Court Hears Case on Textbok 1979

 Authors' suit charges racial bias in history book

By CHAT BLAKEMAN Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer
Tue, August 29, 1979

Is a ninth-grade classroom the place where Mississippians should learn that there have been more lynchings in their state than in any other? Will a photograph of white policemen arresting black demonstrators stir racial hatred or lead students to a true understanding of their past? These types of questions are at the heart of a battle that began Monday in U.S. District Court in Greenville before Judge Orma Smith. Although the issue is alleged racism in Mississippi schools, the, topic is not unequal facilities, alleged physical abuse, private academies or busing. The topic is a pair of books. The suit is being brought by a group that includes Millsaps College history professor Charles Sal-las and former Tougaloo College professor James Loewen, joint editors of a textbook on Mississippi history rejected by the State Textbook Purchasing Board in 1974.

The text, "Mississippi: Conflict and Change," presents what the authors contend is a candid but accurate picture of state history. It details subjects such as the treatment of slaves, blacks' accomplishments during Reconstruction, their plight in the years that followed and the sharecropper system that kept many Mississippians in virtual economic bondage. The authors charge that the Textbook Purchasing Board's rejection of "Conflict and Change" and approval of "Your Mississippi," the text now used, constituted pro-white bias in favor of texts that "minimize and denigrate the roles of black people in American and Mississippi history." The suit alleges, moreover, that the system by which the state approves school texts "is and has been an instrument of state propaganda to exclude controversial viewpoints, operates as a state instrument of unconstitutional state censorship, and fails to provide due process of law." Joined by representatives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Jackson, the Jefferson County School Board and others, the authors ask that the court order "Conflict and Change" added to the list of approved texts and decide whether the book adoption system is valid. The board chooses books based on the recommendation of a rating committee and can approve as many as five books in each category. Acceptance of one text does not require rejection of others.

Although the rating committee rejected "Conflict and Change" on a 5-2 vote (five white members voted against the book and two blacks for it), the state maintains race was not a factor in the decision. The action, the state contends, was based on "racially neutral educational and academic standards." In statements made for the court, and in the ratings made in 1974, board members said that "Conflict and Change" did not include a teacher's manual when it was submitted for approval, employed a vocabulary too advanced for the average Mississippi ninth-grader and did not give "proper emphasis to the economic, social and spiritual development" of Mississippians. Others cited as offensive a photograph in "Conflict and Change" showing the remains of a black man who had been lynched and burned. Gathered around the bonfire is a crowd of whites. "I feel that this book contains too many controversial issues to fit properly into the curriculum of the schools of Mississippi," wrote committee member Harold E. Railes in his evaluation written in 1974. Another member called the book "too racially oriented." Frank Parker, the attorney representing the "Conflict and Change" group, maintains that race and controversy are the real reasons behind the committee's action. The other reasons are "rationalizations after the fact," Parker contends. ."There have been more lynchings in Mississippi than in any other state and you can't ignore that," Parker said. "Your Mississippi" was written by historian John K.Bettersworth, who retired last year as academic vice president of Mississippi State University. In its latest revisions, the book has been used in state schools since 1968 for required ninth-grade state history courses. In an attempt to show that "Conflict and Change" is the better book, the suit challenges the history presented in "Your Mississippi," citing among other examples: That it devotes only four paragraphs to the treatment of slaves and that those passages "minimize the brutality of the system and accentuate mitigating factors." For example, the suit cites Bettersworth's statement that "some slaves who were house servants received an education" and notes the book fails to mention the prohibitions against educating slaves and only 5 percent of the slaves were domestics. That In summing up the modern civil rights era, Bettersworth recounts that, "Gradually Mississippians, black and white, found they could get along together as they always had," without discussing adequately the reasons behind the civil rights movements. That in its use of photographs, the book discriminates against blacks.

"Your Mississippi" has only three photographs or 5 percent showing blacks only, while "Conflict and Change" has 20 or 25.6 percent. Bettersworth, a historian best known for his research into Mississippi society during the Civil War, dismisses the criticism, saying his book does not distort the role of blacks. Mississippi's system of adopting textbooks is shared in some form by roughly half the 50 states and most southern states. The system, provides textbooks free to public and parochial school students. Individual school boards may use whatever texts they want, but only those on the state's list can be purchased with state funds.

In practice, choices are limited to books on the list, which is revised every six years. The suit involving "Your Mississippi" and "Conflict and Change" is expected to last several weeks and it may be several months before the court renders a decision, lawyers for both sides said. Here are examples of disparities between the textbooks "Your Mississippi" and "Mississippi: Conflict and Change": ON SLAVERY Your Mississippi "While there were a number of cases of cruelty to slaves, public opinion and state law tried to see that the slaves were not mistreated. Plantation owners cautioned their overseers against using brutal practices, but overseers were noted for cruelty The code (of 1832) required the master to keep all of his slaves in good health and physical well-being from the cradle to the grave. In general, slaves were treated well or badly on the basis of how good or bad their owners were." Conflict and Change: "When the slaveowner or overseer felt that a slave had done wrong, he sometimes punished the offender severely . . .

One slave recalled a whipping that he had witnessed: 'I saw Old Master get mad at Truman, and he buckled him down across a barrel and whipped him till he cut the blood out of him, and then he rubbed salt and pepper in the raw places.' . . .This harsh treatment had other aims... it made them fear white men, and it attempted to make them feel that whites were 'naturally' superior to blacks." ON RECONSTRUCTION Your Mississippi: By 1874, taxpayers were ready to revolt. ..

Vicksburg and Warren County were scenes of the first incidents. Most of the city and county offices were held by blacks. Since whites paid ninety-nine percent of the taxes, they were very unhappy. The city and county debt, which had been only thirteen thousand dollars in 1869, had climbed to $1.4 million for Vicksburg alone by 1874 .

After 1875 the old hatreds began to fade. Mississippi was back under the control of native whites." Conflict and Change: "Many Mississippians still believe the 'myth of Reconstruction,' that the period directly after the Civil War was a time of bad government, 'Negro domination,' and racial tension. We now know that most of this myth is not true Many of the black leaders in Mississippi were educated; several were college graduates. Those who were honest and able were usually supported by both black and white voters.

