(Note: these learning modules encompass the
actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss
class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students.
Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)
Introduction of Life in the Old South
As our nation and state continues to debate
emotionally-charged racial issues, I think it is helpful if people just
understood other people’s points of view and where those views come from. Then
we can avoid the arrogance that you see on the cable TV news networks like CNN
and FOX, where people not only disagree politically but call opponents names.
There is nothing wrong with the conservative point of view, and I am even
sympathetic to some people who wanted to keep the old Mississippi flag (though
I voted 2 decades ago to change it), but too often white Americans don’t really
understand the points of view of people of other races and ethnicities. I
myself took the initiative to learn about other cultures by reading three books
written by African Americans, and I would strongly recommend the book written
by Mrs. Medgar Evers, For Us, the Living, available through the University
Press of Mississippi. She wrote about her life and that of civil rights leader
Medgar Evers, and it is very accurate (I’ve verified key points) and a very
human story of what it was like for an African American to grow up in the Old
South. Another good book is A Black Physician’s Story by Dr. Douglas L Conner,
which is a more modern story about Starkville’s first black doctor; his adopted
son Richard Holmes became the first African American to attend MSU (our
Cultural Diversity Center was named after him, and it was recently renamed the
Holmes Center for Student Success). My lectures make some key points by drawing
on both of these books. Those key points follow:
We should all be
thankful that our lives are far easier than that of our parents and
grandparents. Evers’ father was a farmer who also had to work at a sawmill and
railroad to make ends meet, and Medgar's siblings also worked at various
part-time jobs. Conner’s father worked twelve hours a day, six days a week in a
lumberyard- 72 hours a week; his mother also worked outside the home full-time,
and Conner worked various part-time jobs. Dr. Conner himself in his early days
as a doctor in Starkville worked 13-hour days, 6 days a week. Medgar Evers had
13- hour workdays as an insurance salesman in the Delta in the early 1950s. How
many hours do we work a week? I include work as being schoolwork, classes,
part-time jobs, helping out parents. Their work lifestyle sounds a little like
my maternal grandparents, Polish immigrants in Milwaukee, who worked six days a
week in their small businesses (Sundays were important years ago, since it was
the one day of rest.)
Both Evers and
Conner experienced the culture of white supremacy in their everyday
life. Both had to sit in the balcony of the movie theater (which was known as
the “buzzard’s roost”) instead of sitting with white people. Both would hear
the N word routinely used by whites, especially if an African American dared to
walk in a white neighborhood or challenged a white customer who refused to pay
an advertised price. Both had to walk by the nearest school in order to attend
an all-black school with the daily walking mileage round-trip being 3 miles for
Conner and 19 for Evers. The black schools were inferior in facilities, desks,
and books. Medical facilities were segregated with separate waiting rooms and
wards (often basement wards for blacks). Both indicated that they had to get
off the sidewalk to give whites full use of the sidewalks. Buses were
segregated with the long bench in the back reserved for “Colored.” So it is not
just the political system that was white-dominated in the South, but the
everyday life of people.
Segregated
universities. Both Evers and Conner attended the all-black public Alcorn
College. Medgar’s wife-to-be wanted to major in music (which no Mississippi
black university offered), so she majored in education with a minor in music.
After graduating from college, Medgar attempted to enter the Ole Miss law
school in 1953, but Ole Miss turned him down after changing their policy so
that it required five letters of reference from their alumni (all of whom were
white). Conner liked Alcorn, as he was able to see “blacks in positions of
authority and respect (p. 33).” Indeed, the college’s black physician was a
very important role model for him. Congressman Bennie Thompson also attended an
all-black university, Jackson State. Indeed, much of the legislative black
caucus has attended historically black universities. So, two morals to take
from this story are the importance of role models for everyone (including
African American role models), plus respect for the importance of historically black
colleges and universities (even Trump bragged about increasing funding for those
schools; Former Vice President Kamala Harris has a BA from historically black
Howard University).
