Despair In Mississippi; Hope In Texas

...The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter...

...perhaps someday, in the far future, it will...

...Nor does it lie, as other white Southern liberals vaguely suggest, in the forging in fire, with each passing racial crisis, of the white man's psyche...

...It is an axiom of survival that when the exile returns to Mississippi, he gets by on bootleg bourbon, usually chased with legal beer...

...Martin Luther King: When Martin Luther King, the leader of the Southern Negroes, recently found himself in a Birmingham jail, he sat down to write an answer to a letter which eight Alabama (white) religious figures had sent declaring the Negro protests to be "unwise and untimely...

...A silence fell between us, like an immense pain...

...it is where young teachers are recruited...

...Last year, in front of a Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, there was a sentence displayed on its bulletin board: "If you want to keep a man down, you have to stay down with him...

...For the child the moment comes early when he is forbidden to be friends with little Negroes...

...In Mississippi, a mere 300 miles to the east, this declaration would not have gone unchallenged (in fact, I am not sure the man would have survived it...

...In Mississippi I admit it would take more courage than I now have at my disposal, but in Texas it takes no courage at all...

...His tormentors, the chanting mob, were, I know, sons and scions good white Mississippi families who somehow manage to invoke at every crisis, in a sort of unlettered liturgical way, the honor and pride and dignity of the Southern tradition...

...The last time we went to the cemetery we were unable to find a single Harper...

...There are deep forces at work in other Southern states which are largely absent in Mississippi...

...The whites of the "educated" class who stay behind, in the experience of my hometown, are those young men whose fathers have set them up in the tire or used car or cotton business, and whose sense of independence is not what one would call Gandhian...

...The hope for racial justice in the Southern states most assuredly does not lie in some imaginary curing of the Southern split-personality (whatever that may be...

...one can only imagine how he, as a human being, must have been torn inside...

...One night, five or six years ago, I sat in a bar in Paris with Richard Wright...

...I bought a newspaper one afternoon in San Francisco and read the wire service account of how a hundred or more students had surrounded Meredith's table in the school cafeteria...

...The Negro bloc, increasingly numerous and well-organized, finds itself courted by all factions...

...The average white Mississippian has no more natural evil or savagery than the average West German or Englishman or citizen of Yonkers, New York...

...when you see the vast majority of your 20,000,000 Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight society...

...Travelling America, he can see, all around him, what the country has become—the dream gone berserk...

...Walker, who got more than 135,000 votes for governor of Texas the previous summer, summoned all good citizens to join him in the Battle of Ole Miss...

...It lies primarily, as a first step, in the Negro vote...

...in Texas it did...

...bleak, hollow, and homogenized...

...In California there is an avenue, El Camino, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, miles on end of chrome, asphalt horror, the thing we have reached, the end of the land...

...With a handful of exceptions, Mississippi is a monolith...

...If it is not your parents who do the nurturing, then it is someone else...

...He thought he might come home and go into Mississippi politics...

...This is what that hatred is: As a child of seven or eight, it is sitting on the floor of a crowded room in the police station and hearing your father tell the Negro who had been caught stealing in your neighborhood, "Nigger, if you even walk down that side of the street again and I see you, I'll blow your head off with both barrels of my shotgun...

...Although there is a distressingly long way to go, the lesson to be learned from Texas is that the one indispensable instrument for meaningful advancement of the Negro is the franchise...

...only the youngest, my grandmother, remains...

...Having been nurtured on his hate and shared in it, I have little cause for self-righteousness...

...when you have to concoct an answer for a 5-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean...

...They jeered him down...

...its soul-force is its burning and ravaging and gnawing hatred...

...On statewide television, Yarborough said he favored an end to racial discrimination—"both public and private...

...There sat Meredith, and there he no doubt still sits...

...Alabama may still be adamant, but at least it has an industrial Birmingham...

...This convention, I understand, is a kind of national employment pool...

...You turn on it, as it turns on Meredith, though it had turned on both of you first, years before...

...when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you...

...We were read by most of the state's intellectuals and by the great majority of the practicing politicians...

...Their graves are well-kept—watered and flowered every year by the townspeople...

...A friend of mine, a Rhodes Scholar from Ole Miss, had been assured by three faculty members before he left for England to do an advanced law degree that the two or three courses he still lacked for his undergraduate law degree at Mississippi would automatically be absolved when he passed his examinations in England...

