Challenging White Rule

...But at one end of the short street white men sat in their cars and pickups...

...When he died, the man's daughter claimed the land...

...The Negroes piled their guns into Clark's car and said they were ready to go...

...Clark knows he could be earning much more than he does now by taking a job with a poverty agency...

...But the picture in Holmes County is complicated somewhat by the existence of a small class of prosperous Negro landowners, too...

...A student assigned to Ebenezer entered the polling place with a small crowd of Negro voters and antagonized a white official enough to be ordered out...

...It is here that Robert Clark, 39, a tireless, clearheaded schoolteacher, became Mississippi's first black legislator since the 1890s, when pliable Negroes represented white constituencies...

...Clark knows the pace of integration in Mississippi will be slow, and does not believe it can be quickened by any bills he might advance...

...At first glance, this seemed to be just another ugly yet minor incident...

...I would deal more with equal economic opportunities than with equal social opportunities," he says...

...After a few minutes he came back and said that the whites would leave when the Negroes did...

...Mileston has asked oeo for $368,000, but has been told it will receive a little over $200,000...

...For the first time," he says, "you had tractor drivers sitting down with professional people on a policy-making level...

...knowing all the time," and here he breaks into a wide-mouthed grin, "that the Reverend James is an idol out here...

...What Clark means by "intelligence" is not so much political rationality as thin-skinned alertness to any sign that a black man angling for leadership has become, through conceit or overconfidence, disrespectful of his constituents...

...A deacon of his church, he corrected what might have been taken as a coolness toward fraternalism by joining the local Negro Masons soon after declaring his candidacy in the summer of 1967...

...Clark feels incidents of this kind, which demonstrate that Negroes can defend themselves, will make the difference in places like Holmes County...

...While he does not say so, Clark himself is less an in-tegrationist than a social equalitar-ian...

...If oeo comes through, the project will embrace about 80 farms that are part of the Mileston Cooperative, a Federally-financed venture which dates from the 1940s and is really an extension of the fsa program...

...Clark spends most of his time between legislative sessions in his Lexington office...

...Before an approaching white man could restrain him, the official was jumped by several Negro teenagers who knocked him down and began kicking him...

...The Ford Foundation is standing by with $100,000, to be released as soon as the Federal money finds its way to Mississippi...

...The threat of violent white resistance seems to be passing in Holmes County, but the mills of the gods grind slow and small...

...Each group was armed...

...His job with Saints Junior College is a necessity, for the legislature meets bienially and only pays $2,500 a year...

...He taught history and "coached everything" in Holmes schools before running for office...

...Clark's head is buzzing with schemes to tap the hidden veins of Federal economic legislation...

...Clark exploited this webwork of connections during the campaign, speaking to almost three-quarters of the county's 6,000 Negro voters...

...A house term lasts four years...

...The county surveyor refused to touch another deed conflict even though the law spoke clearly on the matter (a case of "sufficient description" overriding an incorrect measurement...

...It was this group, standing beyond the reach of economic retaliation, that provided the initial leadership of the civil rights movement...

...In any event, his political life is strictly confined to Holmes County...

...Never active during the early days of the Holmes County movement-1963-66—he owes his election to a highly personalized campaign and to his reputation as a morally upright and educated man from good stock...

...The barrels of shotguns stuck through the open windows...

...But only in Holmes, on the eastern fringe of the Delta, has white rule been seriously challenged...

...The two groups of automobiles began pulling out almost at once...

...Clark understands that even in a county like Holmes, with its Negro voting majority, one has to be more than black to win...

...In 1968 things opened up some...

...It has an easy, synecdochic richness that can only give the outsider a sense of his distance from their lives...

...The government bought bankrupt plantations and divided them among those black farmers who could afford to buy the land with the help of a long-term, low-interest loan...

...There was no intimidation during the 1967 campaign, though after the election charges were made that illiterate Negroes received cool or devious treatment from election officials, who, in spite of Freedom Democratic demands and Justice Department prodding, were all white...

...He moved quickly to quiet things...

...He once made a 20-mile trip to talk to two families he missed when he had to keep an appointment at the local junior college whose athletic department he still heads...

...A woman who had $850 worth of appliances repossessed by a loan agency when she was unable to pay a $550 "carrying and financing fee" is still living in a home without stove or heater...

...Clark has authority in Holmes County, yet only the merest shred of power...

...Everybody's encroaching on everybody else," the surveyor admitted, and he didn't want to open a hornets' nest...

...But it is evident that Clark's energetic campaigning ("seven days a week, 14 hours a day"), not his organization, carried him into office...

...On its own strength, Mileston has diversified into okra and peas...

...This alone would explain his preoccupation with economic questions...

...About 30 law students came to Holmes in 1967 to observe the voting...

...Negro voters apparently preferred a white man in the powerful office of sheriff to a black man who, however dedicated to civil rights, had snubbed the black community...

...For 10 years the Negro lady felt there was nothing she could do...

...In Mississippi," he says, "the black voter votes five times more intelligently than the white voter...

...Neither posed a threat to school segregation...

...Clark, who was at the scene and had three loaded guns in his own car, realized that what had begun as the conventional impulse of a white man to cuff an agitator might turn into a bloody battle...

...Clark somehow finds time to tend to the simpler though no less serious needs of his constituents as well...

...For the past several months, Clark and his farmer constituents have been trying to convince the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) to help finance a beef-cattle project in the Delta section of the county...

...The talk began to get around...

...Some words were exchanged, and the official chased the student onto the street and attacked him...

...While roughly one-fourth of Mississippi's 82 counties have Negro majorities, in just eight of these do Negro voters outnumber whites...

...Their gestures are small and plastic...

...In his small office in the back, Robert Clark answers the telephone...

