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Raylawni Branch
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Raylawni Branch
Raylawni Branch (born 1941) is a black Mississippi pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, a professional nursing educator and US Air Force Reserve officer. She is best known for her leading role in the integration of the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg) in 1965, which was peaceful as opposed to the violent riot triggered by white racism after the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi (Oxford) in 1962.
She was raised in Hattiesburg, Prentiss, and Mount Carmel, Mississippi, and in Chicago, Illinois. When her family moved from Hattiesburg to Chicago, they were homeless two or three times, living in a park. She does not have good memories about living in the North. She went to schools that were predominantly white where the teacher never spoke to her.
She was again homeless in Chicago after the family lost its home over her father's legal problems. After her father died in the Cook County Jail in 1955, the family returned to Mississippi.
By the time she was graduated from the eighth grade, she had moved eleven times and been in eight schools. Back in Mississippi, Branch attended Hattiesburg’s Royal Street (then Rowan) High School and graduated in 1959. There she learned political activism, pride, and how to work the system from Marjorie Chambers, her history teacher. She was also encouraged by listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches on the radio.
As a teenager, she worked in a restaurant named Fat's Kitchen in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street black business district. There she met a regular customer, Clyde Kennard, whose tragic attempt to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi had begun in 1956 and was to play out before Branch’s young eyes. In 1959 she saw Kennard on the morning of his appointment with arch-segregationist Dr. William David McCain, president of (then) Mississippi Southern College, to discuss his enrollment application. She found Kennard the kind of person who actually believed in the goodness of man. He even had a good opinion of Dr. McCain, who was a well known racist and segregationist. He thought that he did not need any protection. Branch and others asked him to "Let someone go with you." But Kennard saw no need.
The meeting with McCain resulted in his arrest on false criminal charges and the beginning of a notorious miscarriage of justice which led to Kennard's early death at 36 because of bungled cancer treatment in the Mississippi prison system. After a second false arrest, Branch attended the trial and was among those who tried to get Johnny Lee Roberts, the prosecution's suborned witness, to tell the truth or flee the state. Roberts refused, fearing that the KKK would harm his family left in Mississippi.
After high school graduation she tried the North again as a migrant worker on farms in Michigan, living in little shacks with no utilities, then again returned to Mississippi.
From 1959 to 1965 she was a homemaker, married and had three children. When northern civil rights activists became active in Mississippi in the early 1960s with the Delta Ministry and similar groups, she became very active, serving as secretary of the Forrest County NAACP and a member of the Council of Federated Organizations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She participated in several activities, including the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which she was one of the 250,000 to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. She integrated the Greyhound Lines and Trailways Transportation System bus stations in Hattiesburg, and was the first African American ever hired at the local Big Yank clothing factory. She also became the first African American ever offered a position as a switchboard operator at the local telephone company.
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Raylawni Branch
Raylawni Branch (born 1941) is a black Mississippi pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, a professional nursing educator and US Air Force Reserve officer. She is best known for her leading role in the integration of the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg) in 1965, which was peaceful as opposed to the violent riot triggered by white racism after the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi (Oxford) in 1962.
She was raised in Hattiesburg, Prentiss, and Mount Carmel, Mississippi, and in Chicago, Illinois. When her family moved from Hattiesburg to Chicago, they were homeless two or three times, living in a park. She does not have good memories about living in the North. She went to schools that were predominantly white where the teacher never spoke to her.
She was again homeless in Chicago after the family lost its home over her father's legal problems. After her father died in the Cook County Jail in 1955, the family returned to Mississippi.
By the time she was graduated from the eighth grade, she had moved eleven times and been in eight schools. Back in Mississippi, Branch attended Hattiesburg’s Royal Street (then Rowan) High School and graduated in 1959. There she learned political activism, pride, and how to work the system from Marjorie Chambers, her history teacher. She was also encouraged by listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches on the radio.
As a teenager, she worked in a restaurant named Fat's Kitchen in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street black business district. There she met a regular customer, Clyde Kennard, whose tragic attempt to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi had begun in 1956 and was to play out before Branch’s young eyes. In 1959 she saw Kennard on the morning of his appointment with arch-segregationist Dr. William David McCain, president of (then) Mississippi Southern College, to discuss his enrollment application. She found Kennard the kind of person who actually believed in the goodness of man. He even had a good opinion of Dr. McCain, who was a well known racist and segregationist. He thought that he did not need any protection. Branch and others asked him to "Let someone go with you." But Kennard saw no need.
The meeting with McCain resulted in his arrest on false criminal charges and the beginning of a notorious miscarriage of justice which led to Kennard's early death at 36 because of bungled cancer treatment in the Mississippi prison system. After a second false arrest, Branch attended the trial and was among those who tried to get Johnny Lee Roberts, the prosecution's suborned witness, to tell the truth or flee the state. Roberts refused, fearing that the KKK would harm his family left in Mississippi.
After high school graduation she tried the North again as a migrant worker on farms in Michigan, living in little shacks with no utilities, then again returned to Mississippi.
From 1959 to 1965 she was a homemaker, married and had three children. When northern civil rights activists became active in Mississippi in the early 1960s with the Delta Ministry and similar groups, she became very active, serving as secretary of the Forrest County NAACP and a member of the Council of Federated Organizations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She participated in several activities, including the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which she was one of the 250,000 to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. She integrated the Greyhound Lines and Trailways Transportation System bus stations in Hattiesburg, and was the first African American ever hired at the local Big Yank clothing factory. She also became the first African American ever offered a position as a switchboard operator at the local telephone company.