...It is the student at the state university saying of Faulkner, who had noted that a society which condones the killing of little children not only does not deserve to survive but probably will not, that he is a crazy drunk hot in pursuit of Northern money, and that his books make no sense anyway...

...enlightenment has been at a certain premium, at any rate, on the University of Mississippi campus...

...with it, the Negro can become less and less the ward of the white man...

...Of the eight white students who shared meals with Meredith in the school cafeteria during the fall semester, not a single one is now enrolled...

...said, "I want to compliment you on the protest you have made here tonight...

...Later, when the violence and bloodshed were at high tide, he asked the mob not to continue: "This," he said, "is not the road to Cuba...

...It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity...

...Academicians in America are not particularly noted for an excess of verve, but after the events of the last few months, the ones at Mississippi must at least fear for the inviolability of their wives and children, if not for their own honor...

...when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"— then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait...

...so determined are they, so great is their fear and hatred, that even with the more sophisticated among them life is a thing of empty social ritual, intellection is shabby and false, and even in their hate there is an almost lifeless formalism...

...But here, at least, is a crucial section in which he takes up the cant of "moderation," the cry of those who keep urging the Negroes to "wait": For years now I have heard the word "Wait...

...its labor-liberal-Negro-Mexican coalition, tenacious and growing, is setting an example for other of the more progressive states of the South...

...If I let my kids go to school with niggers," one of the up-and-coming young deacons at the Methodist Church told my wife, "how will they know they're better than the niggers...

...This is an unfurbished romanticism, but there is no call for either denying it, as with some exiles from the South or, as with others, exaggerating it into a lusty mystique, and making a lot of Yankee dollars in the doing...

...We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied...

...The delta is hotblooded beauty, sorcery, tragedy...

...The strength of this coalition, within a developing two-party system, was clearly demonstrated in the Democratic primaries last summer when a young Houston lawyer, Don Yarborough, conducting the most completely liberal campaign of any statewide candidate in the South in this century, got 49 percent of the 1.2 million votes...

...But it would take a man of superhuman qualities, no doubt, to persuade a teacher to pay his scholarship on a battlefield.* Isolation from the American intellectual community, isolation from civilized values, isolation from the rest of the South seem almost inevitable for Mississippi...

...Since I assign to them neither an excess of virtue nor of evil, my guess is that, like a number of Mississippi editors, housewives, and sons of God after the murder of Emmett Till and the Battle of Ole Miss, they would have kept quiet...

...when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments...

...I am more concerned with what happens to Meredith's psyche, and others like him...

...I have been wondering recently why it was that the full barbarism of the University of Mississippi crisis did not strike me until almost three months after Meredith had been enrolled...

...11I Many Texans were disturbed to acknowledge that their state's major contribution to the Ole Miss riots was not the unalloyed criticism of most of its daily press, or the telegram from the student leaders at the University of Texas praising Meredith for his courage, or the student demonstrations supporting Meredith, or the many public statements from teachers and clergymen assailing the actions of the Mississippians, but General Edwin Walker's call to violence...

...Harper fathered sixteen children, all honorable by their own lights...

...One of the out-of-state militiaman who must have been stirred by his call to rebellion came to Mississippi from Georgia, the wire services reported, and sat near a dormitory window during the rioting, firing into the crowds...

...He was a bright young man, full of the regional courtesies, but with an uncommon amount of independence...

...In the meantime, one can only feel a deep admiration for the new generation of young Negroes in the South...

...As the only influential liberal publication in the state (there were two or three other weeklies of that persuasion) The Observer found itself something of a revered institution in its own country...

...It is what compels you, as a boy of nine or ten, to lurk in the shrubbery while the little Negro child walks down the sidewalk with his mother, and to jump out and knock him to the ground with your fists...

...when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your 6-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people...

...Some newspaper would be performing a public service if it conducted a survey among the professors at the University of Mississippi to find out how many are staying and how many leaving...

...Some yards away were the graves of a few dozen Federal troops killed in an unimportant skirmish in 1863...

...it is free, it stimulates dissent, things are happening...

...But I have seen enough solid middle-class hatred in Mississippi to last a lifetime...

...A professor at a California university tells me that he looked around for one, but failed to find a single member of the Ole Miss English faculty at the convention of English professors in Washington last December...

