The Long Road to Victory : Education was the way out of the fields. So in 1965 the Carters took the state at its word and sent their kids to a white school. Now they’re telling their story.

Mae Bertha Carter sat on one of the sofas in her small living room, displaying an article her grandson Kerry had written for his school newspaper about their family’s struggle for educational opportunity. There could be no mistaking her pride that a 14-year-old had recognized that their achievement was more than a story to be read in some dusty, old book and quickly forgotten.

“Law, just look at that,” she exclaimed. That a school paper here in Drew, a Mississippi Delta town that once tried to make life miserable for her family, had run the story added to her quiet satisfaction. On the front page at that.

Kerry’s mother, Beverly, was one of seven Carter children who in 1965 became the first black students to attend Drew High School and A.W. James Elementary. Theirs was a high-risk move because Drew, population 2,349, had earned a reputation for violence and intolerance that it sustained through the height of the civil rights movement. Indeed, all of Sunflower County was so notorious that Marian Wright Edelman, then a civil rights attorney, said she always tried to be out of the area by nightfall.

Yet Mae Bertha Carter and her late husband, Matthew, sharecroppers who lived on the Pemble plantation nine miles outside Drew, dared to sign the so-called freedom-of-choice papers and so end segregation in the town’s public schools. White authorities in Drew had assumed no black families would have the audacity to enroll their children. Indeed, it would be several years before any other black children would dare to follow.

Now, 30 years later, the Carters have told their story to author Constance Curry, who had helped them during their years of struggle when she was the American Friends Service Committee’s family aid fund director. Her book, “Silver Rights,” has just been published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Curry explains that the title comes from her discovery during the 1960s that many people in the South were unfamiliar with the phrase “civil rights.” They substituted words that created “a pleasing image” in their minds, and they proved willing to risk all for their “silver rights.”

In a recent conversation, Carter, 72, was asked why she and her husband, who died in 1988, had defied segregation.

“I told the children, ‘I felt and your daddy felt that because the school board was all white they would be more concerned about the school where their [own] children were going.’ ”

Education, to the Carters, was always the prime motivator; they knew their children had limited chance to succeed without it. Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter did hot, dirty work in the Delta cotton fields every Monday through Saturday from dawn to dusk--”from can see to can’t” in local parlance--so that their children could go to school.

Once they signed the freedom-of-choice papers, their plantation boss pressured them to change their minds. The Carters’ home was shot into, they lost the land they had worked for years, the last of their crop was plowed under, they couldn’t get credit, and for some time, they could find neither housing nor jobs.

As their parents endured reprisals, Ruth, Larry, Stanley, Gloria, Pearl, Beverly and Deborah Carter were taunted, had spitballs thrown at them and watched other children jump away as they passed. The cruelty and intolerance of adults especially saddened Curry when she heard the children’s stories. One teacher rotated classroom seating assignments so that no white fifth-grader would have to sit next to Pearl for more than a week. Even though Deborah, then in second grade, had no playmates at recess, the principal rebuked the lone white child who tried to befriend her. The Carter children were isolated for taking the law at its word.

Curry, an attorney, left the AFSC in 1975 to become Atlanta’s first community relations director, a job she held for 16 years. She reconnected with Mae Bertha Carter in 1988. The AFSC was collecting oral histories for its 75th anniversary, so Curry traveled to Mississippi at the encouragement of a former colleague, Barbara Moffett, to interview Carter.

“When I got down there, I realized what an incredible storyteller she was and what a wealth of information there was.”

Between January 1966 when Curry had first met the Carters and 1975 when the family aid fund closed, she had filed regular reports, a task she hated because Moffett wanted so much detail.

“I had to say what time we reached the Carters’ house and describe it--what color it was, how many rooms it had, everything,” Curry said. Those details proved invaluable when she consulted her old notes in the AFSC archives while writing the book.

What set Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter apart from countless others who lacked the fortitude to do what they did?

“Their devotion to each other. That gave them a lot of strength. They also had a legacy passed down from their great-grandparents--actually from slavery--a total dedication to getting their children out of the cotton fields through an education.”

Carter remembers being immobilized by fear the first day the school bus picked up her children to go to the all-white schools.

“I fell across the bed and I would pray” until they got home, she said as though it happened yesterday. “I was more scared for them than for myself.”

Mississippi created the freedom-of-choice plan to try to avoid full integration. In 1967, the Carters sued the school system, and were represented by Edelman, now president of the Children’s Defense Fund.

“We won,” Edelman wrote in her introduction to the book. “The court decision came down in 1969 and it threw out freedom-of-choice plans and ordered desegregation of the schools. That would not have happened without the Carters.”

“The white man thought he knew black folks here in Sunflower County,” Carter said, explaining why the state had believed blacks would not enroll their children in the white schools. “He didn’t know these black folks.”

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Mae Bertha Carter has more than a little devilment in her. A woman with blue eyes that can brim with mischief, she describes the “nice letter” that the school system wrote in 1965 offering her children their choice of schools. Officials promised no harassment.

“Now I can’t understand, why would they send that nice a letter if they didn’t mean it?” she said in mock innocence. “Anybody would have thought they meant it.”

She often sets up that kind of hypothetical question, knowing full well what the answer is. Once, in a room crowded with university historians, Carter had everyone enthralled by her tale of the night shots were fired into her home. The Carters lived miles off any paved road, she was saying, and after they signed the school papers, Matthew woke up at 3 a.m. to the sounds of carloads of men driving toward their house.

“Now, what were they doing out there at that hour? They lost?” she asked. They weren’t, of course, and the Carters spent the next three nights on the floor.

Mixed with Carter’s humor is much wisdom about raising children. In all, the Carters had 13 children. Eventually, eight of them graduated from Drew’s public schools. Seven of those graduated from the University of Mississippi. Ole Miss was not much more welcoming for black students but there, they said, at least they had some black friends.

Among the Carters’ 13 children, two sons have retired from the U.S. Air Force, each with more than 20 years’ service; another is a hospital administrator. One daughter has a master’s degree and is vice president for finance of an agency that runs Job Corps programs, and another manages the Oxford, Miss., office for Mid-Valley Pipeline Co. Daughter Beverly still lives in Drew and has served on the school board.

The secret of her success in raising children?

“We didn’t have a secret. We showed them love. They could come and tell us anything. My husband always quoted this to his children: ‘When you’re happy, I am happy. When you’re sad, I am sad.’ He loved his children. They were our first priority.”

Too many people, Carter said, just want to lead their own lives. “You can’t forget about your children,” she said. “Don’t ever get too busy to listen to your children.”

When her children were growing up, she recalled, “We had all these places that children could hang out, under age. We would sit down and tell them why they couldn’t go to these places. There were people drinking and hanging out on the streets. People like that don’t have good morals, and they curse and say all kind of talk. We told the children, ‘You don’t need to be among people like that.’ Later they thanked us for that.

“Now, with 13, they had one another. We did a lot of things at the house among ourselves. A lot of people don’t want their children to play cards but they played cards at home. And checkers. They did all that--at home--’cause we feel like that if they are going to do those things, they should do them at home. We let them feel like, ‘This is your home. Feel free.’ ”

Today her grandchildren are frequently in and out of her house. “They understand they’re free here.”

That racism still flourishes and poisons American life concerns Carter deeply.

“It’s about power, I think, about somebody trying to hold onto the power. I ask myself, ‘When will this ever be over?’ ”

Maybe, she added, “when everybody starts thinking of other people as people and not as black or white.”