All they asked was equal rights before the law. On the whole, Mississippi was especially fortunate in having capable black leaders during these years." ..,...:'.; 

ON THE '60s , " Your Mississippi- "The 1960s were years of crisis. A showdown over desegregation and civil rights occurred. As a result, Mississippi's relationships with the national government were strained. After the Supreme Court's desegregation decision of 1954, Mississippians took vigorous measures to resist. One of those was the organization of a group known as the White Citizens' Council." Conflict and Change: "In 1954, the Supreme Court finally ruled school desegregation illegal. A few white people agreed with the decision but did not speak out effectively. Others organized the Citizens' Councils and passed new laws to resist integration. At the same time, a few black people began to express their dissatisfaction with segregation.". 

ON THE MISSISSIPPI SOVEREIGNTY COMMISSION Your Mississippi "In 1956 a State Sovereignty Commission was set up to take the Mississippi case to the rest of the country." . Conflict and Change: "One of the most important acts passed in 1956 established a State Sovereignty Commission to preserve segregation. The commission promptly hired secret investigators to inquire into 'subversive activities' ... The commission also operated a public relations department to publicize to the nation the benefits of Mississippi's segregated way of life." 

Gatekeepers

I’m working on a project.  I don’t know what to call it yet.  Part of it might be “Lies My Mother Never Told Me.”  For this project, I’ve made a timeline of all the significant events in my universe that involve the Civil Rights movement.  “My Universe” here includes Jackson, Mississippi, Millsaps, Galloway, Ole Miss, St. Andrews, The United Methodist Church, Prep, Casey, Murrah, The Jackson Zoo, Riverside Park, WLBT, WJTV, The Office Supply Company, Mississippi School Supply Company, First National Bank and Deposit Guarantee Bank.  

The timeline starts in 1954 when Brown V Board of Education was handed down, and goes until 1990.  Some might say 1990 is too late a date for the Civil Rights movement, but keep in mind how long it took to settle the Ayers Case, or, as I like to call it, Millsaps Alumni defend the State of Mississippi from its own mistakes.  

I suspected and confirmed by making the timeline that if you made a heatmap of events based on date and geographic location, there’s a significant cluster surrounding the day I was born.  A superstitious person might think I was the cause of it all.

I use Uber a lot.  I have a high rating because I’m polite and tip well.  Not long ago, I was meeting a lady at Bravo.  My Uber driver was a black man about my age.  Some of the drivers don’t talk at all.  This one did.  “Where you from?” He asked.  I said I was from Jackson.  I grew up here.  “Where did you go to high school?”  I said I went to St. Andrews but didn’t graduate in a typical fashion, so I went to college a little early.  “I went to Murrah.”  He said.

He noted where I was going and asked if I knew Jeff Good.  I said I knew Jeff Good really well, primarily through his dad, and I knew his wife primarily through her being a girl at Millsaps.  My driver explained that he and Jeff graduated from Murrah together.  

People who graduated with Jeff at Murrah aren’t just regular kids.  These are the kids who started public school in 1970, the year that the Department of Justice took control of Jackson Schools and a year after Alexander V Holmes County, where the US Supreme Court changed the wording of Brown v Board of Education from “all due haste” to “immediately.” All the schemes Mississippi came up with were over.  We had to integrate.  Jeff didn’t live in Mississippi yet; he lived in a state where this sort of battle didn’t have to happen.  My driver did, though.  He and I were born in the same hospital.   That class who graduated with my driver were the first Mississippians to have gone all the way through school without ever facing public school segregation.

You have to think about why fighting Brown V Board of Education was so important.  If you’re in a state that believes it’s better off if everybody is educated, what does it matter if a black kid learns to multiply fractions sitting next to a white kid?  There was no Civil Rights Act yet; you could still refuse to seat black diners at your restaurant if you wanted.

It mattered because our schools taught math and science. Still, they also taught language, literature, history, civics, and religion; these courses are all gateways to culture, and in Mississippi, the last thing people wanted was to admit Africans into the white culture.  

Schools are cultural gateways.  You’re given a mascot.  You’re taught to have “school spirit.”  You cheer for your school, mainly when it plays other schools.  More importantly, though, you form relationships, like my driver who wanted to tell a total stranger that he shared this cultural connection with a man I knew, and in many ways, that made us equal.

I’ve written extensively about when and why my parents decided to take me out of public school.  Had I stayed in public school, I would have spent most of my high school career with this guy.  We would have been alumni together.  Forty-five years later, it seems alien that anyone would try to keep us apart, but they did.  

Many people say that there’s no reason to write about these things, that there have been a lot of other people who wrote about it already, and obsessing over the past is no way to bring on a happy future.  You’re supposed to write about what you know, though, and write about what you feel.  What I know is what happened to Mississippi, and what I feel, more often than not, is haunted,

As a man, Jeff became a gatekeeper to a new kind of culture in Mississippi.  It’s been challenging and sometimes painful, but we’re forging a new, blended sort of culture in Mississippi.   James Meridith was the first African to graduate from the University of Mississippi sixty days after I was born.  Today, he walks around Jackson like a movie star, and whatever he did, it wasn’t really that big of a deal.  It was that big of a deal.  They shot the guy.  The only reason he lived and Medgar Evers didn’t was because some redneck had lousy aim.  Nobody knows who Aubrey James Norvell was, but they ask James Meridith to sign autographs for their grandchildren.  I’m okay with that outcome.  

Much has been written about why Mississippians were adamant about not allowing black faces through our cultural gateways.  Questions of why always matter, but in this case, the questions seem to go round and round in circles.  I’ve been told, my entire life, that Mississippi would have corrected itself eventually.  I don’t think I believe that.  Even with tremendous pressure, some men fought this to their graves.  

I’m not a very good gatekeeper.  I don’t like to talk to strangers, and I don’t like to talk to anyone at all unless I know you pretty well.  I prefer books to pickleball or cocktail parties.  I’m grateful that there are gatekeepers, though.  Some open restaurants, and some drive Uber taxis.  Both open the passages that allow us to blend our lives together now that the worst part is over.  

