Photo courtesy of Grace Contreni Flynn
It is easy to feel as though our country and respective communities are radically different than they were in the 1960s. After all, numerous foreign wars, social movements, recessions, and medical epidemics have passed and left their marks in that time. Yet, this sensation was taken into question on Feb. 16 as students and faculty spoke with activist and former State Prosecutor Lonnie Braxton II. Braxton ‘86 was born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi and spent his childhood in the throws of the Mississippi tangent of the Civil Rights Movement. During his visit he recounted living blocks away from the men who killed Emmett Till as well as his father’s close friendship with the NAACP’s first field secretary, Medgar Evers. Braxton acknowledged that this era of his life, while inarguably consequential, saw change that was “wide, not deep.” Rather, he reflected, “times then were no harder than times are now,” he urged audience members to understand that “[his] generation is about to exit stage left and leave the stage with you and the hard work for you is to not worry about the wide, you’re going to have to go deep. That deep change requires a lot of hard work. So, get ready, prepare yourself because your turn is not coming, folks. It’s already here.” Throughout the conversation, Braxton clearly outlined the necessary methodology behind this deep work and walked the primarily student audience through the parallels he sees between the Civil Rights Era and the early 2020s. He wove three sentiments into the fabric of the conversation, each appearing in retold memories and cautionary tales. These were: authenticity, patience, and perseverance.
To gather a full understanding of the conversation, I’ll begin with an introduction to Braxton guided by questions that he posed to the audience. Lonnie Braxton II is from the Southern United States. He attended a segregated school and grew up in poverty. Braxton moved to New London, CT in 1968 having been inspired by the numerous “Made in Connecticut” labels he saw in his childhood. He aimed to pursue a manufacturing job as a means of funding his law school education. He speaks with his elementary school teacher regularly. He is familiar with the feeling of having to speak for more than just himself, to serve as a representative for all people who share his background and identities.
Braxton explained that this smattering of demographic information serves as a reminder that there is privilege in being exactly who you are. Marginalized people in particular, he remarked, constantly have their self-expression and personhood questioned. So, he asked “each [person] to learn self, to know yourself” and to respect this self wholly. Braxton gleaned this lesson from his parents who worked throughout his childhood as sharecroppers and put him and his sister through college despite never having had the opportunity themselves. He witnessed his parents work tirelessly and, yet, found that their success did not come from their hard work but from their ability to accept challenges and failures, telling the audience “if you work hard, really hard for something and it doesn’t work out […] stay at it, that failure does not and should not define you rather what you do about it does.” Braxton applied this perseverance to his legal career having spent 17 years working multiple jobs and taking night classes. However, after failing the Bar Exam several times, he learned that he was dyslexic and had Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD. His solution? Study even more often than he had previously and, to prevent lengthy distractions, take the exam in half the time. His methods worked, and Braxton passed the exam.
He spent the next few decades dedicated to his position as a juvenile prosecutor and to advancing the rights of Black people in New London County as the Vice President of the NAACP Norwich branch. Throughout his career, Braxton faced discrimination ranging from judges mistaking him for the defendant to receiving direct threats from the KKK while in the courtroom. Yet, he never stepped down. As we neared the end of the conversation, a student posed the following question, “Sometimes as a person of color in very white spaces or just doing social justice work, it gets very tiring–have you ever had moments of extreme exhaustion and what helped you keep going at that time?”. Braxton took a moment and then referred back to his ancestors, “the sacrifices people made on our behalf…we spit in their face if we don’t give everything we’ve got because they did.”
