Anyone who has lived in Mississippi long enough to remember the early sixties or late fifties (or who has read about it) has to be shocked by Gov. Barbour’s attempt to present to Citizens Council, either in Yazoo City (or anywhere) as a force for racial reconciliation.
Of all the odd books in my personal library (and there are many odd ones), the oddest may be one related to the Citizens Council, a presentation copy of a book by journalist John Bartlow Martin called The Deep South Says Never.
The book is odd not because of its content, exactly– it is an early (1957) accurate depiction of the point of view of Southerners poised to resist-to-the-end desegregation. Martin begins by describing the Citizens Council in Mississippi, and he lets the founders describe it in their own words.
The founders were so sure of the truth of which they spoke that they bought up a supply of this book and gave it out as gifts– this is what we are! My copy is a presentation copy inscribed to one George Godwin “with warm regards,” and signed by Bill Simmons, dated 8/22/57. Bill Simmons was one of the founders of the council, running its office from the 1950s at least until the 1980s, when my sister met him doing a “twenty years after ’64″ story for the Clarion Ledger.
(Understand: The forward of this book is by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who notes that the book will serve as a warning of the exact nature of resistance to school desegregation in the South. I wonder if he later came to regret his intimations that the Warren court approach may have been a little to extreme… “IN retrospect, one is now compelled to wonder whether the fabian aproach of the Vinson Court– which sought to secure the result by construing the doctrine of ‘seperate but equal’ literally instead of reversing it– might not have been wiser than the strategy of the Warren Court of meeting the issue head-on.”)
Somewhere along the line, Simmons and the council folks cottoned on to the notion that letting the outsiders understand what they were thinking may not be the best public relation move.
But in 1957, they were happy to have a Yankee journalist lay it out, just like they saw it. For instance, there’s this:
In the Mississippi Delta, segregation may be the leader of the Citizens’ Council pointing to the muddy Tallahatchie River and saying, ‘That’s Emmett Till’s river,’ and laughing ‘You don’t come all the way down to Mississippi and not see Emmett Till’s river.’
Keep in mind that this is a book the Citizens Council gave out to explain itself. Simmons described how, with the original founder, Robert Patterson, they organized:
W.J. Simmons, who organized the Jackson Council and today shares leadership of the Mississippi Councils with Patterson has recalled “The main way Councils were organized was through the service clubs. Patterson or I would go and make a talke to Rotary or Kiwanis or Civitans or Exchange or Lions. We’d tell them what the Council movement is… Invariably the response was favorable.”
The Councils have a terrible yearning for respectability. Sometimes they even deny using economic pressure on Negroes and whites who favor desegregation– yet it is their chief weopon. Patterson has said, “Any ceonomic pressure taht’s been applied has been spontaneous. And that’s a lot more effective than anything planned.’ ..
Patterson said Mississippi would keep segregation either peaceably or violently The Councils proposed to do it peacably but if they failed ‘We’ll have violence and you’ll know it.’”
The book goes on to describe the council’s role in that early effort for desegregation in Yazoo City alluded to in the Sovereignty Commission memo in my last post on this.
On June 5, just six days after the Supreme Court decree [in the Brown II 1955 implementing the 1954 Brown I), the NAACP state board instructed its branches to ask local school boards to take “immediate steps” to wipe out classroom segregation. Within a few weeks Negroes filed petitions asking admission to white schools with the school boards in five Mississippi cities– Jackson, Vicksburg, Clarksdale, Natchez, and Yazoo City. …
As noted in the memo from the Sovereignty Commission files, this lead to the formation of the Yazoo City council.
On August 6, Negroes filed a petition in Yazoo City. The Citizens Council there bought a full page ad in the Yazoo City Herald to print the names and addresses of the Negro petition signers. ”There were about fifty-three signers originally,” Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, recalls, “and when they got through only two signatures remained on it. One of them is living by helping his wife sell mail order cosmetics– couldn’t get any work in town One man had been a plumber for twenty years in Yazoo City but he lost his business as soon as his name was in the paper. That very day on the way home he stopped in at the grocery for a loaf of bread and the grocer looked at him in the eye and said, “That’ll cost you a dollar.” He went to Detroit and we got him a job in a factory.” Wholesalers refused to supply a Negro grocer who had signed the petition, and a banker told him to come and get his money. He took his name off the petition but it did no good. He left town. Another man took his name off the petition but his employer fired him anyway. A woman went to a grocery and picked out about $10 worth of groceries but when she took them to the cashier the butcher told the cashier, ”This nigger woman is one of the ones who signed the petition,” and the clerk refused her money. She returned the merchandise. Other signers of the petition left Mississippi, unable to return a living.