The Citizens Council and the Republican Party

 The genius of the Citizens Council, the thing that made them both the most effective and the most evil, was that they equated segregation with good citizenship.  It was in their name.  Fighting to keep our schools segregate equated to patriotism and cultural loyalty.  If you read their literature, that was clearly the message.

The Citizens Council started in the Delta, in areas where the black population outnumbered the white population, areas where the idea of “separate but equal” was as problematic as the idea of integration.  They didn’t see these descendants of slaves as peers or equals or fully citizens and saw the interference from the federal government, both through the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, as an impingement on their sovereignty.  For them, this was the heart of “states’ rights.”  

In Jackson, the Citizens Council was, at first, fully accepted in business and social circles.  Doctors, Lawyers, and Bankers all became members, along with tradesmen of every sort.  The Citizens Council was a great equalizer with regard to the issue of class but the most significant divider with regard to the issue of race.  

By the mid 70’s, the social and economic tides turned against the Citizen’s Council.  The rest of the world began equating the Citizen’s Council with the Klan.  Jackson's business, legal and religious leaders began seeing it the same way.  There were men in Jackson who remained loyal to the Citizens Council, including some prominent physicians, but by 1975 they saw their professional progress hampered by their membership in the CC.  Offers for board memberships and professional advancement started slowing and stopping.  Thompson, who had been Mayor of Jackson, was in the Citizens Council; he was replaced by Davis and then Danks, who were not.  The tide was changing.  

The idea that the federal intervention in our culture, our education, our economics, and our society didn’t go away though, but it did change names.  Mississippi had been a yellow-dog Democratic state ever since the civil war, but by the mid-seventies, a growing number of Mississippians saw the Democratic party as against us, an interference in how we lived.  

When you look at early adapters of the Republican Party in Mississippi, I can just about promise you they never sat down and discussed the “Southern Strategy” as such.  They didn’t have to.  Saying you wanted to get the federal government out of your business, even if your business is oil, banking, insurance, or the like,  Nobody ever had to say, “Boy, we sure would have been better off if they left our damn schools alone.”  Nobody ever had to say it because the great majority of Mississippians believed in their hearts and still do.  

There were guys out there who believed in an evolved Democratic party and believed it was good for Mississippi.  Guys like Charlie Deaton and Bob Fortenberry built their careers trying to apply these new, expansive ideas of the Democratic Party to the boots-on-the-ground situation in Mississippi.  They had some success, but the most successful was William Winter.  Winter and his Boys of Spring were the last great stand for the new Democratic Party in Mississippi.  

Likened to Camelot, both the play and the Kennedy administration, Winter’s tenure as Governor of Mississippi was, and is, seen as a golden age of progressive politics and moves to equalize, at least educationally, the experience of white and black Mississippians.

Ray Maybus rose out of Winter’s team and became governor at a time when a lot of Mississippians thought we were turning over a new page and Mississippi was changing.  It was not.  Toward the end of his term, preparing for his next move, Maybus ran full force into the rising Republican Revolution in Mississippi.  The Young Republicans were becoming more popular than over-starched Oxford shirts at Ole Miss, and at an SEC game in Jackson, Mabus was booed when the announcer asked the crowd to greet him before the game started.   

In my mind, that moment when a bunch of guys my age began to boo a sitting governor at an Ole Miss game loudly was a sea change in Mississippi culture.  I’d seen them cheer Ross Barnett, both before and after his tenure as governor.  I’d seen them cheer Cliff Finch, even knowing that all the stories about Finch were true, but they were booing Ray Mabus–Herman Hine’s son-in-law, a champion of education and public benefit in Mississippi, a genuinely nice guy with a career drive like nothing I’d ever seen before somehow equated to a bad thing among my peers.  To them, being in favor of Mabus and his pro-education platform was unpatriotic.  I still don’t get it.  Not even a little.  In my heart, I will always pin some of that moment on feelings about the Democratic Party forcefully integrating Mississippi.  

Even today, there are people in Mississippi who straight-up blame the Democratic Party for changing the Mississippi State flag, even though every single person involved in pushing that move through our legislature was Republican, and it was signed by a Republican governor.  People don’t want the truth.  They want somebody to blame.  

I was five years old when the Jackson Citizens Council started sending out fliers saying they would accept students into their five different schools.  Council Schools were priced considerably lower than Prep, JA, St. Richards, or St. Andrews.  They were actually priced too low to pay their bills using tuition money.  The Citizens Council promised fund-raising efforts to make up the difference, and for a while, they did, but they couldn’t sustain it.  The business community distanced itself from the Council, limiting its ability to raise money.  Pretty soon, the council schools began closing.  

What happened next is a matter for the history books.  Much of Jackson’s white population did what they must to pay and send their children to Prep, JA, St Andrews, and St. Richards.  That made Jackson Public Schools the majority black.  Dr. Walker, the superintendent, retired almost as soon as integration began.  He was replaced by a series of men who didn’t stay until Bob Fortenberry came back to Mississippi to take the job.  Bob fought for Jackson and for JPS, and he did a great job, but he was ambitious and wouldn’t stay forever.  

By the 90s, with Dr. Fortenberry retired, people who couldn’t afford private school began leaving Jackson for cities in Rankin and Madison counties that still had a majority white population.  This created an avalanche of white flight out of Jackson that we’re still dealing with.  Jackson is still losing population, even though we were at an all-time high in the 80s.  

Life is like a series of domino pieces standing on end.  When you knock one over, it knocks the one next to it over, and that knocks over the one next to it, and so on, and so on, until you get to a space quite a distance away from where you first tipped over a domino, but the causation remains the same.  

A lot of people want to say that what happened in the sixties and seventies has nothing to do with what’s happening now.  That’s just not true.  What’s happening now is a direct result of what happened in the sixties and seventies, even though we had to go through many steps to get here from there.

American Colonization Society

Some edits of "Birth of A Nation," of which there are many, end with a title card praising Lincoln and his plan to repatriate the Africans if only he had lived.  Lincoln was indeed a member of the American Colonization Society, one of the few topics slave owners and abolitionists agreed on.

