YOCONA, Miss. (AP) — Lydia Koltai of Yocona marks 2016 as the beginning of her role as a community organizer.
After Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed by police, Koltai shifted from being a quietly concerned citizen to someone willing to speak out.
“I needed to be doing something in the community other than just feeling upset,” Koltai said.
Koltai, 39, reached out to April Grayson, director of Community and Capacity Building for the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, to see if there were any opportunities to volunteer. Soon after, Kyleen Burke, a Northeastern University law student, reached out with research she had done on Elwood Higginbottom, the last known lynching victim in Lafayette County.
Out of that came the Lynching Memorialization in Lafayette County steering committee, a group of Lafayette County citizens who wanted to honor the seven documented lynching victims in Lafayette County.
Through her work with the steering committee, Koltai built relationships with other community members committed to racial justice, equity, and reparations. Their efforts culminated in 2018 when they hosted an event honoring Elwood Higginbottom. About 500 community members attended, including members of Higginbottom’s family.
Three years later, the committee’s efforts continue with a focus on creating tangible reparations for family members of lynching victims.
“It’s just been really, really powerful work and really community-building work, so I’m grateful that I happened to email April and got involved with that,” Koltai said.
Organizing in Lafayette County is especially poignant for Koltai, who had a lot of negative feelings about the University of Mississippi as a teenager. When she visited the campus in high school, she remembers seeing the Confederate statue on campus and feeling that Oxford represented some uglier parts of Mississippi’s history. Through her activism, she’s learned more about how diverse the community is and how people have been doing work similar to hers for generations. She’s especially inspired by UM students working to have the Confederate statue moved from the center of UM’s campus and having the retired Mississippi flag removed off campus.
“There’s a lot going on here in Lafayette County that’s not just what it appears like on the surface sometimes,” Koltai said.
Since the start of the pandemic, Koltai has worked on other projects, such as Take It Down Oxford to mobilize to get the Confederate statue moved out of the Square, and with the Oxford Resilience Gardens to grow community gardens and address food security. Seeing empty grocery store shelves as people rushed to buy supplies while others struggled to put food on the table because of lost income showed Koltai who was being most affected by the outbreak.
While not the full solution to food insecurity, setting up spaces where people can grow food for free is one small piece the community can do to become stronger, Koltai said.
“I think coronavirus kind of gave us a taste, in some ways, of the vulnerabilities of our current systems,” Koltai said. “Now is a huge opportunity for us to course-correct and address some of these issues so that we can protect people who are being harmed right now.”
Growing up in the Delta, Koltai saw how inequity and poverty runs along racial lines, and how history ties into those outcomes.
“What motivates my work is wanting to help us acknowledge the past and the impact that it has on us presently, and then move together as a community to really address these inequities so we can have racial equity and have solutions,” Koltai said.
Racial justice also plays a role in her climate justice activism. After seeing Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, Koltai realized the full extent of the destruction caused by climate change.
“Our communities are struggling and dying from those impacts now. One thing people say in climate justice work is that there’s front line communities who are Black and brown communities, often impoverished communities, who are hit first and worst,” Koltai said.
Koltai joined the Citizens’ Climate Lobby of Oxford after reading the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2018 Special report stating immediate action was needed to address climate change to reverse its impact on humanity. As the mother of four kids, Koltai felt she needed to do more on a political and local level “because we’re running out of time on the issue, and a lot more needs to be happening than can just be done in my home garden,” Koltai said.
The Oxford chapter is working to address climate change locally, help Oxford be more prepared to deal with its affects, and protect their most vulnerable communities, Koltai said. Koltai doesn’t think climate change is well understood in Mississippi, so her priority is educating people.
Be it race relations or climate change, Koltai hopes her efforts will lead to more honest conversations about how history affects the present and inspire people to help heal that past and address present issues.
“I just want to move the needle forward to a more just and equitable and livable world for all beings,” Koltai said.
