The popular Wednesday Brown Bag forums in the lecture hall at Barnard Observatory benefited on October 4 from a richly observed, deeply passionate presentation by freelance writer and researcher Susan Sullivan. Sullivan’s work, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Mississippi Humanities Council, has resulted in a gift to Ole Miss-- the permanent placement of Marjorie Baroni’s personal papers in University archives. Louis Baroni, Marjorie’s husband, approved the establishment of the Baroni files at the University through the urging of Sullivan. Louis and members of the Baroni family were in the audience for the Sullivan’s lecture at Barnard Observatory.

   Marge Baroni, according to Sullivan, was a sharecropper’s daughter from Natchez who left her Baptist faith to convert to Catholicism as a young married woman in the 1950s. Lacking a high school diploma, Marge read and wrote continually and over a wide range of subjects, eventually concluding that she had to become significantly involved in the civil rights struggle in her community.

   Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Baroni house became a refuge for local activists, black and white, which led to the family’s ostracism and harassment in Natchez. Marge personally brought supplies to one of Natchez’s Freedom Schools and helped integrate the white library of her town. She joined the Mississippi Council on Human Relations and served jail time after she lobbied for the release of a black man whose posted bond was being ignored. She worked for 10 years for the first black mayor of Fayette (the first time a black man was elected as a mayor of a biracial Mississippi town). Through it all, her basic belief in the dignity of people led her to practice, on a daily basis, a life dedicated to a search for human rights for all.

   Before she died in 1986 at the age of 61, Marge Baroni completed college (a B.A. from USM Natchez in 1982) and was at work on a master’s degree as well. The quality of her mind, and her activism, however, far outpaced her formal education and degrees. This Southern woman was anything but “ordinary,” and Sullivan’s research into her life has just begun.  “There are boxes and boxes of materials to review, to make sense of, and I’ve given you all just a glimpse of Marge today.” The Baroni family’s gift of Marge’s papers is a legacy of Southern courage, and the Center and Ole Miss are grateful to Sullivan, and to the Baroni family, for their placement in University archives.

Lesley Urgo