Abolitionists believed the plan to return Africans to Africa was the kindest possible plan.  Since they were taken from there, returning them there offered the best possible outcome for these people who had been wronged by enslavement in America and the Caribbean.  Southerners supported the plan because if slavery ended, there would be millions of now-free Africans in their territory that might be angry about the treatment they received as slaves and pose a threat to the safety of their white former owners.  

These are people who really knew very little about Africa, and what they did know was a hundred years before.  In the 19th century, Ottomans and Europeans were divvying Africa up between them, and with the death of Shaka Zulu, there was nothing but each other to prevent it.  If you go to Africa now, most of the countries that are now Christian were colonized by Europeans, and the countries that are now Muslim were colonized by Ottomans.  Even in their own country, Africans were not safe from our control.

ACS members didn't consider that, with very few exceptions, most former slaves didn't know what part of Africa they came from and to whom they were related or owed allegiance to in Africa. So once they got there, there were rejected by both the whites and the blacks.  They were men without a country. 

The colonies set up by the ACS had even less funding than Rowanoak, and having lived in America for two hundred years, many of these people had lost whatever immunity they had to African diseases.  

Had Lincoln lived, this is probably the plan the country would have followed, either sending the Africans back to Africa or to areas set up for them in Central America.  It would have been a disaster and brought about a human crisis almost as bad as the war itself.

State Flag Conspiracy

There's a fairly popular myth that woke liberal politicians broke in and changed the Mississippi state flag in the middle of the night, despite the people's wishes.  There are a couple of problems with this theory, the first being that there are only about eleven woke liberal politicians in the Mississippi state legislature.  They're not very organized, and they usually go out at night.  Sometimes all night.  While that might warm the heart of Mississippi's most conservative souls, it's just not what happened.

Lauren Stennis devoted a fair portion of her life to changing the Mississippi State Flag.  Lauren was to the left of me on many issues, and we often didn't agree on things, but on this, we did.  I made every effort to very visible support her efforts.  I believed it was important.  Lauren deserved a win on this.  She did the work.  She was tireless and devoted, and she was, more than anything else, right.  You should have been able to tell your grandchildren about the woman that changed Mississippi's history, it would have made me and a lot of other people very happy, but that's not what happened.  The referendum Lauren fought for lost.  It lost by a much larger margin than any of us expected.

The story's not over, though.  The same battle over the South Carolina flag was heating up.  Students in South Carolina started demanding that the NCAA take a stand.  The NCAA isn't a hotbed of woke liberals, either.  They'd really rather do anything than deal with stuff like this.  Somebody at the NCAA did a head count, though, and it was pretty evident that there were an awful lot more descendants of federal soldiers and Confederate slaves playing football, basketball, and baseball than there were descendants of Confederate soldiers.  Some of these descendants of Confederate Slaves were saying things like they would boycott games in or with South Carolina teams if they didn't change their flag.

The NCAA is about playing football, and this business in South Carolina was threatening that.  The NCAA said, "Y'all gotta change," to which South Carolina said, "Screw you!" and that's when the NCAA said, "Until you change, we won't sanction any championship games in your state.  With protests increasing in the state and pressure from the NCAA, South Carolina capitulated.  The attention then turned to Mississippi.

In Mississippi, the chancellor of Ole Miss (New Miss, according to James Meridith) wanted nothing to do with a fight over the confederate flag.  His position was that it was needlessly divisive and had nothing to do with improving the university experience.  He was right.  His solution was to get rid of the confederate flag but keep the name "rebels."  That seemed to appease nearly everyone.  

After the flag referendum failed and the University of Mississippi cooperated, the NCAA turned its attention to the state capitol and threatened the same sanctions they used on South Carolina, starting with taking away championship games and then becoming more punitive from there.  

Threatening Confederate symbology is one thing.  Threatening football is another.  Very soon, the college board, College presidents (both public and private), and college coaches began pressuring the Governor, the Speaker, and the lt. Governor (all Republicans) to do something.  Universities and colleges began refusing to fly the state flag.  Some cities refused to fly the state flag.  Governor Bryant started looking for a way out of this.  Finally, at the end of June 2020, the Republican legislature of Mississippi and the Republican governor retired the Mississippi state flag.  They did it in hopes we could get back to business.

A lot of people still have copies of the Stennis flag, now known as the "hospitality flag."  In my mind, Lauren will always get credit for this, even though it didn't work out the way she wanted.  Conservative Republicans changed the Mississippi state flag because they loved football more than the confederacy.  I haven't a bit of a problem with that.  Mississippi doesn't ever do things in a straightforward way, but sometimes we get them done some other way.

Sins of the Father

In the larger world, we talk about the baby boom generation, generation x, and millennials.  In Mississippi, there's only one generational marker that matters:  Those of us who were in school when the order for segregation came and those who weren't.  That moment in history, that turning point of history, changed the future of Jackson and Mississippi and might have destroyed it.   

If you look at Jackson now and many other parts of Mississippi, you'll see a school system that's just about as segregated now as it was in 1970.  There are some white kids in black schools and some black kids in white schools, but for the most part, all of our schools are either almost entirely white or almost entirely black, with a fairly predictable outcome of underfunded black schools and overfunded white schools.  

White schools have buildings named for wealthy white benefactors (who usually paid for them) while black schools have buildings named for people who died for the cause, that were either paid for with what federal dollars trickled down to us, a bond issue Jackson can't afford, or they just renamed an older building that had been named for a white person, sometimes a Confederate hero.  

I'd like to report that successful middle-class and upper-middle-class black families stepped in and replaced the lost financial support of white people with their own financial support, but that's not happening.  Middle-class and upper-middle-class black families are, by and large, sending their kids to the same private schools the white parents send their kids to, but there are far fewer of them, so they end up being a small minority in their school that sits inside a city where people who look like them are actually the majority.

It's awfully easy to say, "Boyd, you were six years old.  You don't bear any responsibility in this." and there have certainly been times when I believed that.  I don't say that anymore.  These days, I tend to say, "If you're alive, and you live here or did your best to escape from here, then you bear some responsibility."  Leaving Jackson, leaving the Delta, even leaving Mississippi doesn't make you not responsible anymore; it just makes it easier to live like you weren't.  

