Monday, January 17, 2005

Mississippi in 1966

The indictment of Edgar Ray Killen for the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi has provoked a number of comments from various writers on how Mississippi is dealing with the segregationist past, or some variation of that theme.  (It strikes me that "Killen" is a particularly unfortunate name for someone on trial for murder.) For instance: The search for closure in a Mississippi town by Patrik Jonnson Christian Science Monitor 01/14/05.

Mississippi, like other Southern states, has made undeniable progress in race relations. Diminished prejudice, a low cost of living, and rising demographic trends have lured many, including actor Morgan Freeman, to the Magnolia State. But the long shadows of the Civil War still fall here, and movies such as "Mississippi Burning," which was based on the Killen case, as well as scandals tying powerful state politicians to segregationist groups, continue to define Mississippi.

"What has really marked Mississippi as a sort of the 'South of the South' has been the society," says Watson. "Companies don't want to go there, professionals don't want to go there. On the other hand, there are a lot of black people moving back, and obviously folks are looking for something they can't find anywhere else in the country. As Mississippi addresses these ghosts of the past, then more people will be willing to do that."

The Watson quoted there is Harry Watson, director of the Center for the Study of the American South in North Carolina.  I haven't heard the expression "South of the South" before; but probably most Mississippians wouldn't argue with it as a description of the state.

What kind of past are we talking about here?  Here's one description that provides some recollections of how nasty things could get in Mississippi in the days where the likes of Edgar Ray Killen could run loose on the backroads: Ugliness in the Mississippi I knew by Gregory Favre San Francisco Chronicle 12/22/02.  The immediate context for the article was Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's final meltdown as Senate Republican leader.

I left Mississippi a long time ago, but I have made many visits in the years since to see my family, so I have bushels full of good times and good friends and loved ones in Mississippi stored in my memory bank.

But I have been sitting here trying to reconcile numerous other memories of the Mississippi I knew growing up there with what some have been saying in defense of Lott after his remarks at the 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond. ...

The Mississippi of my youth was a time when a young African American man in my hometown was killed by a white man simply because he refused to have a drink with the man. The killer was found guilty and sentenced to all of six months in jail. The grieving mother, meanwhile, buried the last of her five children.

In the Mississippi of my youth, an African American mechanic was shotgunned by a white man because he had other jobs to do and couldn't stop right then to fix the man's car. Nobody went to jail.

In the Mississippi of my youth, there were separate schools, separate drinking fountains, separate sections in the movie theaters and whites-only restaurants and hotels. It was a state with a poll tax and intimidation and voting registration fraud that made sure most blacks weren't allowed to vote.

It's this environment, the swamp of Southern segregation and its defenders, that produced a large part of the ideology and attitude of today's Republican Party, however embarassing that might be for Yankee suburbanite Bush fans who like to think they're above all that.

But Favre raises an important point, on the way that good and fond memories can be mixed with bad and degrading ones as a definition of a place like Mississippi.  A friend of mine in Memphis once said, in a great turn of phrase that I've long since stolen as my own, that Mississippi isn't a place, it's a state of mind.  And there's something to that.

But what does it really mean, "addressing these ghosts of the past"?  As I've mentioned a number of times, Mississippi's current Republican governor won election in 2003 with the open endorsement of the racist White Citizen's Council (which officially goes by the nameof the Council of Conservative Citizens today).  And that was with overwhelming support by white voters.  So you have to wonder how much those ghosts have been exorcised.

But, again, I found myself thinking, what would "addressing the ghosts" or "coming to terms with the past" or whatever really mean?  Would it mean politicians giving nice but vague speeches recalling the bad old days coupled with a few inspirational words about how we all have to move forward together?  Would it mean creating museums to commemorate events of the civil rights era?  Personally, I think it would be nice if the county courthouses in Mississippi took down those dorky Confederate veteran memorials that so many of them have.  But is that "addressing ghosts"?  Or just substituting slightly more positive symbolism for negative symbolism in monuments that hardly anyone pays attention to anyway?

You probably won't see this in the Yankee press

But then I saw this item from Lloyd Gray.  Since "blog ethics" is currently a big discussion, I'll happily mention again that Lloyd was the editor on the student paper at Millsaps College in Jackson when I was a student there and did a column for the paper.   He gave me a lot of leeway to say what I wanted.  As I recall, the only thing he ever edited out of one of my columns was a gratuitous reference to "the American war machine."  Fortunately (or not!), I've acquired a somewhat more diplomatic vocabulary in the intervening years.

And Lloyd is still writing good stuff:  Neshoba's path leads toward redemption by Lloyd Gray Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal 01/08/05.  He picks up on something that doesn't come through in the national press coverage I've seen.  Referring back to a 25th anniversary commemoration in 1989 about the murders, he writes:

The events of June 1989 helped pierce the armor of silence and denial. The 1990s were a period of progress and prosperity in Neshoba County. Gradually the murders were talked about more, their historic significance recognized, and the idea of reopening the case periodically hit the news. The Chamber of Commerce even began to offer guidance for tourists who came through wanting to get a handle on what happened and where.