Recall the description of all this in the Sovereignty Commission memo from three years later in my last post:
Several years ago the negroes presented the School Board in Yazoo County a petition with quite a number of negroes names on said petition requesting admittance into their white schools, whereupon the citizens of Yazoo County got busy and very soon had eliminated that situation by having those negroes whose signatures were petitioned to remove same. However, the good citizens of Yazoo County were shocked into realizing the necessity of binding themselves together and working as a unit to prevent a recurrence. Yazoo County has a very strong Citizens’ Council composed of the very best citizens of the county.
Just for those idly curious, Simmons inscribed the book to a guy who did advertising work for the Sov. Comm. (a quick run through the Sov. Comm. papers turns him up in that context)
Is that the same Yazoo City, Mississippi where that Mr. Willie Morris, the writer, lived also?
For those that don’t know, Mr. Morris (November 29,1934-August 2, 1999) was the youngest editor of Harper’s Magazine, up there in New York City.
It must be a different town. I have a copy of Mr. Morris’s book, GOOD OLD BOY, and inside the dust cover it says this:
“Willie Morris’s GOOD OLD BOY is about the mischief and magic of growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Since it was first published in 1971, Morris has received hundreds of letters from children who told him that the towns where they were growing up were very much like his Yazoo City. Others expressed disappointment in not having experienced small-town adventures like those in Morris’s stories. “to the latter I would reply, “writes the author in his introduction to the present edition, “never mind, adventure lies deep in the heart of any young person who wishes it, just waiting there to be summoned, depending on how much you want it.’.”
Well, looks like there might be two different towns named Yazoo City, Mississippi. One that Governor Barbour(October 22, 1947) and Mr. Willie Morris remember and the other racist Yazoo City, Mississippi, the one Mr. Joe Scarborogh and Mr. Eugene Robinson so much enjoyed trashing this morning while they continued to kick Governor Barbour in the nuts. Don’t feel left out Ole Miss fans, Mr. Robinson did not fail to mention the institutional racism at our beloved Ole Miss.
I suppose the Progressive’s are scared shitless that Mr. Obama might not be re-elected so they have already started to thrash anyone that might be a treat to his second term, without any concern what so ever for collateral damage!
In the case of Governor Barbour they find it easy to mock the way he talks and even easier to play the race card. After all if he has Southern roots he must, of course, he is a racist, and hot damn, if he went to Ole Miss there is no doubt that he is a racist.
When Mr. Willie Morris first moved to New York City and started working around those Progressives at that left leaning Harper’s Magazine, I wonder if they ever mocked the way he talked or teased him about his Southern roots?
NMS, please keep posting about the Citizens Council info and all the other information about Mississippi’s racist past. It is so helpful to Mississippi to keep dredging up the past-after all, we have no where to go but up.
WS
WS, direct your complaints to the party responsible: H. Barbour.
The two different Souths you mention, WaySouth–one is fiction, and the other is fact. I can’t believe you are faulting people for bringing up facts. It is exceptionally important work not to let anyone rewrite the past, especially for their own political gain. Can’t you see that?
Hey, WS, I grew up in a town that felt like the fictional one in To Kill A Mockingbird. Or as idillic as Willie Morris’s Yazoo City. And when they tried to integrate the college here, when I was a second grader, there was a riot partly provoked by state government officials where two people were killed, and the student admitted had to have armed guards.
There’s a file for Lafayette County in the Sov.. Comm. papers. In it you can read of in investigation where a license plate belonging to a local black family turned up at a civil rights meeting in Jackson. They send Sov Comm. investigators to Oxford who contacted the sheriff and learned that the car was being driven by the family’s oldest son, who was at jackson State. They investigated further and learned that the family owned their own house and the mother and father were two of the 70 (out of 7000!) blacks registered in the county to vote.
This lead the SC to conclude that the parents were too independent and should be put on a watch list for agitators.
That’s just one memo, three pages out of hundreds for Lafayette County, full of documents where the Sov. Comm., local law enforcement, and the Council worked together to spy upon and harras blacks who showed any sign of independence. It was real, and it didn’t often touch the way kids growing up the way Morris did grew up.