Part of dealing with the sins of the Father is that you're left with some portion of what they left behind, just like they were left with the sins their Father left behind.   Breaking the cycle isn't easy, but until you do something different, you won't get nothing different.  Any generation can break the cycle.  They just have to choose it.

Quentin Compson Leaves Home.

Mississippi never leads nor follows.  It intensifies whatever fears and prejudices are already present in the larger society as if to say, "We can do it too," worried that, if we don't, we might be overlooked or forgotten about.   

"Do you hate blacks and queers?  We really, really hate them.    We'll prove it, and boy, will you be impressed.  Do you want to stop abortion?  We really want to stop abortion.  We'll do anything to stop it.  Boy, will you be impressed!"

It's not that we can't change, or be loving, or human.  We once tried to kill James Meridith, but now he walks those same streets as a hero.  People ask him to pose for a photo with their children.  It's almost as if we proved our point about integration; now, we can go back to being human again.  We never really hated the guy; we were just trying to show how dedicated we were to this idea, even though those who did lead were leading the entire country in another direction.     

Maybe, ultimately, it's a matter of confidence.  Maybe if we had more of it, we wouldn't be so determined to lead the way on the most prevalent negative emotions.   Maybe then we could say, "That's too much.  We don't want any part of that."

Yesterday we had a lecture from Donna Ladd, formerly the founder of the Jackson Free Press and now Editor of the Mississippi Free Press.   When I first started blogging, some of the people who now run very political blogs recognized me as having once been very political and tried to win me to their side by impressing me with how much they hated and disagreed with Donna.  Now that the face of journalism is changing, I worry that those same guys are having a much larger impact than they deserve.  That's not to say we didn't suffer from horribly biased news before, but for a while, we had almost liberated ourselves from that.  

Donna has launched more young writers than I've even met.  That makes her the perfect addition to the McMullan Young Writers program.  Donna's from Philadelphia, Mississippi.  She's just a couple years older than I am, and I was born in 1963.  If you think about what happened in Philadelphia in 1964, then you can't really blame her for feeling some sorta way about Mississippi.  

Those feelings made her want, more than anything, to escape Mississippi and never come back.  I know of a lot of people who had the same feeling, some really famous ones like Oprah Winfrey and Leontine Price, and Tennessee Williams.  Williams didn't go far, but in the 50s and 60s, New Orleans was an oasis of its own.  There were only a few places in the country where he could be what he was, New Orleans was one, and Mississippi was not.

At one point in her lecture, Donna asked the question that I spend a great deal of time thinking about.  "How many of you want to leave Mississippi when you graduate?"  More than half of the hands went up.  Some with energy and enthusiasm.  

I talk about this with my friends a lot.  "How do you keep your children here?"  So many of my generation face this.  Some of the young people in the forum that day were actually children of people I've known for a long time, raising their hands to say they want to leave Mississippi--to my mind, they want to leave those who love them more than anything.  I can't really blame them.  We invest so much treasure and time and energy and blood into raising these children, working so very hard to make sure they become remarkable people, and when they do actually become remarkable people, can we really ask them to stay here knowing that they might have to clip the wings we spent a lifetime giving them?

So much of what happened in Philadelphia that summer in 1964 touched my life.  Even though I was just learning to walk, it was so close to me.  My father always told the story of how the FBI called and wanted forty desk sets in forty-eight hours and how he struggled to fill the order.  Ben Puckett talked about the day the FBI called to rent equipment to dig up an earthen dam.  Clay Lee was a passionate young minister who the conference moved away from some pretty terrible things in Jackson, at Galloway, and sent him to a quiet country church where the troubles of Mississippi wouldn't upset his promising career, and they sent him to--Philadelphia Mississippi, just months before June of 1964.

I can't really blame Donna for leaving Mississippi.  We didn't exactly lay an appetizing table before her.  It's a miracle we ever got her back. 

When I was at St. Catherine's, I would have coffee with some guys, and one of them told the story of how they longed to leave Mississippi and see the world, and did, but when he saw in the newspapers that Rabbi Nussbaum's office and synagog were bombed, he figured he needed to go back to Mississippi.  He never hated Mississippi, but he never thought he'd get such a loud call to come back to her, either.

Many of Faulkner's characters spend a great deal of time turning over in their head what it means to be from Mississippi.  In Absalom, Absalom! my sometimes favorite novel, Quentin Compson struggles with his feelings about his home.  Throughout Faulkner's books, the Compsons often represent the moral heart of Mississippi.  Far from home, he says, “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”  I've never really had a Quentin Compson moment, but it's been close.  I've known a lot of people who did, though, and acted on it.  It's our own fault, really.  Everybody has a chance to make it better, but not everybody does. 

Women Who Don't Celebrate Holidays

 Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are big fans of the idea that a "good guy with a gun" is all you need to solve the problem of "bad guys with guns."  They believe in it so much that they plaster it all over their social media every time it works.  

That's the problem; every time it works is between one and two percent of all the gun violence in the nation.  One or two percent make their evidence in this argument almost anecdotal.  While it does work at some level, their strategy simply isn't solving the problem.

Usually, their social media post will go like this: Larry Smith takes out Rico Warez with the AK47 he kept in the back of his truck in case he wanted to go deer hunting.  Their posts are filled to the brim with racial dog whistles. Then 500 middle-aged men will comment how great it is to be an American and FU Brandon!  

Problems like gun violence amplify problems with economic disparity.  The darker and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be the victim of gun violence.

Going to the grocery today, I was struck by what a terrible job we do of governing the people who live here.  Morgan Place is so filled with potholes you can't navigate it with a normal vehicle.  Inside the grocery, the women at the deli counter were talking.  I suppose the topic before I walked up was why they're working today (July 4).  One of them said she didn't mind working on the fourth because that's when her cousin got shot, and her family doesn't celebrate it, and the other woman said she felt the same about Christmas because that's when her daddy got shot.  

Two women, Americans both Mississippians and Jacksonians, laid out a testimony before me of what a horrible job we've done of governing the world they live in.  By "we," I mean me too!  There certainly have been thousands of times when I could have done more, said more, and tried more to make things better but didn't.  

