When a smiling clown in a colorful costume joins hands with children, moods change and happiness arrives in that time and place.

But when that time and place is 1968 Meridian, Mississippi, and the hands being joined are black and white, the same gestures that create cheer to children can create fear for some adults.

The images they produce can remain vivid memories 50 years later.

Marie Jenkins, 26 and a former United Airlines flight attendant, was the wife of Lt. Charles E. Jenkins, a Navy instructor pilot at Naval Air Station Meridian in 1968.

The fun-loving couple were known around town as they rode their motorcycles up and down the hills, drove their Porsche sports car around town and sometimes raced the young local set of residents.

Active in Meridian Little Theater, playing a wife in the King and I among her roles, Jenkins received a tip from director Jimmy Pigford on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend. WHTV, a local television station, needed a new Clooney the Clown and she should head over to their office for an audition.

“It was quite interesting because I had no idea what the show was about,” Jenkins said, recalling the events of 50 years ago. “There was an Elsie the Cow at the studio and they handed me a microphone and asked me to go interview her. Well, because I was a stewardess, I could talk to a rock. I went over to Elsie and just started talking. They said, ‘OK, be here Monday.’

“When I showed up that Monday, a man who played a character known as Pedro was supposed to show me the ropes. But when I got there, he said, ‘I’m going home, just go talk to kids.’ I was on my own, and that’s how I started.”

‘I was confused as to why they weren’t on my program’

Along with her show airtime duties, Jenkins, as Clooney the Clown, visited hospitals, opened stores and appeared at parks and public events.

After a couple of months, she questioned why only white children appeared as guest on her show.

“When I would go to hospitals and events there would be little black children and they would take my hand and want to talk with me,” Jenkins said. “I was confused as to why they weren’t on my program.”

Jenkins was friends with another Navy pilot’s wife who was involved with the Head Start program in Meridian. They arranged to have 10 black children join 10 white children who already were scheduled to appear on the live program.

“I wish I could say I was a Civil Rights fighter back then, but I wasn’t,” Jenkins said. “I just loved all children and I wanted all children to be able to be on my program.

“That’s when the S, hit the fan, as they say.”

Shortly before the 4:30 p.m. air time, Jenkins recalled, mothers of some of the white children entered her dressing room as she sat there in her Clooney costume.

“ ‘Well, now, Clooney, you know there are some n—— sitting in the lobby. Why are they sitting in the lobby’ “ Jenkins said they asked?

Marie Jenkins as Clooney

“It just hit me. I was stunned. I said, They’re here to be on the program. Clooney loves all children, black, white, polka dotted or striped. I said, if you don’t think Johnny’s father – I don’t remember his real name – doesn’t want him on the program with them, maybe you should take them off the program.”

–Marie Jenkins

“It just hit me. I was stunned. I said, They’re here to be on the program. Clooney loves all children, black, white, polka dotted or striped. I said, if you don’t think Johnny’s father – I don’t remember his real name – doesn’t want him on the program with them, maybe you should take them off the program.”

When Jenkins walked to the lobby to bring the children to the set, and found 10 black children dressed in their best clothes, bows in the girls’ hair, and only one on the scheduled 10 white children, a little boy.

“I was so surprised and so shocked that they would do something like that,” Jenkins said. “I couldn’t imagine what it was like in there … all of the white kids who were excited to be on the show and being pulled out of there by their mothers. And I thought of the black kids sitting there watching them leave.”

Upset and confused, as cartoons rolled for the kids, she entered the office of station manager Weyman Walker to tell him about the meanness she had witnessed and to consider her next move.

“ ‘Clooney, you don’t know what’s been going on down here in the South,” Jenkins, who came from the small town of Hill City, Kansas, recalled him saying. “ ‘You can do much good with this show. ‘ “

‘I didn’t even know what burning a cross was’

Walker told her about the murder of Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner four years earlier.

He informed her, for the first time, about the Ku Klux Klan.

She remembers his words vividly: “Clooney, they would never burn a cross on a clown’s lawn.”

Weyman Walker quote

“Clooney, they would never burn a cross on a clown’s lawn.”

–Marie Jenkins, remembering the words of Weyman Walker

“Those words stuck with me,” Jenkins said. “I didn’t even know what burning a cross was.”

After hearing about Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner and their work to register voters, Jenkins calmed down and returned to the remaining 11 kids and the show went on.

No matter who wrote to her, Jenkins invited them on the show, which remained integrated through its duration. Jenkins said there were no more incidents and she received no threats.

“After that, people knew the show would be integrated,” Jenkins said.

She eventually completed 272 shows, Mondays through Fridays, on channel 24. With her Navy friends, many of her programs were watched in the NAS officers club by pilots in their flight suits. One of them, Win Charlebois, now living in New Zealand, sometimes served as her sidekick at community events.

Jenkins didn’t know that, after her husband was transferred in 1969 and they moved to San Diego, Walker was fired from the station. He joined an integrated group that included Aaron Henry, Charles Evers, Charles Young Sr. and Hodding Carter III in a failed bid to secure the license of WLBT to better serve the African-American community in Jackson.

Walker couldn’t be located for this report. A death notice in his hometown of Houston, Texas, indicates a Weyman Haywood Dunlap Walker died on March 23, 2013 at age 71. It lacked a full obituary. 

‘They didn’t want outside views coming into Meridian’

Noted Meridian civil rights attorney Bill Ready Sr. is familiar with Walker but lost touch with him years ago. Ready said Walker was sympathetic to the civil rights cause and would not be surprised if Walker’s firing stemmed from efforts such as the integration of the Clooney the Clown show.

“Local TV stations, and The Meridian Star, were not very supportive of what we were doing,” Ready said.

While he did not have a direct memory of the Clooney controversy, Ready said, local powers would not want anything with white kids and black kids together.

“They didn’t want outside views coming into Meridian,” Ready said.

Brad Sykes, who arrived at WHTV in 1970 and worked there several months as an engineer before the station went dark for several years, said other people played Clooney the Clown and the show remained integrated.

‘I wanted to know if I made a difference’ 

Jenkins lost her husband in the 1980s, remained in Encinitas, California, near San Diego, and raised a daughter and a son, mostly on her own. Besides devoting her time to her five grandchildren, she volunteers every Saturday at the USS Midway Museum and says she still loves children more than adults.

Jenkins said she’s not sure why she wanted to talk about Clooney the Clown now, but she phoned The Meridian Star on Friday, June 22, 54 years and one day after the murder of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, to tell her story.

“I get these premonitions sometimes,” Jenkins said. “It’s 50 years. I wanted to know if I made a difference. I wanted to know if people still remembered me, not me, but Clooney. I wanted my kids to know that Clooney still thinks of them … I was so happy to bring them all together.”

Follow Dave Bohrer on Twitter @DA_Bohrer