But it took another 15 years for the momentum to build to the point we are today - with the first-ever Mississippi indictment for murder in the case coming from a Neshoba County grand jury last week. That happened for one reason: the good citizens of Neshoba County insisted on it.

Last summer, they had a 40th anniversary commemoration, this time spearheaded by a broader, deeper community coalition - whites, blacks, Choctaw Indians, civic and political leaders all. They made it clear: they wanted justice in the case and, for themselves and their community, redemption and renewal.

Attorney General Jim Hood became an ally and has played an important role in bringing the case this far. But without the willingness - no, the insistence - of the community to right this wrong, nothing would have happened.

It's a point that shouldn't be missed.  A multi-racial group in the local community demanded that the state do its job in the case and go after the murderers still at large.  Now that's "addressing the ghosts."

It's in this context that I finally feel okay about doing this post and the one following.  It's about two incidents in my home town, the small town of Shubuta, Mississippi, that made a deep impression on me at the time and had a big role in shaping my viewpoint ever since.

(For more articles on the Killen indictment and its implications, see:
Hood seeks informants' help Jackson Clarion-Ledger 01/09/05
Killen arrrest challenges nation's views of Miss. by Jerry Mitchell Jackson Clarion-Ledger 01/11/01
The Clarion-Ledger is maintaining an updated archive on the case:  Neshoba County Slaying Archive Jackson Clarion-Ledger.)

Mississippi - a police state under segregation?

It's often said, and I believe accurately, that Mississippi during the segregation decades, and especially in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s at least, was a police state.  But what does that really mean?  It doesn't mean that every town looked like Chile during the 1973 military coup.  Although the Christian Science Monitor article I quoted in the previous post describes a 10:00 curfew for black citizens only in the little city Philadelphia MS that was reportedly rather severely enforced.  So I wouldn't want to minimize the overt signs that were there.

But both black and white Mississippians carried on their lives.  They were born, got married, lived and died, and most of the days were routine.  People visited with their neighbors, drove around town, shopped for groceries, gossiped about each other, worked, took vacations.  They lived normal lives, in other words.

And then occasionally there would be sudden, shattering racial violence.

The Mississippi Stasi

Another aspect of Mississippi's version of segregation reminds me very much of the stories I've heard about the Stasi, the East German secret police.  One of the most difficult but also important aspects of the transition to democracy and unification for eastern Germans since 1990 has been the opening of the Stasi archives.  The Stasi established an extensive network of informers, encouraging East German citizens to rat each other out for offenses real and imagined.  Many people were surprised to find out that some of their closest friends and neighbors had been Stasi informants against them.

Mississippi had its own version of the Stasi, known as the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC).  This is a good summary description from The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: An Agency History by Sarah Rowe-Sims Mississippi History Now Sept 2002.

As the state's official tax-funded agency to combat activities of the Civil Rights Movement, the commission performed many duties. Although varied, these tasks can be divided into three general functions: investigative, advisory, and public relations. For seventeen years, from 1956 to 1973, the commission spied on civil rights workers, acted as a clearinghouse for information on civil rights activities and legislation from around the nation, funneled money to pro-segregation causes, and distributed right-wing propaganda.

As Rowe-Simms' article explains, a court order in 1998 required the opening of the sealed files of the MSSC.  For comparison, we might note that the opening of Stasi files in Germany began almost immediately after reunification.  School segregation ended in Mississippi in 1970, and the MSSC ceased operations in 1973.  The Germans have become more accustomed to dealing with "the ghosts of the past" than the officials of Mississippi, it seems.

It's the online archives of the MSSC documents that I'll use in the following post to tell this story.  I should stress that anyone using these documents has to be aware that the MSSC was a sleazy, rightwing agency whose purpose was to support the unconstitutional system of segregation that nevertheless was practiced in the state of Mississippi.  The MSSC archives also have a section where people can provide responses to their MSSC files, and anyone using them should also check for responses.

This is always a problem with publicly releasing raw investigative files.  In the case of MSSC, they were looking to get anything they could to discredit civil rights activists, and some of the Shubuta files include unsubstantiated gossip and sexual misconduct and worse against people.  In fairness to people mentioned as having spoken to MSSC investigators, one should also keep in mind that as an official (if disreputable) state agency, the MSSC could expect that anyone in a public office would at least go through the motions of cooperating with them.

As one respondent puts it in her response to MSSC files naming her, "I do hope that nothing in anyone's file is used in such a way as to reinforce false information or bandy-about the negative adjectives used by informants and employees of the Commission."  That response, by the way, gives a good feel for how sleazy the MSSC's procedures were.  In this case, they claimed the individual in question had given them a statement which she claims (in careful language) she did not.  Her response also gives a glimpse of the ways in which the authorities tried to spy on and intimidate civil rights activists.

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