Our city has an administration that was elected on the premise that they could and would do something about economic disparity, but they've done such a shit job at maintaining the basic functions of a city that they've actually made the effects of economic disparity much worse.  Our state has a decidedly conservative legislature and administration, by word, absolutely devoted to providing security to its citizens but failing utterly for these two women.  Both ends of the political spectrum made promises to help these women, and both failed.  Their lives are bad and getting worse.  

I think we have to admit that conservative gun policies are a failure.  I think we also have to admit that liberal policing policies are also a failure.  I think we have to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate everything we're doing and look for solutions to the problem rather than ways to protect our empire of ideas.  

It's not fair that these women have to work on July fourth while I get to fuck around and do what I want.  It's also not fair that in one of the world's most advanced countries, we can't keep that woman's father safe on Christmas Eve or the other woman's cousin safe on the Fourth of July.

Lee and Agamemnon

 In Lee: The Last Years, Flood quotes one of the "KA Five" as saying of Lee that "We likened him unto Agamemnon."  I always found that strange because things didn't end well for Agamemnon.

For a white Southerner, college-educated in the nineteenth century, it's not at all surprising that they read and studied the Illiad.  Agamemnon, drawing the Greeks together for this great cultural and political, and military adventure, probably did remind him of his service under Lee, both as a soldier and as a student.  

Apparently, whoever taught Greek literature, at Washington College, after the war, didn't include the Orestian Trilogy in their lessons.  Agamemnon's life may have been the origin of the Greek State, but his death was the origin of Greek justice.  Their professor only told them half the story.

Unlike Robert E Lee, who I'm absolutely certain was real, I'm not at all convinced that Agamemnon was ever a real person.  If he was, I can't imagine his real story matching up to the myth at all.  That's not what myths are for.  

Myths create stories that explain societies.  Sometimes they build up over many years, and disparate stories are combined and remade to fit the narrative the culture builds.

Every culture needs two creation stories.  The first is a metaphysical story.  The earth was a woman, and the sky was her husband.  The gods came as horses rising from the foam of the sea.  The Greek stories of metaphysical creation are fascinating and beautiful.  

They also need a myth about their political creation.  In Judaic culture, that's Joseph and Abraham, and Moses.  These are stories about what sets our people apart from other people.  They are vital in creating a cultural identity.  For the Greeks, the Illiad serves this purpose.  The Greek culture created itself with a story about defeating Troy, fighting over their ideas about the honor of a woman.

There are other very important myths, though.  Myths about where our cultural values come from.  In the bible, you have stories about Cain and Abel sewing the seeds of ideas about justice.  That's what the death of Agamemnon and his son's quest for redemption does for the Greeks.  It creates and describes in them the idea of Justice and just redemption.

It's entirely possible that the myth about Agamamemnon's life and Agamemnon's death was originally two entirely different people that were merged together into one story.  I think that happened a lot.  

Lee's political campaign might have created the political culture of the South, even though he lost the war, but there's been a much longer struggle for justice to come out of the Civil War, one that we're still fighting today.  I can't really say that Lee was part of that battle.  His purpose after the war was to get these boys, who had been his soldiers, prepared to be productive citizens again.  The question of Justice in the South would not be answered in their generation.  I'm very much starting to doubt that it will be answered in mine.

Education is a funny thing.  You can't ever really fit a complete understanding of any subject into any one lifetime, even if what you're trying to understand happened thousands of years ago.  Whoever taught the KA five about the Illiad didn't mention what happened to Agamemnon when he got home.  That was a pretty serious omission. 

 

Available at Amazon

Broken Fire Hydrant

 Last night on the news, they interviewed a woman who had a fire in her neighborhood, but the Firemen couldn’t find the hydrant, and when they did find it, it didn’t work.  The firemen fought the blaze for hours without a source of water and prevented this one-house fire from taking over the neighborhood.

I was struck by the abject poverty of this woman and her neighbors.  I’ve seen neighborhoods like this before, but I don’t get that many opportunities to talk to the residents.  

Some people would say, especially in Mississippi, say that her subculture and her race are what made her this poor.  While there’s no evidence that race has this effect, whoever you are, whatever you become, your subculture has a lot to do with it.  

No subculture is perfectly logical or perfectly successful.  My subculture makes me read books I don’t understand (looking at you, James Joyce.)  Her culture has given her all the tools necessary to live in abject poverty but hasn’t provided her a path out of it.  Even though my city has an administration that’s more attentive and generous to people on her end of the economic spectrum than ever in the history of Mississippi, we still failed her, and we don’t have a clear path to improving things for her.  If not for some inventive firemen, her entire neighborhood could have been destroyed.

Ivan Allen made more money in the Office Supply business than anyone in the history of stationery.  He was also a brilliant statesman.  Allen had a theory that went something like this:  all of our boats are tied together–the greatest and the smallest.  When the tide comes in, my boat cannot rise to its potential unless this poor woman whose house burned down has a boat that’s allowed and encouraged to rise too.  No matter how seaworthy my vessel is, I’m never going to reach my potential unless I take her with me.  There’s no way to stay here and cut the ropes.

A lot of people choose not to stay here.  You have to go pretty far away, though.  You can’t just go to Madison or Brandon and expect to escape the cycle of poverty; you have to leave the state, and sometimes you have to leave the South.

We have a responsibility to improve all of our citizens, starting at birth.  In Mississippi, we don’t do such a great job of that.  Unless we improve the lot of the poorest and weakest born to us, the strongest can never reach their potential.  

The woman on television said she’d lived in Jackson all her life.  I believe her.  She was the product of the Jackson Public Schools and all the organizations we have and create to improve our citizens, and we didn’t do such a great job with her.  We can do better.  A great society recognizes the necessity to improve every child born within its borders.  We don’t do such a great job of this, but we can do better.  

The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook by Charles W. Eagles

I've just been made aware of this book, but I'm moving it up on my reading list because it's pretty important to me.  The history of the struggle for civil rights is, in many ways, my own history.  Born in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, to a very political family, this is the world I entered into just as the fight was getting more heated.  

For the past several months, I've been doing a really deep dive into the integration of Galloway United Methodist Church, and my plan is to do Millsaps next.  This book is about incidents that happened later on, more into the early and mid-seventies.

