#SayHerName: Rosie Head, Civil/Voting Rights Activist
September 29, 2022 by Mitzi J Smith PhD
Ms. Rosie Head was a leading civil rights activist in the Holmes County, Mississippi where she was born. Her father was a carpenter and sharecropper, and they (she and her two brothers and seven sisters) worked in the cotton and corn fields and in the gardens called “truck patches” where they raised all their food. She eventually left Greenwood, MS for Lexington, MS. Rosie’s mother cooked for the plantation owner. Rosie and the other younger children accompanied her to the plantation owner’s house. They would farm the land and pick a bale of cotton a day or six bales a week. They did 75-80 bales a year. When her dad would come home after going to the shop where they were to be paid for picking cotton and he’d return and say to his wife “baby, we came out in the hole again.” This meant that they were given no money for their work; all the profits went to the plantation owner. The plantation owners gave them $35 credit for food at the store every month. Her mother made their clothes from burlap sacks that had stored flour. Rosie’s mother gave birth to all her children at home without any medical help. Rosie herself never saw doctor until she was grown.
Rosie recalls that Emmett Till was about her age. She and her family heard about Emmett Till’s murder on the radio. They had frequently walked across the railroad tracks to the store where Emmett Till supposedly whistled at a white woman. After Till’s death, Rosie’s dad told her and her siblings to do what the white folks told them to do, and God would take care of them. Rosie stayed out of trouble until she started making trouble. At the age of seventeen years in Tchula, MS, Rosie picked cotton for a dollar a day. Rosie knew how the white folks treated and thought of Black folks but believed there was a better way. It was sometime later before the Black people did anything about Emmett Till’s death; they didn’t know what they could do. In 1963 Rosie and others started going back to Greenwood when the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) volunteers started coming to Mississippi to register people to vote (i.e., John Ball, Sam Block, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, Willie Peacock, Hollis Watkin). Eventually they got some people to come to Tchula, MI to start a Freedom School. In the SNCC meetings they talked about the segregation laws, discrimination against Black people, how they were treated like second class citizens but had to pay taxes like first-class citizens, what could be available to them but they had to prepare to get it, and what they had to do to register to vote and that’s where the power resides.
Rosie remembers a Black man who told her that a white farmer used to come to his house and “have his way with his wife, and the Black man could not return home until the white farmer said he could.” It was the saddest thing they ever heard.
Rosie participated in the 1963 mock voting campaign. She canvassed the community to make sure people understood the mock election and to encourage them to come out to vote. If there was any confrontation with the white folk, they would know what to do so as not to get in any trouble. Some Black people were afraid because they were living in the plantation owners’ homes and afraid they would get put out. Those that did get put out, they tried to help out and people from the north would send things to help. They also helped folks with rides to participate in the mock election. Of course, the Ku Klux Klan was active in Mississippi then. A friend from California had built a community center in Holmes County for them. One night, Rosie and others were in the Holmes County Community Center putting newsletters together and so forth. Sometimes they’d sleep in the Center and the KKK would show up shouting at them using obscene language and shooting guns in the air to intimidate them to stop working. They always feared for their lives. But they kept organizing. Rosie says they prayed and knew “there was nothing else to do, you couldn’t go back.” During Freedom Summer 1964, Rosie and others spent almost entire days trying to prepare Black people to get out and vote.
In a majority Black county, very few Black people voted. When the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, federal agents came to Mississippi to register Black people to vote. But before the feds came in, Rosie and four other Black women tried to register to vote, but they were blocked. They were met at the courthouse by the Sheriff, his deputies, and the dogs; she was afraid of dogs. They put her in a closet and closed the door. Rosie had been in the closet for about an hour and had long finished completing the paperwork. She attempted to leave the room, but every time she touched the door knob the dog would growl. Four hours later, they came back and let her out of the room. Rosie and other Black women and men were not deterred; they were eventually able to cast their vote. That was not the end of the voter intimidation, interference, and violence; “it was rough.” But Rosie continued to vote, worked at the polls and on candidate campaigns. There was no turning back!
Listen to the full interview at the Library of Congress, Civil Rights History Project, Rosie Head oral history interview conducted by John Dittmer in Tchula, Mississippi, March 13, 2013.