Unforgiving sunrays relentlessly beamed down on sharecroppers as they worked the fields of the Mississippi Delta. Covered by the shade of their hats, and the clothes on their backs to shield them from the sun, sharecroppers worked to harvest cotton. Only now, they would receive pay for working in the fields as slavery was no more, but cotton was still a lucrative crop.
Like other children in the Mississippi Delta, 5-year-old Okolo Rashid went out into the fields with her father, mother, and siblings.
Her little brown hands would grasp the plants, picking them from the top of the stalk to the bottom to pull the cotton out of the bur. With each addition to her family’s harvest, there would be hope for a life of stability, but the system wasn’t designed that way.
Rashid’s family was falling into a cycle of indebtedness, as sharecropping wasn’t meant for them to get ahead in life. Instead, it was a system that kept families reliant upon landowners.
“My father would eventually realize that it wasn’t going to work,” Rashid said. “We were living in rural Mississippi. He just didn’t understand the culture; he got us out of there, but we had to sneak (out) in the wee hours of the morning during that particular period of time. You couldn’t just up and leave.”
She was born in Mississippi and grew up during America’s tainted history of segregation and racial oppression. The South lacked opportunities, so her family remained as sharecroppers, even after they left the Delta for a better life.
“I was 5 years old at that time. We didn’t move to Jackson. We moved back to another part of rural Mississippi, and we continued to sharecrop,” Rashid stated. Her family eventually made their way to Jackson, which would become home.
“I was close to 10 when we moved from Flora to Jackson. But even when we moved here, we used to go back and work in the fields because we didn’t have opportunities for money,” she said. “So over the summer, we would still go back and work in fields.”
Though sharecropping would remain a primary source of income for her family, things changed for Rashid when she was 10 years old. That was the first time she was able to attend school extensively. Before moving to Jackson, a sharecropper’s schedule served as a school schedule for Rashid, which meant attending school only after the harvest season, that’s half a school year.
“When we moved to Jackson, I started school in the fourth grade, and I never missed a day,” Rashid recalled. “Even when I was sick, I got up and went to school each day. I didn’t understand why I was doing it until later on. Until I became more knowledgeable about human makeup. I was discovering myself. There is something that God puts into every human being. We call it inner dignity. It’s motivation that’s naturally deposited in a human being toward excellence.”
Years of minor education and exposure didn’t deter Rashid’s yearning to learn. Her thirst for knowledge propelled her educational journey.
“In the beginning, I could barely read, and I say barely, I don’t even know if I could read,” Rashid said. “We didn’t have a book in the house when we were living in Flora. I said, a house without a book except the Bible. We never read it, but it was there, and the fact that I was able to graduate with honors. So it’s like applying yourself. And so some people are more… in tune with that.”
