relationships, to talk to parents about their children,” Parker said. “We’d ask them, Is your child two grades behind? Is your child failing math and reading? Is your child involved in Youth Court? It was really putting us in touch with the people being impacted. So we stopped looking over our shoulder at those who were not stepping up to help us. These were the ones being labeled as people who didn’t care about education, and we found them through the community parks.”
A quick scan of Parker’s employment history shows a woman who had been circling around public service for years – as a school bus driver, juvenile officer, detective, truancy officer and substitute teacher – but less visible is the motivation behind that effort. Her parents worked long hours as a cook and cab driver, yet made sure to attend every PTA meeting. Her mother, who turns 93 this month, was raised by a former slave and never got past the tenth grade, but took on extra jobs to put six children through college.
“My mother and father set the standards by which I engage this work,” said Parker, who feels keenly the push of history. “They’d say, ‘Nothing is impossible, and quitting is not an option.’”
Yet her impulse to act has not always been welcome. In the decade since attending her first school board meeting, Parker has run unsuccessfully for a seat on the Greenville City Council. She has watched longtime friends shy from her crusade and weathered repeated swipes from the local paper, which routinely accuses her of “tossing out senseless impediments at every opportunity" and "attempting to interject politics” in the debate. One resident wrote in to complain that Parker had no right to question education in Greenville because she had no children in the schools.
“We thought we were doing all this good stuff and that everyone would jump on the bandwagon, but it just didn’t happen like that,” Parker noted. “We were challenging a system, and doing that in a community this small, you will begin to step on toes. That was the hardest lesson for me to learn. People started to look at me as being this troublemaker who was always talking about the bad things. But I just thought we could be better than people said we were.”
Back at Southern Echo, Leroy Johnson was not surprised. “Here was Joyce, who came from a family with huge ties to the community, for the first time in her life being treated as a transparent person,” he said. “Transformation takes time, and you make mistakes along the way. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Though the criticism smarted, Parker kept working – educating citizens about civic involvement and watching as Greenville’s government slowly began to change. She still bristles at the memory of a newspaper editor describing her community as apathetic, with little interest in anything other than sitting on the front porch and going to church.
Hardly. Mayor Hudson says hundreds of residents have been mobilized by Citizens for a Better Greenville,
85 of whom were so motivated that they traveled with Parker to the Equal Voice National Convention in Birmingham last year. Meanwhile, through Parker, they have witness the power of organizing: Both high school buildings now have glistening science facilities, the state is keeping an eye on equity in the district and, with Hudson’s leadership, the bluesy town on the Delta is growing more accustomed to new faces in power.
“Citizens for a Better Greenville became so forceful that those who didn’t want to see them had to see them, and those that didn’t want to hear them had to hear them,” said Johnson, summing up their impact 10 years down the line. “It changed how the community saw themselves, and it was wonderful to watch. The way they walked into a room became different. They knew they belonged in the room.”