...11 The one hope concerning Mississippi lies in its progressive isolation from the rest of the South...

...You have a right to protest under the Constitution...

...or perhaps it was my imagining...

...The rioting and the mayhem, of course, would have destroyed the school's reputation, if it had had one...

...They have fire in their eyes...

...But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim...

...But no longer...

...Walker climbed a Confederate statue on the campus and * A well-known New York journalist who recently spent several days on the campus told me the administration is having an extremely difficult time finding replacements for the many professors who are leaving...

...They want to make sure you haven't changed...

...State government itself is an anachronism, a great deal of sound and fury exerted in a vacuum, but not so the provincial politics of reform, which is increasingly embracing the important national and international issues...

...The occasional good student who graduates from Ole Miss usually leaves the state, never to come back...

...Yet there is a futile, deepening ambivalence in the white Southerner's act of removal...

...So far as I can see, the growing enlightenment of its younger white generation, which one occasionally hears about, is a fiction...

...13.8 per cent of the employable Negro population is out of work today...

...For I knew that the land is bloody and full of guilt where we were born...

...At the time we were operating on a healthy subsidy,* and our freedom to express ourselves was absolute...

...King's letter is a superb argument for civil rights, and we wish we had the space to print the whole of it...

...The past which this South claims for you, legend though most of it is, is somehow embodied, made vivid, in those one or two or three indestructible images of your people...

...I am not quite sure what the Footes and the Harpers would have done when Governor Barnett inspired the clash at the University of Mississippi last fall...

...You can find symbolism in this curious juxtaposition, I suppose, but the symbolism will not help you find the Harpers...

...With me it is a simple fact of sensibility, and there is nothing I can do about it...

...He had tried, he said, to keep to himself and get out as quickly as possible, but he was becoming more and more subject to wild outbursts in the school cafeteria against the smug young racists who had been praising Eastland and Barnett's good form on television from the Democratic national convention...

...it could lose its accreditation and not know it...

...after school he will not be admitted into the unions in these fields: plumbing bricklaying electrical work much of printing 7 per cent of the employable white population is out of work today...

...For the past two years I was editor of a leftward weekly there, The Texas Observer...

...I write about Mississippi with an almost total despair...

...The paper has gone fortnightly, and under the excellent editorship of Ronnie Dugger is paying its own way, which is unusual to the point of sacrilege...

...The South would do well to be proud of them...

...And although Texas is still the citadel of some of the most corrosive wealth known to man, it has produced an impressive number of hard-headed political activists, young liberal and radical intellectuals...

...from that moment on he begins to sense hatred in the very atmosphere, a living, breathing, electric thing, hatred institutionalized and embodied...

...Groups of little boys roamed the streets of the town, where Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust has been filmed a few years before, throwing rocks and bottles...

...It was like looking at a particularly stark painting: the image of the Negro surrounded, enclosed, had no modifying details, no relief, no irony or sympathy for anyone but the victim, all the power concentrated, congealed, in his lonely enguish...

...Since I came to California several people have inquired, in a civil, campus way, if it did not take an undue amount of courage to publish an outspoken journal in the South...

...I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait...

...Up to then I had read most of the reports on the demonstrations, and as editor of a small Texas journal had published a number of stories on the riots and the killing...

...I was born and raised there, and like most Southerners who leave home and yet come to understand, as the historian Vann Woodward says, that to throw away your Southern background for the usual brittle Americanism is affirming more than you bargain for, I feel hopelessly rooted to it, drawn back to it, not merely as an American is drawn to home, but as one is drawn to a condition of the senses, to some fragile certitude of old grief and sorrow and love...

...Perhaps his stoic patience has, in some small measure, impinged on the honor and pride and dignity which his antagonists claim as their birthright...

...This is happening now...

...As for what is happening among the school's faculty, one can only wonder...

...I remember, as in a dream, Highway 49 in the Mississippi delta, superimposed almost without a curve from Yazoo City to Memphis on that black alluvial flatland...

...It is what you see in the school auditorium, one night in 1955, when the fathers of your schoolmates sit on a stage before a crowded audience and organize a Citizens Council to punish fifty Negroes who had signed an NAACP petition: no jobs, no loans, no groceries...

...No Negro boy or young apprentice attending high school or vocational training school need learn the following trades...

