An Insider’s Account of Race and Politics in the Delta.

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 17-19

Even Mississippi by Melany Neilson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. xiv, pp. 199).

Part memoir and part campaign history, Even Mississippi is worthwhile reading for its insider’s account of race and politics in the Mississippi Delta of the early 1980s.

Melany Neilson grew up in the turbulent wake of the civil rights movement, but her earliest childhood memories are surprisingly similar to those of previous generations of white, well-to-do Southerners. She recalls the droves of black field hands working the family cotton plantation and lovingly remembers the family’s warm-bosomed black maids. Her father, Ed Tye, was a planter turned lawyer. The men of the family had been lawyers and planters in the same county for several generations.

The Neilsons were one of the prominent families of Lexington, the county seat of Holmes County, which is on

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the eastern edge of the flat alluvial plain known as the Delta. Welfare, cotton, and pulpwood are the country’s economic mainstays. Three-fourths of its 23,000 residents are black.

The civil rights movement redrew the lines of segregation in Holmes Country. Neilson remembers her third grade teacher, with trembling voice, telling the class that the following year, 1968, colored children would be coming to the school. That was the year that Neilson, along with nearly every other white child in town, enrolled in newly-formed Central Holmes Academy. The year 1968 was also significant because Mississippi seated its first black legislator since Reconstruction. He was Robert Clark from Holmes County. His election and public school desegregation added to the tension that was as palpable as the Delta’s August heat. “Every man in town, white and nigra,” Neilson recalls her father saying, “is hating someone for something.”

While growing up, Neilson recognized the schism between blacks and whites, but she accepted the status quo and anticipated living her life as a traditional belle. But her life changed dramatically while she was a graduate student in journalism at Ole Miss when, pretty much on impulse, she applied for a job in Robert Clark’s 1982 campaign for Congress. In Ed Tye’s opinion Clark was a “good nigra,” but that didn’t keep Neilson’s mother from asking, “Will you have to ride in the same car with him?”

Despite her mother’s and her own apprehensions, Neilson joined Clark’s campaign just days before the Democratic primary, a contest against two white candidates which Clark won with an encouraging 57 percent of the vote. In the general election Clark faced Republican Webb Franklin, and race was the dominant unspoken issue. Responding off the record to a reporter’s criticism that he was too timid with whites, Clark replied, “A black man reaching for a white woman’s hand’ll scare a lot of ’em. So will talking about race.”

While Clark couldn’t make race an issue, his opponent could and did, in ways subtle and not so subtle. Franklin began a stump speech before a mixed audience with the comment, “I didn’t just fall off a watermelon truck.” One of his campaign posters featured his photograph next to one of Clark with the caption, “The choice is yours for Congress.” Part of the inspiration for this poster came from a poll which found that a quarter of the voters didn’t know Clark was black.

But, hearteningly, the book shows that modern-day Mississippi politics isn’t divided completely by race. At a fundraiser in a posh home in Biloxi, Clark pressed the flesh with a crowd of successful men and women, white and black, who contributed some $5,000 to his campaign. In the Delta, at an all-black fund raiser where the fare was fried catfish and hush puppies, the hat was passed and filled with sweat-darkened dollar bills. The contributions were enthusiastic but meager until two white farmers drove upend handed over two checks for $500 each.

These and other insider accounts of race relations and politics in the Delta make Even Mississippi interesting reading. But readers interested in Deep South politics may be disappointed that there is so little about Robert Clark’s fourteen-plus years in the state legislature. Neilson’s summary of his legislative career reads like a press release. Clark is a pioneer black politician who has been a state legislator now for more than twenty years. A book that is in part about his political aspirations should have said more about his record.

Another bothersome aspect of the book is that Neilson’s prose doesn’t always make the reader feel the gravity of her experiences. Much of Even Mississippi is about the emotional trials of a young white woman from an old Delta family who violates deeply-rooted race, caste, class and gender taboos by going to work for a black politician. Not long ago, such behavior would have meant, at best, life-long ostracism. The Delta is an insular world that few outsiders understand.

Even Mississippi is strong, though, on recognizing human decency and courage. Neilson’s work for Clark took a heavy toll on her family. In the dead of night they received threatening telephone calls. Ed Tye’s law practice lost clients. Mrs. Neilson, tired of the condescension, quit the Garden Club. Her parents had misgivings, but they didn’t try to rein in their daughter. Ed Tye even endorsed

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Clark in a television commercial.