Racist speech and lynching
was tolerated by public officials. The Evers’ book recounts how young Medgar
and his brother Charles watched a speech by U.S. Senator Bilbo, when the
Senator pointed out the two black kids at the outside of the white crowd in
Decatur, and ranted: “If we fail to hold high the wall of separation between
the races… we will live to see the day when those two (N word) boys right there
will be asking for everything that is ours by right.” (p. 17, Evers book). When
Medgar was 12, “a Negro man, accused of leering at a white woman, was snatched
by a mob and dragged through town and out the road that led past the Evers’
house. In a near-by field he was tied to a tree and shot dead.” (p. 17) “Medgar
would pass the spot while hunting, drawn against his will to see the rotting
clothes with their blood stains turning slowly to rust.” (p. 18) Given such
historic violence by whites, we can understand why so many African Americans
today feel so strongly about allegations of white police profiling or killing
of African American civilians.
Economic
intimidation. After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 requiring
desegregated public schools "with all deliberate speed" (which ultimately
took 15 years to complete), many African American citizens signed public
petitions calling for the local school boards to implement that decision in a
timely manner. One white circuit judge in Mississippi wrote a book of his own
speeches that called this Court decision, Black Monday- “a black day of tragedy
for the South.” (Evers book, p. 108). Whites across the state formed White
Citizens Councils. The Yazoo City newspaper published a paid ad by the Citizens
Council that listed the names of 53 African Americans who had signed a school
desegregation petition. African American petition signers soon started to lose
their jobs, were refused goods by suppliers and stores, and even spouses lost
their jobs. Eventually, all removed their names from the petition (2 of them
just left the county), but not all got their jobs back. (p. 165, Evers book)
White violence
against NAACP workers. The Evers book has several credible examples from the
1950s. In Belzoni, NAACP member reverend George Lee received death threats
after registering to vote, and he died from two gun blasts into his car; the
local white police claimed that the lead pellets in his jaw were dental
fillings, and that even if it was a murder it was probably “some jealous (N
word)” whose wife the reverend was allegedly having an affair with (p. 157). In
Brookhaven, Lamar Smith actually succeeded in voting by absentee ballot, so he
was “shot dead in broad daylight on the Lincoln County Court House lawn.” (p.
169). Though the accused white farmer was charged, an all-white grand jury
refused to indict him. Civil rights activist Mack Charles Parker was “lynched
in the old-fashioned way, dragged by his heels down concrete stairs from an
unguarded cell in Poplarville where he had been charged with the rape of a
white woman; then shot to death by a lynch mob, his body dumped into the Pearl
River. Everyone in town knew who did it… There were no arrests.” (p. 204) When
a Mississippi judge gave a speech in Connecticut and was asked if he thought Parker’s
killers would ever be found, the judge replied that he didn’t think so.
“Besides, three of them are already dead.” (Evers book, p. 205; also on page
118 of Katagiri book on The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a book
about this public commission that Mississippi set up to defend its segregated
system to the nation). Of course, the ultimate example of white violence was
the assassination of Medgar Evers himself in his Jackson home carport in 1963,
after Evers gave a speech on television in response to the Jackson mayor’s
rejection of the NAACP’s call for a biracial committee to end all segregation
and discrimination in the city. A white fertilizer salesman from Greenwood,
Byron de la Beckwith was charged with his murder, and two hung juries resulted
(split votes, which permit retrials). Beckwith bragged to friends about the
killing, so he was retried in 1994 and convicted by a biracial jury in the new
Mississippi (the jury consisted of 8 blacks and 4 whites). He died in prison in
2001 at the age of 80. Medgar Evers, on the other hand, as an American
soldier during World War 2, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in
Washington. When I visited our national cemetery honoring our veterans, I
didn’t really have any relatives buried there, so I went into the visitor’s
center and asked where Medgar Evers was buried. They took out a special book
with the most notable people buried there, I visited his gravesite, and over
his gravesite was a wreath that read, “From your NAACP brothers and sisters.”
While Hollywood movies seem to glorify the whites who supported the civil
rights movement, I think that the real heroes who helped change our society for
the better were African American southerners like Medgar Evers. After all, they
fought in the trenches, so to speak.
Final, provocative
ideas for our modern age, drawn from the Conner book, primarily.
Maybe we need more self-help in health care.