...He had to come back to finish his undergraduate work, and when I visited him at Ole Miss the summer he had come home from England, he was spending all his time outside of class getting drunk in front of an electric fan...

...It is as pluralistic as Mississippi is monolithic...

...Ole Miss is an institutional symbol, a pseudo-genteel outpost of brainless young beauties, incipient drunks, and winning football teams...

...The educated young whites are leaving the state almost as rapidly as the more restless young Negroes...

...two thousand miles away, my response was untempered by the strange compromises your emotions make, almost as a matter of course, when you are there...

...In the course of two years, as it happened, the three professors who had advised him at Ole Miss had either left the place or been driven out...

...The Negro undergraduates picketing the theaters at the University of Texas (and winning), the 187 students whose conviction for demonstrating in front of the South Carolina capitol has just been reversed by the Supreme Court, the young children who face the mobs every September, Meredith surrounded and insulted in the Ole Miss cafeteria—these courageous young souls embody today, in their honor and dignity, the best and most enduring of the Southern tradition itself...

...It is the silence from the churches when two delta ruffians kill a Negro child from Chicago for looking at a white woman...

...He succeeded in drawing forth a more active segment of the underside of Southern humanity, for whom he ranks as the leading statesmen...

...Their graves were sunk down, overgrown, and hopelessly lost...

...This "Wait" has always meant "Never...

...Shaking their fists, quivering like young mammals in heat, they had chanted: "Go home nigger...

...Yet in its basic aspects, Texas is another world from Mississippi...

...That afternoon, I think, my final awareness of the indescribable shame had a great deal to do with the simple fact of physical removal from the South, where I have spent most of my life...

...Without the vote, all those goals which the Negro, with his white ally, has set for himself remain politically inaccessible...

...On visits back home they drive you into corners...

...it is almost everything else...

...Texas has become, in the postWar years, an industrial, urban society...

...when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored," when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs...

...It is great-grandfather George W. Harper, editor of the Hinds County Gazette, turning to one-mule dirt farming after the Federal troops deposited his printing press in the town well...

...It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration...

...It is the admonition of the white doctor, as I heard him three years ago when a friend brought to the doctor's house an old field hand who had pneumonia, "Nigger, what's so wrong with you to disturb a doctor at night...

...We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our Constitutional and God-given rights...

...Vacancies are being filled with academic driftwood...

...What distinctiveness remains, in this deepest South, is rooted even yet to a life which is contradictory of civilized values...

...The tragedy of Mississippi is the tragedy of a society which not only does not allow dissent, but equates even silence with a kind of disloyalty...

...when you have seen hatefilled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity...

...The "honor of the Confederacy" was on exhibit...

...but for the Mississippi I know that is hoping too much...

...Now my friend lives in New York...

...El Camino is ugly, vulgar, cheap...

...It was difficult to be surprised by the violence which broke out last fall at the University of Mississippi...

...although writers like Robert Penn Warren seem to argue from that thesis...

...Racism is dead in statewide campaigning...

...There is only this overriding consideration: to keep the black man down...

...What I do have is a monstrous shame, and I know full well that, trapped in its own institutionalized hate, landlocked in it like some dead and ancient sea, Mississippi is doomed to yet greater shame and violence...

...In the end the "swelling response" which Walker found his appeal to have inspired consisted of chronic racists armed with .22's, rednecks armed with pipes and bludgeons, fraternity boys armed with stones, all crazy with hate and smelling blood...

...Some argue, as a young man from Florida told me at a gathering in San Francisco recently, that all the trouble comes from the rednecks, the Snopses...

...We discovered, in talking, that we had been born only a few miles apart in Mississippi...

...Growing up in Mississippi, you have the hatred nurtured in your bones...

...We don't want you here...

...Texas had little cause to rejoice in this deranged contribution...

...Yet to the vast majority of Mississippians today, even quiet is suspect...

...Faulkner was not allowed to speak there...

...Since Mississippians have given so much of themselves to keep the Negro down, they themselves have lost some essential part of their own humanity...

...With me it is the great-great uncle, U. S. Senator Henry S. Foote—rascal, charlatan, courageous foe of secession and bitter enemy of Jefferson Davis (whom he once defeated for governor of Mississippi)—campaigning throughout the South against the mounting hysteria for Douglas and the Northern Democrats in 1860...