NORTH CARROLLTON -- Former Delta Electric Power Association receptionist Dianne Slocum was doing something lots of folks do periodically earlier this winter, when she re-discovered a treasure -- an copy of “Up From A Cotton Patch” given her decades ago by the wife of Dr. James Herbert White, founding president of Mississippi Valley State University.
The memoir, which told of the birth of the historic institution created by legislative act in 1946 of a college for vocational education of black people that Dr. White was tapped to develop and lead in 1950 after his similar pioneering work in his home state of Tennessee over the years, had been autographed to Slocum not long after its publication in 1979.
“Louie Spencer was general manager in those times of Delta Electric,” Slocum said. “When Dr. White would confer with him, Mrs. White would talk with me, so I got to know them. Valley State was a customer of Delta Electric, as were the Whites.”
Slocum retired from the cooperative in 1999 after 38 years. Among her subsequent endeavors, she worked in banking and served as alderman and then as mayor of her town.
Dr. White, born April 13, 1903, in Gallatin, Tenn., died in 1974; his widow, Augusta C. “Mama” White, died in 1991. Their residence, built after his retirement from Valley State in 1971, is now an alumni house for the university, which steadily grew -- but at the time he accepted the challenge to create the institution and left Tennessee for Mississippi, all that was there was a vacant field, which had been part of a plantation near Itta Bena.
“I think MVSU is an asset to our area, don’t you?” Slocum commented. She decided her copy of that precious memoir signed by Mrs. White belonged to the university and to the archives of its library, which is named in Dr. White’s memory. The book is a first edition.
