Much of this violence passed unnoticed by most Mississippians, but not so with the Grays.<\/p>\n
Gray was president of the Lauderdale County Head Start board and Ruthie Gray taught music in one of the Head Start centers that was bombed.<\/p>\n
Daughter Anne says, \u201cProbably one of the most vivid memories I have of that time was when Mom picked me up from school one day, which was not real common. And she was just visibly shaken and almost crying.<\/p>\n
\u201c<\/span>She said, \u2018You\u2019ve\u00a0got to<\/em>\u00a0see this,\u2019 and she drove me to where this black church had been bombed and she stopped.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>And I remember so vividly, she said, \u2018Now you get your\u00a0white<\/em>\u00a0face out and walk over there!\u2019 I said, \u2018What am I supposed to say, Mama?\u2019 And she said, \u2018You just\u00a0say<\/em>\u00a0something.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>It was the church where she had helped with the Head Start program, and so it was real personal. It was people she knew. I remember all I could say to them was \u2018I\u2019m just so sorry.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>It wasn\u2019t a conversation; everybody was just in shock. I remember walking up to an old man who was crying. I was more emotionally wracked by that than by just about anything up to that point.\u201d<\/p>\n Anne recalled that her school friends were either ignorant of or oblivious to the violence going on around them.<\/p>\n \u201cThis had happened during the night, but nobody said a word about it at school. When I tried to talk to my friends about my experience, they were in denial. They said it didn\u2019t happen. People wouldn\u2019t do things like that. Nobody could be that mean.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>They said it was an accident. They said things like, \u2018Well, you know that church was old. It had bad wiring\u2019 or \u2018Why would anybody do anything like that? They\u2018re just trying to get sympathy.\u2019 But it wasn\u2019t in their part of town.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much of this violence passed unnoticed by most Mississippians, but not so with the Grays. Gray was president of the Lauderdale County Head Start board and Ruthie Gray taught music in one of the Head Start centers that was bombed. Daughter Anne says, \u201cProbably one of the most vivid memories I have of that time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-66","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-excerpts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andonewasapriest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}