Mississippi Conflict and Change was a textbook about Mississippi history written by James W. Loewen, who taught at Tougaloo, and Charles Sallis, who taught at Millsaps.  It was the first Mississippi History textbook to include anything about the civil rights movement.  There's where the conflict and change about the book itself came in.

Mississippi has a free textbook law.  That means students of the public schools (and some parochial schools) are provided free textbooks paid for by the State of Mississippi.  In order to qualify for these funds, the books have to go through an approval and adoption process as set out in the law.  This is true for all the states that have a free textbook law, which I believe is all the states now.  

Approving textbooks can be very political.  With so many concerns about Critical Race Theory and anything about people with different sexualities, approving textbooks has become much more political than has been in many years.  In the seventies, there was considerable pressure to keep the civil rights movement out of any Mississippi History textbook.  Authors Lowen and Sallis, having struggled to get the book published in the first place, were determined to have it adopted by the state Textbook board, so they filed suit, accusing the board of rejecting their book illegally.

Eagle's Book "Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook," tells the story of the fight over getting "Conflict and Change" published.   

At St. Andrews, I was taught Mississippi History using Conflict and Change.  A very young priest named Jerry McBride taught it.  I didn't know it at the time, but St. Andrews was the only school in the nation that had ordered the book for classroom use.  I knew this because my father and grandfather ran the Mississippi State Textbook Depository.

My dad was asked to give a deposition in the case.  Considering the very political nature of his business, both at Missco and Trustmark and St Dominics, he really didn't want to get mixed up in this, but he also was pretty determined to get the book adopted.  Dr. Sallis was an important member of the Millsaps History Department.  Bill Goodman represented the State of Mississippi in this and many other matters.  He was also a life trustee of Millsaps College.  Mr. Goodman's advice was that the state not fight this, that fighting it would make us look pretty bad.  

At the time, there were political figures in Mississippi who had much to gain for taking a stance against a civil rights textbook.  Sadly, those days may have returned.  There was considerable political wrangling over this.  I don't know how much is in Eagle's book, but it involved a lot of icons of my youth.

Ultimately, cooler heads were able to prevail, and the book was adopted after considerable political and legal pressure.  I'm very interested to see how much of this lines up with my own memory of that period.  I was thirteen and fourteen.  Interestingly, the only reviewer of the book on Amazon is Bob King, former Dean at Millsaps College.

They have Mississippi Conflict and Change listed as almost $1,500 on Amazon.  I think I have two copies.  

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook is available in hardcover, softcover, and kindle formats on Amazon.com I'll write a review once I've finished it.  

Shrimp and Grits

 1985.  Ruben Anderson is appointed to the Mississippi State Supreme Court.  My dad decided to have a dinner party in his honor.  My dad was making a point.  He probably thought his points were subtle, but they never were.  There were men in Mississippi who might make a face at having a black man on the State Supreme court, and my dad wanted them to know his opinion of their opinion.  

Besides Judge Anderson and his remarkable wife, the guest list was the regular suspects, Brum Day, Rowan Taylor, Charlie Deaton, and added in George Hughes, Bill Goodman, and of course, everyone's respective spouses or public girlfriends.  A lot of times, I was more pleased to see the spouses and girlfriends than the men themselves.

Daddy was making a point.  His side of the Capitol Street Gang approved of Judge Anderson, and he didn't care who had other opinions.  Not just approval of Judge Anderson, although he's a genuinely remarkable man, but approval of having black men in positions of power in Jackson, Mississippi.

The guts and the details of the dinner party fell to my mom.  She was a self-taught cook and a great one.  Her regular co-conspirators were Mrs. Kroeze, Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Flood, Mrs. Bass, and my Aunt Linda.   Jane Lewis was the best baker I've ever met.  They told me it was a rare disease that took her from us, but several other dear Mississippians died of the same condition, so maybe it wasn't all that rare after all.  That disease stole vital human beings from me.  That makes it my enemy.

Mother was a very experimental cook, which I appreciated, but my siblings often had another opinion.  Sometimes her menus were unconventional.  Gazpacho, different forms of liver and oysters, and calf's tongue were served at family dinners but not well received.

"What are you serving?"  I asked as she was cutting onions.

"Shrimp and Grits," she said.  I could see the shrimp in the sink where she de-veined them.  She bought them from a man coming up from Biloxi every week and parked his truck with ice chests full of fresh seafood at Deville Plaza.  Every woman in town made occasional trips to meet him and cut a deal. 

"Mother, this man is a judge; you cannot serve grits for supper."  I was adamant.

She ignored my opinion, as she often would.  In this instance, she was correct.  This was a few years before Bill Neal made shrimp and grits famous and Southern Cooking respectable.  If you've never heard of Bill Neal, I'll include a link to a video about him.  He's a remarkable man and responsible for many of the recipes you eat.

Years later, I asked her how she knew ten years before anyone else that Shrimp and Grits were a thing.  She said she got the recipe out of Southern Living, but I've looked, and there weren't any Shrimp and Grits recipes in Southern Living that year.  Further research told me that Galatoire's in New Orleans had occasionally been serving Shrimp and Grits since the seventies.  Her recipe was similar to that.  Either she had it there, or one of her co-conspirators had it there.

The best Shrimp and Grits I've ever had was at City Grocery in Oxford.  Their recipe was similar to Bill Neal's but had a little extra push to it.  By now, if you're from here, you've had the dish somewhere unless you were kosher or suffered a shellfish allergy.  

For me, Shrimp and Grits mean a time when my mother was right, and I was wrong.  They represent a day when my Daddy wanted to make a blunt point, and my mom made it graceful.  Food isn't just food.  It's art, and it's culture, and sometimes it's memory.

A video about Bill Neal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeteYtkVB6Y

The Pearl River Reservoir

I don't use the phrase "Ross Barnett Reservoir."  I don't use it because Ross Barnett was an asshole, and I"m embarrassed of him.  It's difficult to convince people Mississippi is changed and evolved beyond our racist past when they hear the largest body of water in central Mississippi is still named for our most famous racist.

