Things were supposed to be different Monday at Unity Park in downtown Starkville.
No crowd will gather at the park on Douglas L. Conner Drive to witness the formal dedication of two new honorees whose lives helped promote racial unity and understanding. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic took care of that local Martin Luther King Jr. Day tradition.
Even the plaques bearing the names of this year’s honorees are arriving late, another consequence of the pandemic, said Unity Park Committee Chair Jeanne Marszalek.
All the same, some time next week, two new names — those of the late George W. Evans and the late Fenton Peters — will be added to the park’s wall to permanently recognize their work as trailblazers for their community.
“Because of the rising (COVID) case numbers, we didn’t think it was safe to have the crowd there,” Marszalek told The Dispatch. “But we thought it was important to honor these two people whose life’s work was uniting people and making their community a better place.”
The committee announced this year’s honorees on Wednesday, following a public nomination period that ran from Sept. 1 through Nov. 1. Founded in 2013, Unity Park includes plaques honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Former Gov. William Winter, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as local honorees Dr. Douglas L. Conner, Rosa Stewart, Sadye Weir, Wilson Ashford Sr., Adelaide Jeanette Elliott, Dorothy Bishop, Carole McReynolds Davis and the Mississippi State University’s “Game of Change” with the University of Loyola-Chicago.
To be honored, a person must have lived in Oktibbeha County for at least part of his or her life, been deceased for at least five years, “advanced community unity” and “made a significant contribution to civil rights in Oktibbeha County.”
George W. Evans
Born to sharecroppers in the Chapel Hill Community southeast of Starkville, Evans (1899-1980) made a name for himself as a local musician and businessman.
After finishing high school, Evans attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before making his home in Starkville’s Needmore Community.
A self-taught saxophone and clarinet player, Evans traveled across the South playing “big-tent” minstrel shows, his son Charles Evans said. After that, he formed a 25-piece band, George Evans and the Crusaders, that played all over the Golden Triangle.
He led an all-Black Boy Scouts troop for years, but after World War II called away many of the white troop leaders, he was asked to lead his troop and a white troop on a combined campout — which many call the unofficial integration of the Boy Scouts in Oktibbeha County.
One of George’s most notable contributions came through his entrepreneurial spirit, starting a shoe shine parlor downtown that remained open for decades.
Charles said his father started the business with one chair while working for a shoe shop on Main Street. George later moved the business to its own location, and it grew to 15 chairs. More than that, Charles said, it employed as many as 500 Black youth over the years.
“They went on to all kinds of endeavors in life,” Charles said. “It was more than a shoe shine parlor. It was an institution of learning, teaching young men how to make their own way in life.
“My father was a pioneer in this city,” he added. “He played a pivotal role in the success of Black kids in the community.”
Charles was among them, starting at the shoe shine parlor at age 8 and — with the exception of a stint in the military — worked there until he became Starkville’s first Black postman.
Fenton Peters
In Peters’ career as an educator, he had “a lot to put up with, but there was a lot on the line,” recalled his eldest son, Pellum Peters.
He did it calmly, sometimes even in the face of violent discrimination.
Fenton (1935-2014) was valedictorian of Oktibbeha County Training School and graduated with highest honors at Rust College with a degree in biology. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in education from Mississippi State University in 1968 and 1983, respectively.
He began his education career in 1958 as a science teacher at the segregated Oktibbeha County Training School and later moved to the principal role at Henderson High School.
He remained principal at what became Henderson Junior High when Starkville schools integrated in 1970. He went on to become principal at Starkville High School and later an assistant superintendent for the district.
“His style was more behind the scenes,” Pellum said of his father. “He went through a lot that he shielded us from. But he knew how important it was to take that step so that others behind him would have an easier go of it. It would have been easy for him to give up and say it wasn’t worth it, but he soldiered on.”
Fenton’s tires were slashed and his family threatened. Pellum said he remembers, shortly after Fenton became SHS principal, someone blew up the family’s mailbox at their home. In response, Fenton and a sheriff’s deputy, for about three months, stood guard outside the house from 11 p.m.-3 a.m. each night. Then Fenton would start getting ready for work at 5.
Ultimately, his calm, fair-minded demeanor helped ease tensions among the integrated staff and student body at the school.
Beyond Fenton’s educational contributions, he served on various boards — such as for OCH Regional Medical Center, Cadence Bank and Starkville Symphony Orchestra — and volunteered with various community efforts.
He loved a capella singing and “used that to bring people together,” Pellum said.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better role model as a father,” Pellum said. “It means a great deal to us that he would be honored in this fashion. He would be very pleased by it, but he would be very low-key about it.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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