Despite solid victories in the primaries, Clark lost two bids for Congress, in 1982 and 1984. Webb Franklin won both elections because of a low turnout of black voters and his appeals to racism and conservatism. But in Clark’s defeat there were hopeful signs for the future.

In 1982, Neilson was the only white staffer working for Clark. His campaign also attracted a few white volunteers from northern colleges. In 1984, she was one of two white staffers, and they were aided by many volunteers, including several local whites. Having Mississippians work for a black candidate was a significant change and contributed to the overall pioneering effect of Clark’s two campaigns. His trail blazing probably helped Mike Espy defeat Franklin in 1986 to become Mississippi’s first black congressman in the twentieth century.

In its description of race relations and politics in the Delta, Even Mississippi provides a good sense of how slowly racial attitudes are changing. That point is painfully clear in the book’s evocative epilogue, which describes Neilson’s wedding, at which Clark was a reluctant guest.

On her wedding day, Neilson recalls, everything in the church, its trappings and the guests, was glaringly white–except for Clark standing uncomfortably in the back row, neither speaking nor being spoken to. At the reception in the Neilson’s white-columned home, he entered the back door. The only other black people there were the maids. Clark chatted briefly with the police chief, met Mrs. Neilson for the first time, and then slipped quietly out the back.

MICHAEL COOPER is researching the life of Hazel Brannon Smith, former editor and publisher of the Holmes County Lexington Advertiser.

A Passionate, First-Hand Story of One Place in the Movement.

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 20-21

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism by John R Salter Jr. (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krueger Publishing Co., Inc. 1987. 256 pp., no price).

John Salter’s book, which evokes the emotions, the frustrations, and the fears of Jackson in the early 1960s, is particularly valuable because so little has been written about the civil rights movement in Mississippi’s capital and largest city.

Salter and his wife were drawn from Arizona to Mississippi in 1961 by the growing civil rights movement. A sociology professor, Salter got a job teaching at Tougaloo College. Soon afterward he became the sponsor of the local NAACP Youth Council.

Under his guidance the council’s eager young people became activists. They launched a boycott of the Mississippi State Fair. With leaflets, press releases, and word of mouth the youth group persuaded black people to shun the fair. This victory inspired a more ambitious project, a boycott of downtown Jackson businesses during the 1962 Christmas buying-season. A short list of demands was drawn up, bail money was raised, and pickets were selected to launch the boycott in early December. The first day downtown the young men and women were met by paddy wagons and an army of policemen who promptly arrested all six pickets. Undeterred by the overwhelming show of force, the young people picketed for weeks and the boycott I was a success.

The Youth Council had one impressive victory after another. In addition to its successful boycotts of the state fair and of downtown stores, the group had quietly desegregated public events at then all-white Millsaps College, conducted a voter registration drive, and campaigned for black politicians.

The catalyst for this activism was Salter. In a long foreword to the book, the Reverend R Edwin King, Jr., a native Mississippian and Methodist minister, says Salter was, “The key strategist in the massive community organizing effort.” As such, Salter joined the state’s small band of civil rights activists, which included Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Tom Johnson, and a handful of others. Being a prominent civil rights activist was a double-edged honor. To the ubiquitous Citizens Council he was an outside agitator, a man marked for retribution.

Despite harassing phone calls, the angry glares of white neighbors, and constant surveillance by men in an unmarked car, Salter persevered and the local movement attracted more and more participants. The national NAACP, however, wasn’t responding with bail money and other assistance. While praising the organization’s local officials, Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry, Salter is quite critical of the national NAACP’s role in Jackson.

“We knew, for example, that Aaron Henry had frequently felt that the national office was being slow to assist the struggle in Mississippi; and we knew that Aaron Henry himself had been criticized by the national office for his friendliness and cooperation with such groups as COR1S, SCLC, and SNCC.” Salter also says that the NAACP’s National Executive Board was indecisive on the use of direct action “as well as on the issue of involvement in Mississippi.” Overall, Salter felt that “the national office of the NAACP was not much interested in our campaign in Jackson.”

But that interest changed after sit-ins at Woolworth’s and a demonstration where five hundred young people were arrested and locked up in a barbed-wire stockade became national news. Not so coincidentally, Salter implies, the national NAACP suddenly took notice of the Jackson movement.

NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins flew to Jackson and joined a demonstration in which he and two hundred other people were arrested. Soon afterward the national NAACP took over the Jackson movement and moved it into a new phase, of less direct action and more legal action. Salter’s leadership was circumvented. Although he continued to argue for more demonstrations, the move meet’s momentum seemed spent until the murder of Medgar Evers incited Jackson’s black community.

The Evers funeral attracted five thousand people, in-

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cluding Martin Luther King Jr. Several hundred mourners made an impromptu march downtown resulting in a police riot and dozens of bloody arrests. Salter was blamed by both the white community and the alarmed black community for the march and the violence. Discredited in the eyes of the more cautious black people, he was maneuvered out of leadership.

Although no longer a principal leader, Salter was still the target of white hatred. In what might have been attempted murder, he and fellow activist Edwin King were seriously injured in a car crash. Both men recovered, and soon afterward Salter left Mississippi to work as an organizer in eastern North Carolina with the Southern Conference Educational Fund.

Some readers will object to Salter’s less than flattering portrayal of the national NAACP and of Jackson’s black ministers. As he describes it, the NAACP was too preoccupied with its own agenda and its own glory to worry much about the people of Mississippi.

Salter has too little empathy with local black ministers who didn’t participate in the protests. In Mississippi’s civil rights battles it’s not surprising there were so few brave people; it’s surprising there were so many. Black people in particular had everything to fear. Everything–home, family, friends, and livelihood–was at stake. At best a local black activist might suffer economic reprisals; at worst he or she might be gunned down. When Jackson turned violent, Salter’s wife and child went to Minnesota. And soon afterward Salter himself left the state. Few local black people could so move.

Salter’s book does not pretend to be objective journalism. He did not ask the NAACP officials or the black ministers for their versions. Rather, the book is a passionate, first-hand account of the Jackson movement by one of its central figures. Jackson, Mississippi was first published in 1979. The Robert E. Krueger Publishing Company deserves plaudits for this new edition.

Writer Michael Cooper has been researching Mississippi.

Nobody’s Gonna Turn Me Round

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 32-33

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round: The Pursuit of Racial Justice in the Rural South (Richard A. Couto, Temple University Press, 1991, 348 pages).

Richard A. Couto’s appealingly-titled book is about the role of federally-funded health care centers in the century-plus struggle for civil rights. In Southern, rural, poor, and mostly-black communities, the centers not only provided essential, long-neglected health care; they also attracted ambitious civil rights activists. Couto is less interested in the specific benefits of health care centers than in placing them in a larger tradition of political and social reform.

He examines four different places: Haywood County, Tenn.; Lee County, Ark.; Lowndes County, Ala.; and the Sea Islands, S.C.. He divides his material into three distinct parts.

Part one of the book is oral history, 139 pages of comment from more than 40 people who describe their lives, their activism, and their relationships to local health centers.

Part two scans the history of black land ownership, education, civil rights, and health care. Couto describes accomplishments and failures during several period of major reform: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

In part three, Couto theorizes on the nature of leadership in rural black communities. The first half of this section is the least interesting and most frustrating part of the book, because it is strewn with such jargon as “local community of memory,” “heroic bureaucracies,””redemptive organizations,” and “new politics of portions.” The second half of this brief section examines the successes and failures of various social reform organizations and agencies from the Freedmen’s Bureau to SNCC to the Office of Economic Opportunity.

In the introduction, Couto promised a book with “The emphasis… on the health centers as an extension of the movement to acquire civil rights.”

But he obscured this straightforward premise a couple of pages later by stating his book was “about a set of model federal programs, their relation to social movements for democratic equality and human dignity, the people who conducted both the programs and movement locally, and the impact of previous programs and movements on them.”

It is hard not to sympathize with the tone, but clearer writing, better organization, and more details would have made this book more compelling. What services were provided and to whom?

What kind of local opposition did the centers weather? Can social service organizations operate in areas of great deprivation without addressing political and economic

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issues?

The multifaceted impact of health centers in poor areas is an interesting and timely subject. One hopes Professor Couto’s future writings are more informative.

Free-lancer Michael Cooper writes often for Southern Changes.

New York Lite

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 22-23

New York Daysby Willie Morris (Little, Brown and Company, 1993, 396 pages).

Willie Morris’s New York Days, his thirteenth book, is fun to read because the writing is evocative, literate, and lyrical. This autobiography, which is intended as a sequel to his first one, North Toward Home, is mostly about Morris’s stint as a celebrated editor at Harper’s magazine. That famous old magazine summoned Morris to New York in 1963, when he was only in his late twenties, from his job as editor of the Texas Observer. He was a junior editor at Harper’s until 1967, when he was named editorin-chief, the job he held until a messy mass resignation in 1971.

