Stennis Lecture Series
MidSouth Community College Fellowship Program
Mississippi State University - July 8, 2003

By: Sid Salter

I am honored today-26 years after being chosen as one of the first John C. Stennis Scholars in Political Science at Mississippi State University-to be here today charged with the responsibility to deliver the Stennis Leadership Lecture before this august gathering.

First, it is an honor to participate in an event that honors the memory of Senator Stennis-a man I met as a small boy in DeKalb while visiting in the home of his neighbors, my Uncle Earnest and Aunt Pearl Bateman. At the time, Stennis was chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee and already busy at work building the modern U.S. Navy.

My Uncle Earnest was a Kemper County supervisor and Stennis lived in his beat. In DeKalb, there was a healthy debate in the minds of the locals over who held the greatest power. Seems that Mr. John could secure financing for a $5 billion aircraft carrier, but my Uncle Earnest could supply anybody in his beat with a culvert. Culverts were in far greater demand in rural Kemper County than were aircraft carriers-and instantly, I had learned a valuable political lesson.

In later years, I would come to appreciate the "little judge" from Kemper County who "plowed a straight furrow to the end of the row." John C. Stennis remains the gold standard in Mississippi politics for integrity, honesty, selflessness, vision and genuine compassion and concern for common men and women.

When I visit the graves of my kin buried in DeKalb, I visit Senator Stennis' grave and that of Miss Coy. As an aside, I would also share with you that since he's buried in his native Forest, I also frequently visit gravesites of Stennis' 31-year Senate colleague from Mississippi, Big Jim Eastland.

I have always been taken with the contrast in the two gravesites. Eastland's grave in Forest is marked by a huge, monolithic slab of marble that far outsizes any other marker in the cemetery. But for Senator Stennis, there is only a small white marble stone, unobtrusive, that blends into the hillside.

Great men, it seems, don't really need great stones to ensure their memories. John Stennis proves that daily.

The senator touched my life as a boy, later as a Mississippi State student attending school on a scholarship that bore his name, and each time I'm introduced today-for his name still opens doors and commands respect years after his death.

I have been fortunate to receive many honors and accolades over the course of my career, but none that mean more to me than the distinction-Stennis Scholar.

But the truth is, I was no great scholar. There are many professors, some here today, who can attest to the fact. Nor am I overly qualified to speak to you today on the topic of leadership.

Albert Einstein once said, "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve."

If I do possess any gifts beyond the good name left me by my parents, I suspect those gifts lie not in leadership per se but in possessing the courage of my convictions and the ability to communicate those convictions in a manner that connects with my readers.

For you see, I am not a great leader. I am a journalist, a middling writer and a reasonably competent researcher. I spent most of my career publishing country crossroads weekly newspapers that featured photographs of deceased deer and snakes, vegetables shaped roughly like Guatemala and the occasional two-headed calf.

I've spent more time covering Chamber of Commerce meetings than congressional hearings and President Bush has yet to seek my counsel on the ongoing unpleasantness in Iraq.

But I get a chance to speak to about a million Mississippians each week through my newspaper column. And while I do not take myself seriously, I take that forum and that opportunity very seriously.

As I have stated on other occasions, I owe any success I've ever enjoyed to my parents. I am the son of two loving parents who spent their lives teaching other people's children in the public schools of Mississippi.

My father grew up on a 100-acre family farm in Neshoba County. He left home in the midst of the Great Depression with the proceeds of one bale of cotton-the sum total of his parent's ability to help him get started in the world-and then worked his way through East Central Junior College and later Mississippi State University.

He was a Bronze Star decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Army in World War II. After surviving the second wave of the beaches of Normandy, he returned home to teach vocational agriculture and to marry my mother.

My mother was a sharecropper's daughter, one of ten children, in a family that lost all they had in the Great Flood of 1927 in the Humphreys County hamlet of Midnight. My mother has clearly been the central figure of my life and if you have heard me speak before, you have heard me recount this story.

But I will tell it again, for I vowed long ago to share this story with all who would listen, for it is as parable or prayer to me.

My mother was smart enough to be promoted through several grades at Silver City High School and found herself graduating as salutatorian of her 1939 class of 12 students. She won a small scholarship to Sunflower Junior College, now MDCC, and found a job working in the cafeteria at Sunflower to pay her room and board.

Mother left home with two dresses and a single pair of shoes. Her job in the cafeteria was washing those big old heavy metal milk cans, which left her standing in water for several hours each day. Finally, near the end of the first semester, my mother's shoes simply came apart-and there she was, 16 years old and barefoot and penniless, working her way through school.

For perhaps the only time in her life, my mother allowed herself to feel ashamed of her poverty and in her despair, she left Moorhead in the night, walking barefoot back to Midnight determined to leave school and go back to the cotton fields, defeated and discouraged.