...I could hear guns clicking," says Clark...

...Two of the 18 measures he has introduced in the legislature, for example, were school bills...

...There was no violence, and the sheriff made no arrests...

...Perhaps the most important is that Clark has lived in the South all his life, except for the brief time he spent as a graduate student in Michigan...

...the peas ended in disaster...

...All Clark could do was introduce a bill in the legislature forcing agencies to give 60 days' notice before repossession...

...But black men with shotguns in their front seats drove slowly along Ebenezer's main street until nearly 11 o'clock that night...

...He is not likely to hear the voice of a white man threatening his life...

...Clark helped to forge a coalition of the ministerial alliance, the naacp chapter, the Masons, and the Holmes County Freedom Democrats...

...Clark went to the courthouse-a long block from his office at Freedom Democratic headquarters in Lexington—examined the deed, and found the white woman was either mistaken or dishonest...

...But what he does hear may hurt him more: the voice of a procrastinating Washington official, or of a farmer whose peas may be lost, or of a widow whose goods have been repossessed by the loan agency...

...He has a BA from Jackson State, an MA from Michigan State, and many of his relatives, including his father, have also been schoolteachers in Holmes...

...I always tried to find the common ground: 'Didn't Reverend James used to pastor here...

...Over 30 years ago, she said, she bought several acres from a white man who told her she did not have to worry about the deed...

...Just over 100 of these farmers got their land through a redistribution program undertaken by the Farm Security Administration (fsa) in the late 1930s...

...Clark's successful candidacy and performance in office highlight the subtleties of Southern Negro politics...

...Their speech is mannered, rythmic, encouraged by response...

...Well, he's eaten a lot of chicken at our house...

...Meanwhile, he himself bought up several lots at $100 an acre and is selling them to the displaced poor at cost, on time...

...Nor has black politics advanced at the same pace all over the state...

...Three Negroes won places on the election commission, and a black teacher from Saints Junior College was elected to the school board...

...at the other end, black men...

...Regardless of his other credentials, a black candidate is likely to be punished at the polls if he "puts on airs...

...Clark represents a county where the median family income for Negroes is less than $1,000 a year...

...He is more concerned with raising income and educational standards in the black community than with directly challenging segregation...

...For the black voter, you've got to show something besides your color...

...Consciously and systematically, he practiced what former civil rights worker David Emmons has called the "politics of intimacy...

...This cautious measure passed the House but failed in the Senate Finance Committee, which is chaired by a man who is in the small-loan business...

...If Clark is thinking about moving up the political ladder, he is not talking about it...

...He's hiding—thinks he's better than we are, passes in a car without waving.' " Smith's final blunder was to absent himself from the caravan that toured the county just before the balloting...

...What y'all think of him?' I'd ask...

...We had people lose tons and tons of peas," he explains, "because they didn't know to spray the peas...

...It is difficult for him to imagine an integrated society...

...Thus Clark painstakingly sought the thread joining him with potential supporters—whether church or school or the girls' basketball team...

...So he is doing what any man in his circumstances would do, but tirelessly: He is plowing his small acre for all it is worth...

...He was put in office in 1967 by a black electorate barely two years old, with the energetic help of the Holmes County Freedom Democratic organization-sole significant survivor of the otherwise splintered and weakened movement that challenged the state's regulars in 1964...

...Even if he could, it would be a distant vision, practically a chimera...

...True, as a result of the Fifth Circuit's Jefferson County decision in April 1967, genuine school integration looks closer than it did a few years ago...

...One would have made attendance compulsory up to the age of 17, the other would have equalized the salaries of Negro principals...

...Negroes active in the Freedom Democratic movement note that Robert Smith, the black candidate for sheriff on Clark's ticket, lost the election because in the final weeks of the campaign, "he took himself away from the general public, stopped going down to what we call Beale Street, Buzzard's Roost...

...The sheriff hesitated...

...He also knows that bitter, life-sapping poverty will not be overcome in an integrated classroom...

...Most of the problems Clark gets are not so easy to solve...

...The okra project, Clark's idea, was successful...

...The black lady obtained title to her land...

...Jack Chatfield, a new contributor to these pages, is a freelance writer who specializes in the South...

...Except for a man who was elected constable (a ward, rather than a county office), Clark was the only black candidate on a crowded ticket of 11 to win, and his margin of victory was 116 votes...

...Integration the way we are pushing it is not enough," he declares pointedly...

...A woman came in to him recently and complained that she had been cheated out of her land...

...Indeed, to many Holmes County Negroes he has become "the man who can move city hall...

...And in Ebenezer, a tiny hamlet in the southern part of the county, an episode occurred that calls to mind the "Mississippi Plan," the deliberate effort to terrorize Negroes away from the polls in the latter days of Reconstruction...

...He would talk to the whites, he said...

...In the Freedom Democratic office on Yazoo Street, men warm themselves by the heater in the bare front room, and talk...

...The sheriff drove up, got out of his car, and walked toward the group of Negroes...

...Of the eight, five-Jefferson, Claiborne, Wilkinson, Bolivar, and Holmes—have elected black people to public office...

...At the same time, it points up one reason why organized violence against Negroes is coming to an end...

...Should he rise, it will be on the strength of his record here and not because he has cast himself as a state leader or as a spokesman for the oppressed Southern black...

...Where is this man...

...The Negro teenagers backed off...

...There are several reasons for this...

...He told them they were under arrest...

...But he has made a choice, at least for the moment, and seems deeply satisfied...

...Yet Clark knows that Federal courts are not so powerful as they seem when booming out decisions, and that it may be years before the order is complied with across the Deep South...

...They find humor in the oblique, the suggestive, or in a kind of feigned, playful tentativeness...