Raylawni Branch

Raylawni Branch
Born	1941 Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Raylawni Branch (born 1941, Hattiesburg, Forrest County, Mississippi, United States) is a black Mississippi pioneer of the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968), a professional nursing educator and US Air Force Reserve officer. She is best known for her leading role in the integration of the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg) in 1965, which was peaceful as opposed to the violent riot occasioned by the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi (Oxford) in 1962.

She was raised in Hattiesburg, Prentiss, and Mount Carmel, Mississippi, and in Chicago, Illinois. When her family moved from Hattiesburg to Chicago, they were homeless two or three times, living in a park. She does not have good memories about living in the North. She went to schools that were predominantly white where the teacher never spoke to her.

She was again homeless in Chicago after the family lost its home over her father’s legal problems. After her father died in the Cook County Jail in 1955, the family returned to Mississippi.

By the time she was graduated from the eighth grade, she had moved eleven times and been in eight schools. Back in Mississippi, Branch attended Hattiesburg’s Royal Street (then Rowan) High School and graduated in 1959. There she learned political activism, pride, and how to work the system from Marjorie Chambers, her history teacher. She was also encouraged by listening to Dr. Martin Luther King's speeches on the radio.

As a teenager, she worked in a restaurant named Fat's Kitchen in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street black business district. There she met a regular customer, Clyde Kennard, whose tragic attempt to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi had begun in 1956 and was to play out before Branch’s young eyes. In 1959 she saw Kennard on the morning of his appointment with arch-segregationist Dr. William David McCain, president of (then) Mississippi Southern College, to discuss his enrollment application. She found Kennard the kind of person who actually believed in the goodness of man. He even had a good opinion of Dr. McCain, who was a well known racist and segregationist. He thought that he did not need any protection. Branch and others asked him to "Let someone go with you." But Kennard saw no need.

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