She made it home. A couple of days later, her older sister Evelyn came home and found her working in the fields and asked her why she wasn't in school. Evelyn put Momma in the car, carried her to Belzoni and bought her a couple of pair of shoes and a couple of dresses and drove her back to Moorhead.

"I don't care what happens to you, don't you ever quit again," Evelyn told my mother. And she never did.

She graduated from Sunflower, married my dad, and later graduated with honors from Mississippi State. Alline Slater would teach English literature for 40 years in this state. She was named an MEC Star Teacher five times in her career.

We do not always know the straw that will break the camel's back, but when I am discouraged I think often of the fact that but for the lack of a pair of shoes, a great teacher might have been lost. My mother certainly never forgot that crossroads in her life.

No poor child ever suffered in my mother's class and no child ever left school for the lack of anything that my parents could supply them. I have made a living writing and I credit that fact to my mother's wise and nurturing influence. But in my line of work, the ability to write is not always sufficient.

I credit the fact that I have the courage of my convictions to my father. My father didn't back down in time of war or in time of peace. He was a quiet man, but a man not given to the turns of the prevailing winds. Daddy was principal of Neshoba Central High School in 1969 when the Holmes v. Alexander decision forced school integration immediately in this state. My father faced down the blowhards of the Citizens' Councils and the rednecks of the Ku Klux Klan and working shoulder to shoulder with a fine black school administrator named Lee J. McKinney, presided over the integration of the public schools of Neshoba County without incident.

My father passed away more than a decade ago. My mother, now 81, is trapped in the withering maze of Alzheimer's Disease. But from them, I learned what I consider to be the firm foundation of leadership-and that is the twin towers of courage and character.

What are the traits of leadership? Bearing, Decisiveness, Dependability, Endurance, Enthusiasm, Initiative, Integrity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Loyalty, Tact and Selflessness, but those traits can only exist on the foundation of Courage and Character.

A leader does what's right. A follower does what's easy.

A leader is controlled by virtues, a follower by moods.

A leader is loyal to the end, a follower will betray or desert.

A leader looks for solutions, a follower for excuses.

A leader perseveres when challenged, a follower quits.

A leader is self-motivated, a follower must be driven.

A leaders' words and actions agree, a follower just talks.

A leader is self-confident, follower just acts cool.

A leader's choices lead to success, a follower's choices lead to failure.

But those are simply definitions of leadership. And I suppose my task here today is to tell you not how others define leadership, but how I define it.

I believe that true leadership is based in the ability to inspire others to be better, live better, think better and behave better than the alluring sirens of their more base instincts.

Gordon Gecko of the film Wall Street was wrong. Greed isn't good. Greed has made names like WorldCom, Adelphia, Enron, Martha Stewart and others that were once synonymous with success now the very definitions of deceit and fraud.

The best leadership is leadership by example. Those leaders who practice a strong work ethic can more easily inspire that same work ethic in others. Strong leaders are the hardest workers.

John Cornelius Stennis was neither swift nor strong nor physically imposing. He was possessed of a Southern drawl so thick as to be comical. But his legacy is that of a giant. Why?

Stennis was persistent, consistent and insistent. He believed in ethics and integrity and practiced it. He believed in a strong national defense and he provided for it. He believed in helping the poor and downtrodden and he extended the hand of the federal government to them through WPA, TVA and later through the Great Society programs.

Mississippi and this great nation face many challenges today. The nation's economy is struggling. Terrorism and regional political instabilities threaten world peace. Poverty, insularity and racial strife are still problematic in many areas of this state and nation.

I realize that I am preaching to the choir today, but it remains clear to me that the path to economic redemption, racial reconciliation and the eradication of poverty leads through the public schools, college and universities. How many young boys out there today will be called upon, as my father was, to defend this nation?

How many young girls, like my mother, see their futures endangered by poverty?

On a grander scale, leadership must transcend the petty "gotcha" politics that dominate partisan squabbles in Congress and in the administration. Poverty, ignorance, prejudice, crime, disease and fear are problems that are neither Democratic or Republican.

They are American problems, global problems.

When I was a boy, we got the Jackson newspapers a day late by mail. Today, my daughter reads The New York Times online in real time. Telecommunications has made the world smaller and less complex, but at the same time brought change at a pace more rapid than ever imagined.

But in essence, John Stennis had it right. Leadership is indeed "plowing a straight furrow to the end of the row."

I was among the last generation of Mississippi to actually till a field using plowshares under the power of a mule. I know how hard it is to ploy any kind of furrow, much less a straight one. I also know how easy it is to succumb to the temptation to stop plowing altogether.

But leadership demands that we stay in the field, keep plowing and fight the furrow straight. John Stennis knew that.

And that is his legacy to us today. May God bless his memory.

Thank you.