Oral history with Joe Martin

              An Oral History with Joe Martin
This oral history is provided through a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage It is presented here for reference purposes only. Interviews in this collection are protected by copyright and PERMISSION TO PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED from the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. Please call ( 601) 266- 4574 for more information.
Biography
Joe Martin was born in McComb, Mississippi on May 22, 1943 to L. J. and Leola Carsey Martin. His involvement in civil rights germinated in elementary school when he heard Medgar Evers speak at his church. So inspired was he by Mr. Evers, that in 1958, Martin and his Burgland High School football buddies formed a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) youth group. Another source of Mr. Martin's involvement in civil rights issues was Mr. C. C. Bryant, a barber who was the president of the local NAACP. Mr. Bryant supplied civil rights educational materials for his patrons to read, and Mr. Martin cultivated a practice of studying those materials when he visited the barber shop. Even as a child, Mr. Martin became aware of police brutality and a system of " apartheid" in McComb. Mr. Martin was active in the NAACP Youth Council. While a student at Burgland High School, Mr. Martin participated in a student walkout for which he was arrested. Through his involvement in high school, Mr. Martin later became a member of both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations ( COFO) and through those organizations, he has actively worked for civil rights in Mississippi. In 1965, he was outraged that Mississippi African American John Shaw had been killed while serving in the foreign battlefield of Vietnam, yet had been denied equal rights in his home of McComb, Mississippi, Mr. Martin and fellow McComb activist Clint Hopson circulated an essay listing five reasons why black-, brown-, and red- skinned people shouldn't fight in the Vietnam War. The treatise addressed the dilemma of African Americans who were ordered to risk their lives fighting in Vietnam for " freedom," while enduring Klan- inspired terrorism and police brutality in their homes in Mississippi, and being denied their right to vote. Mr. Martin worked for Mississippi Institution for the Technical and Economic Resources, which was instrumental in bringing legal services and a health clinic to McComb as well as being a forum for students to air problems that were taking place at school. Additionally, every year in April, they would visit all the high schools in the county and take students who wished to go, to register to vote. At the time of this interview, Mr. Martin worked as a bail bondsman, still encountering and fighting racism on various fronts in his daily life.
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