Conner wrote that about three-fourths of patient visits were psychosomatic, so
he suggested that doctors have more of an understanding of their patients as
human beings, and that doctors should study the liberal arts such as sociology,
history, and African American culture. He opposed abortion after the first
three months, as he felt that human life was then present; he wrote that with
modern birth control measures, there was no need for abortions. He opposed
smoking, drinking more than 1-2 drinks a day, and marijuana legalization
(though he favored decriminalizing it). He denounced our overreliance on
over-the-counter and prescription drugs, which he saw as a product of the fast
pace of modern life. For a long healthy life, he said: “eat regular meals,
sleep regularly, don’t eat too much, get enough exercise, and don’t worry too
much.” (p. 101, Conner book) He sounds like what my life is like; I hadn’t seen
a doctor since 2008 until the big Covid scare. Also, notice how Democratic
President John Kennedy and Republican President Donald Trump stressed Americans
taking a Physical Fitness test.
Racial quotas aren’t always the answer. Mississippi Democrats by the 1980s
required an even race and sex division on their state delegations attending their
national party convention. Though very active in the state Democratic Party and
a delegate to the three previous national conventions, Conner wasn’t able to
attend in 1984 because the party had enough African American males. Why do we
still have nearly all-white “academies”? Most academies arose as the
public schools desegregated, as a way to avoid race mixing. Some claim that
today they serve a “class consciousness” role, as kids get to mix with a peer
group that may help them in later life. When they were created, though, some
parents would send their girls to the academies while their boys would stay in
the public schools, which suggested a desire to avoid race mixing. Have any of
you attended an “academy,” and how do they operate today? I hear that many do
offer scholarships to minorities, and that many do permit Christians to openly
worship.
Some Republicans do connect with the
black community. Gil Carmichael was a progressive Republican who unsuccessfully
ran for Mississippi governor and U.S. senator (against Eastland); he was a
Meridian businessman who wanted a new state constitution, and Dr. Conner voted
for him. Another progressive Republican was Jack Reed, who was a racial liberal
from Tupelo, a businessman, and was Chairman of the state Board of Education;
he narrowly lost to Democrat Ray Mabus for governor in 1987, four years before
Fordice won. Indeed, the title of Mrs. Evers book is taken from President
Abraham Lincoln (whose statue some white radicals have tried to deface) and his
Gettysburg address, which also states that we have “unfinished work,” and that
“this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
Freedom to demonstrate is important. In 1970 Conner was jailed for
marching against segregation in Starkville and for not having a permit. A
federal judge held that peaceful marches were legal, that the city could not
require a permit tax, and that marchers only needed to notify the city one hour
ahead of time. It is interesting that since that time a board of aldermen
instituted more regulations so that legal action had to be threatened so that
the board would permit an LGBTQ march (which is now annual, and accepted by the
city of Starkville), and an effort to require marchers to purchase insurance
resulted in MSU permitting the 2020 anti-racism rally to be held at our
amphitheater instead of a city park (the city has since eliminated this
insurance requirement for such 1st amendment marches and rallies).
It does give us some something to consider today, as the recent Covid virus
crisis led to the closing of churches to in-person services and liberal
Democratic public officials denouncing Trump rallies and citizen demonstrations
against the government lock-downs. Indeed, some Trump supporters protesting the
election outcome were tried and convicted for merely walking into the Capitol
on January 6, since the Capitol was a "restricted area" due to Covid
(Republican pundits oppose lumping them together with the violent rioters, and
Thompson's Committee fairly showed the difference between the two groups). Most
recently, some students at Ivy League schools have expressed concern that their
demonstrations against Israeli military actions in Gaza are being shut down, as
they are accused of supporting terrorism.
Human decency is a common denominator for everyone. Despite everything, the
Evers moved to Mississippi from Chicago, as they hated the impersonal big-city life
of the North and Medgar loved hunting and fishing (so does Bennie Thompson).
Though Mrs. Evers moved to California after her husband’s death, she conceded
that: “In Mississippi, we were all victims. The disease was hate, fed by fear,
nurtured by ignorance, fostered by guilt. We were all, black and white, its
victims.” (p. 374, Evers book) When Mrs. Evers visited Mississippi on the
occasion of the opening of the nationally-acclaimed Mississippi Civil Rights
Museum, she was treated with great respect, and she praised the changes in the
state. Dr. Conner wrote that “It is wrong for blacks to hate whites, since some
whites helped promote racial integration …. Hate does nothing but create more
hate.” (Conner book, p. 175) Conner writes that the world needs “more blacks
and whites working together for our common good.” (p. 175) Interesting that
that philosophy of human beings mirrors that of Nelson Mandela himself.