Further: If you think the rosy-tinted view of a southern childhood reflects what Morris published at Harpers in the 60s, you haven’t read much of Harpers in the 60s. As an editor, he was fully receptive to the realities of the south. The bedtime stories of Good Old Boy are just that.
What? St. Haley a racist? Say it aint so! I always wondered about those “Change the Governor, not the flag” ads. lol, If I wasn’t so terrified they might win, I would almost wish for a Palin/Barbour ticket.
I’m just amused that WayRacist thinks progressives are terrified about Obama losing in 2012, as if the man has actually been progressive instead of barely left-of-center Reaganite whose been running the country for the benefit of bankers over the last two years. And I’m pretty confident that he will get reelected if the GOP is really so debased that we’re seriously discussing whether Grand Cyclops Barbour can get the Republican nomination. I mean, really?!? The first AA president in U.S. history still has approval ratings better than Reagan’s in 1982 and Clinton’s in 1994, despite 9%+ unemployment, and the GOP might run the governor of Mississippi who apparently wants to make the 2012 election a referendum on whether the White Citizens Councils of the 1950′s were really racist or not?!? Bring it on!
BTW, are the Sovereignty Commission papers publicly available? I had seemed to remember that those documents (or at least some of them) were sealed for 100 years or some other preposterously long time? Am I wrong about that?
Here ya’ go, Alan:
http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/
George Godwin was head of Godwin Advertising (now The Godwin Group), one of the oldest advertising agencies in Jackson. George Godwin Sr. started the firm in the 1930s, and George Jr. took it over some time later. If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably the senior Godwin that handled the Sovereignty Commission account, such as it was. Both are now deceased.
Lordy, Lordy-Let’s do some fact checking.
Right out of the pages of the Soverneignty Commison papers that Ben referenced:
“List of Mississippi business men reported in Wall Street Journal as MODERATES
Off-topic: Slate has this piece about Barry Hannah today:
http://www.slate.com/id/2278455/
and F. Scott Fitzgerald died 70 years ago today, as Frank Zappa was born 70 years ago today.
“List of Mississippi business men reported in Wall Street Journal as MODERATES who pledged their support to the Ole Miss faculty and urged the students to return to the Campus and calmly continue their education.”
And look whose name is listed third in the second column, W.H. Barbour, Yazoo City. I wonder who he is?
This supports what Governor Barbour was, I believe, trying to say. Back in those dark days there were Mississippi businessmen and others who were doing the best that they could to promote better race relations in spite of what was happening in the state.
Those who are familiar with Oxford will also recognize the name of my dear friend Baxer O. Elliot, Sr., Oxford, who served on the Board of Alderman for many years and helped build a lot of the town.
Rather than look at the facts I’m sure most of your had much prefer to take Eugene Robinson’s approach and just throw the Race Card. So be it.
Here’s the link to that page if you care to look.
http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd01/003954.png&otherstuff=1|67|3|26|1|1|1|3842|
WS
WaySouth: I daresay those “Moderates” you’re so proud of were substantially working both sides of the street. They said “take it easy and let’s all get along” on one side, but they reported to the sheriff, or policeman, or to their White Citizens’s Council or KKK brother-in-law or such the balances owed on open accounts by black customers, or they’d deny credit to black customers, or they’d prefer criminal charges if a black customer’s check bounced.
Treachery worked both ways, too. When blacks called for boycotts of white businesses over one grievance or another, they forced out of business many of the local merchants who had worked with them, even coddled them a bit, before “The Great Unrest” emerged. Drive through any town in the state today and look at the sidewalks and old storefronts … you’ll see the names of the merchants–mostly Jewish–who established stores there and extended generous credit to black citizens … stores they lost because of the boycotts.
There are no “Bright and Shining Lights” in Mississippi history. Anyone who tries to gloss over race relations in Mississippi is trying to goldplate a you-know-what.
WaySouth: I believe that WH Barbour was Haley’s uncle, and the namesake of the federal judge.
For whatever its worth.
Our Judge Littlejohn is in there, too.
Littlejohn to his credit was one of two state legislators attacking the Commission for declaring an Ole Miss student a “left-winger” and presumed Communist subversive because he had … allegedly worked for an Atlanta newspaper.
He does however endorse segregation in a newspaper quote, and they post a travel voucher for his out-of-state flights charged to the Commission.