SPEAKING FREELY ON VICTORIA DeLEE (Part 1)

Amid the annual focus on Martin Luther King and his heroic contributions to the civil rights struggle, many other Black Americans who made enormous sacrifices for the cause are often overlooked, particularly women.

Rosa Parks, Fanie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, and a handful of other women have received national attention for their work and have become an enduring part of the civil rights tapestry.

But perhaps only residents of Dorchester County in the 1960s remember the force of nature that was Victoria DeLee. She deserves broader recognition for her contributions and the sacrifices her family made for the cause.

The late Hayes Mizell, a staff member at the American Friends Service Committee, worked closely with DeLee on school desegregation issues in the 1960s in Ridgeville. He wrote in an article for the AFSC that she was "a tall, stocky woman who was physically intimidating, sharp-tongued and quick-witted. She used these assets with great effect," Mizell wrote. "Whenever she met someone who she thought might help her cause, she did not take 'no' for an answer."

Mizell witnessed these traits in a showdown at the Washington, D.C. office of U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell on July 1, 1969. DeLee was one of thirty seeking a meeting with Mitchell to protest the possibility that the Nixon administration would back away from school integration. DeLee relished face-to-face meetings with her foes.

The group was told Mitchell was unavailable, of course. They were handed over to a young associate of Mitchell--Jerris Leonard. He tried to give them the bum's rush. Mizell describes what happened next:


"Leonard realized too late that he had made the same mistake as every other person who had assumed that their education, position, class or experience would prevail in a confrontation with Mrs. DeLee; he was clearly in over his head. In frustration, Leonard suddenly turned and strode out of the room. But Mrs. DeLee was right behind him, wagging her forefinger at the back of his head and firing her final salvo, ...'and you're as phony as baloney'."

DeLee was not afraid of white school administrators, federal judges, prosecutors, or those in Dorchester County who fired shots at her house, burned it to the ground, and beat up her children for trying to integrate Dorchester County schools.

Born in 1925, DeLee grew up in a rural Dorchester County not much removed from Reconstruction. Her family worked as sharecroppers, picking vegetables "for white people," she said. She witnessed a lynching. She attended a Black school in a one-room shack heated by a pot belly stove. This impoverished, segregated school did, however, kindle her sense of unfairness and led her to a life of activism in Dorchester County.

That career began in 1947 when she tried to register to vote. This was no simple matter, despite the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870 to guarantee that right to all. Only two kinds of people were actually welcome at the registrar's office in Dorchester County: whites, and "reliable" Blacks who could be counted on to vote for the white candidates chosen by the Democratic Party. This was the party of the Solid South that had backed only white Democrats since Reconstruction ended in 1876.

DeLee was in neither category, but she was determined to change the system, and voting was one way to do it. So she went to the registrar's office and told him she wanted her voter registration certificate.

"You can't get registered," he told her. (DeLee recalled this in an interview with journalist Calvin Trillin, published in The New Yorker in 1971.) Her showdown with the registrar, in her words, continued as follows:

"He said, 'You got to read this here---the Constitution.' So he gave me a book. It wasn't no Constitution. It was something' else he gave me to read---a whole big thing there. I read it. He say, 'You read, but you can't read with understanding.'

"I said, 'Who's the person who's supposed to understand it---me or you? I read and I understand what I read, and give me my registration certificate.' I said, 'If you don't---I says---'Mister, it's goin' to be trouble.'

"So he got scared. This white man got scared. He said, 'You know who you're talking to?'

"I said, 'You know who you're talking to?' I said, 'This happen to not be one of your niggers.' I said, 'I want my registration certificate.'

"After a while, he says, 'O.K. Now, you ain't makin' me do this,' he says, 'but I'm goin' to give you this registration certificate. But don't you go there and tell nobody else I give you this registration certificate.'

"I says, 'You ain't giving' me my registration certificate.' I says, "i applied and I am eligible for it. That's your Constitution---I done read it. That's all that's required.' I said, 'I'm going out here and tell everybody.'

And she did.

Eventually she decided that the only way to change a white racist Democratic Party was to run for office herself.

But that's a story for my next post on the admirable career of Dorchester County's civil rights pioneer, Victoria DeLee. .