Ross Barnett wasn't a great man and certainly no great leader.  What did he ever accomplish as governor other than fighting to keep Mississippi segregated?  The only reason I can imagine that anyone would want to name anything after him is that there must have been some guys in the legislature who were still pissed off about Washington forcing Mississippi to integrate, and this was their "fuck you" to the Kennedys.

Barnett approved the plan to send Freedom Riders to Parchment, ordering them strip-searched to humiliate them and taking their beds away to intimidate them for the crime of sitting in a bus station. Barnett hated the black-and-tan Republicans and fought any development of a two-party system in Mississippi.

Barnett would have you believe he fought integration with every fiber of his being. If you listen to the recordings of him and John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy's recollections of the Meredith affair after the fact, it's clear that Barnet knew he couldn't win.  He hoped to use the whole matter to ingratiate himself with the anti-integration factions in Mississippi.

It might be a legend, but the story goes that after the court order to admit James Meridith to the University of Mississippi, Barnett stood at the door to the registrar's office at Ole Miss, with scores of white protestors and even more white national guard troops beyond.  Meridith ascended the steps to complete his court-ordered registration, flanked by white guards and white lawyers.  When he reached the door, Barnett reportedly said, "Which one of you gentlemen is James Meridith?"

Showboat, all of it was a showboat.  Barnett had no intention of leading Mississippi; he only wanted to ride the wave of our hate and cultural shortcomings to enrich himself and inflate his legacy.  

After his term as governor, Barnett sought to rebuild his previously successful plaintiff's law practice.  He sued my dad when a fella ran into a truck making deliveries to the Crystal Springs furniture plant.  We made a fair offer to settle, but Barnett refused.  "While I was serving the great state of Mississippi, my law partners stole every bit of my practice, and I need a big victory to restore my reputation," Barnett told the judge.  The judge advised Barnett to reconsider and settle because Bill Goodman was making a fool of him in court.  Barnett settled.

I've heard noises through the years of re-naming the reservoir, but nothing ever came of it.  I don't know if there was ever a bill to rename it.   None are pending now.  I've heard the opinion that the Pearl River Valley Water Supply District board could rename the reservoir without legislative action, but I have no idea if that's accurate.  If they can do it, they should just do it quietly one day and let that be that.  Until someone makes an official name change, I will continue to call it "The Pearl River Reservoir" because it's accurate, and there's no adverse history associated with that name.  

Putting off Melton's Re-Trial

It's probably not possible, but part of me would like federal authorities to put off Frank Melton's retrial until after we elect a new mayor.

The city's been through so much the past few years, it might help if we put off the turmoil of a new trial until a time when Melton's no longer mayor. Of course, that assumes he won't win re-election, and with a field of as many as fifteen candidates anything is possible.

A lot of people were upset when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon to spare the country the damage of a presidential trial and conviction, but I've always thought his decision was wise. As much as I despise the crap Melton pulled while in office, a re-trial, conviction, and the turmoil of pulling him out of office leaving us with a gap of six months or more with no mayor or an acting mayor might be worse.

If possible, it might be better to see him somehow constrained from further illegal acts, but still in office until the natural end of his term, and once he's no longer mayor, I don't much care what happens to him.

The Next Mayor
So far I don't see a really outstanding choice among the contenders for Melton's seat. There's still time before the election for one of these guys to really distinguish himself though, so I'm holding out hope.

Whoever becomes our next mayor faces all the same challenges in place when Melton was elected, plus having to deal with the gang-like management structure Melton put in power. It's going to take some time and a lot of effort for the new mayor to clean that particular mess up and get some of these jokers out of power in the city's systems.

Jackson's next mayor will probably be black, but it could be a different experience than before. Electing a third black mayor is a very different from the first or second. For one thing, his race isn't nearly as big a deal as it once was and there won't be as many people who cast their vote or lend their support based just on the candidates race. There should be a feeling among the voters that getting the job done is now more important than race.

I'm holding out hope that the Obama presidency can provide a model to cities like Jackson of what a black-lead administration can be like. At the very least, a successful black president should give any newly-elected black mayor confidence none of his predecessors had.

There will still be conflicts over whether to spend money on the white side of town or the black side of town, but those definitions are changing to be more about class and income than race, and, although that's still not an ideal situation, it is improvement.

The nation is changing and Jackson is changing. I, for one, am hopeful, but we still have to shed ourselves of some of the mistakes of the past, and that's going to be difficult.

Evolution and the Obama Chimp

Even though they've issued an apology, people are still simmering over the New York Post's Obama-Chimp cartoon.

It's offensive, we're told, because there's a history of people comparing Africans to apes and monkeys. What people may not realize is that it wasn't just random rednecks making this comparison, but legitimate anthropologists as well.

It started with Darwin's theory of evolution. People theorized that African apes evolved into African humans, who evolved into European humans, making African people more closely related to apes than Europeans.

There's two problems with that theory, both arising from a basic misunderstanding of how evolution works. First, evolution never operated with the development of European humans as an ultimate goal, that's just our own vanity pushing its way into the theory.

Secondly, evolution isn't linear. It starts from a pretty identifiable point, but then grows from that point into an ever expanding sphere of chain-reaction consequence. African apes are further into the sphere than humans, but African and European humans are more-or-less on the same level emanating from that point.

In other words, we're equally related to apes. You could say they are our grandparents, but African and European humans are cousins. Examining the three at a genetic level yields basically the same conclusion.

Stephen Jay Gould's most significant scientific work was probably his theory of punctuated equilibrium, but many will remember him most for his later work deconstructing the history of using race in evolutionary studies.

Most people don't spend much time considering the nuances of the evolutionary model and most white people spend very little time considering the influence of race and racism on it and the consequences.

I suspect this is how Sean Delonas came to draw the Obama-chimp cartoon in the first place. He might have had "comparing black people to monkeys is bad" stored somewhere in his brain, but he didn't consider the thought often enough for it to surface when he drew the cartoon, so he stepped in it big time.

There are going to be lots of land mines like this for people criticizing Obama over the next few years, because the experience of racism is so different for white people than it is for black people. I think we're just going to have to get used to it though, because it's unreasonable to expect people to lay off criticizing the current president, just because he's black. If it's any consolation to black people, it'll take an awful lot of racist comments to balance out the fact that the president himself is black, at the end of the day, he's still president.