New York Days describes Morris’s brief orbit in the galaxy of New York’s literati and glitterati. Apparently, every rich, famous, or influential person he ever met, or in some cases merely glimpsed, is mentioned in New York Days. There’s a telephone call from Norman Podhoretz, a note from Philip Roth, a brief exchange at a party with Tennessee Williams. At least one other reviewer has complained of Morris’s name dropping, and it is tedious at times.

On the other hand, Morris was friends with many cultural stars: Truman Capote, William Styron, Larry L. King, David Halberstam, and Arthur Schlesinger, to name just a few. The young editor is forever meeting, eating, or drinking with famous folk, and he has an eye for a good story. Like the time he and Capote were approached at dinner by a woman who asked, “‘Mr. Capote, I read that book In Cold Blood. I just have one question. Did you personally know those two murderers?’

‘Mama,’ he said, ‘did I know them? I lived with them for seven years.'”

But name dropping is just one of several problems with this autobiography. Another is its relentless self-congratulatory tone: how great the magazine was, how great its writers were, and, by not so subtle implication, how great its boy-wonder editor was. Plus, the rich, boorish, and short-sighted owners of Harper’s (who didn’t like Morris’s sledge-hammer journalism) are described so unflatteringly so consistently that it makes the reader suspect this is a get-even book. The conservative publishers reigned the editor in, he resigned, and, coupled with the pain of a recent divorce, the golden boy and his golden era crashed. While pay-back books can be delicious, there is always a nagging doubt about their objectivity.

Overall, New York Days offers little insight into either the times or the journalists who were stirring the social cauldron of the late 1960s. Under Morris’s editorship, the magazine published a surprising number of articles that helped define those years: Norman Mailer’s, “Prisoner of Sex,” and “On the Steps of the Pentagon,” and, (Morris’s favorite) Seymour M. Hersh’s “My Lai: The First Detailed Account of the Viet Nam Massacre.” There are a few insider’s tidbits strewn through the book. For example, Morris writes that he suggested the idea which resulted in Mailer’s Fire on the Moon. But there is not enough of this kind of information.

Because of the stature of these writers and the significance of their work, the reader approaches this book with high expectations that its author, their editor, will have revealing stories about how these journalists conceived and developed their articles and their impact on the nation’s political and cultural life. The reader’s expectations are unfulfilled. Essentially, New Yorks Days is not unlike a long article in a popular magazine, more entertaining than probing; it’s “lite” cultural history.

While much of New York Days is about Morris’s whirl in that culture capital, there are many passages to interest Dixiephiles. His first autobiography and his elevation to editor of Harper’s made Morris a celebrity at a time when the civil rights movement had saturated the media with images of vicious and seemingly ignorant white Southerners. Morris was another sort of curiosity, a Rhodes scholar and a white liberal from a town with the funny name of Yazoo in that awful place called Mississippi.

When North Toward Home was published, Barbara Walters interviewed Morris on the “Today Show.” She asked the author why he, at age twelve, had beaten up a three-year-old black child. Not because he was black, Morris tried to tell her with humor (dark as it might be, which is so characteristic of Southern writers), but because he was small. Morris and his hometown were also the subjects of a photographic essay in The Saturday Evening Post. And after resigning from Harper’s, with plenty of time on his hands, he wrote Good Old Boy, an autobiographical children’s book which Walt Disney Studios made into a movie.

Like fellow Mississippian Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Morris often muses about what the South is and what it means to be a Southerner. He does this mostly with other Southerners

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and once, Hamlet-like, on a late night stroll over the battlefields at Gettysburg National Park. Morris approvingly quotes Styron on the subject: “If you were born and reared in the South it is certain you will remain a Southerner as long as you live, no matter how far you’ve traveled or wherever you’ve made your home.”

New York Days ends with a chapter entitled “South Toward Home” where, back in Mississippi, the author concludes, “Sometimes I cannot live with its awful emotional burdens, its terrible racist hazards and human neglects, sometimes I can, but these forever drive me to words.”

And Willie Morris is very, very good with words.

Michael L. Cooper is a native of southeastern Kentucky who lives in New York City. His last book was Playing America’s Game: The Story of Negro League Baseball (Lodestar/Dutton, 1993).