In Search of Bisco (10 page)

I know my color and I’m proud to stay with it and be what I am. Some of my grandchildren have got a lot lighter color than me and my wife and the time may come when they’ll go up North to pass and leave our race. That’d be all right with me. You can’t expect the younger generation to keep the same old-fashioned ideas I’ve got.

I was born and raised in the South and I’ve been colored for sixty-eight years. That means I’ve lived within my race all my life and I’m accustomed to it. And that’s why you won’t see me at my age getting out and demonstrating for integration and civil rights. That’s something for the young people to do and I’m not going to blame them for trying to change things for the better as long as they use good common sense about the way they go at it. I’ll stand behind them every step of the way as long as they do that.

What I hope about it is that our young people will stick with Martin King and listen to him. If it wasn’t for Martin King, we’d still be back where we started from—which was ’way back nowhere. I don’t want to see some scatter-brain colored people do the wrong kind of agitating and do us more harm than good. If everybody will listen to Martin King, we’ll be all right.

There’s something in the newspapers nearly every day about integrating the school so the colored and white children can get the same education. I’m in favor of both races getting a good education, but the big trouble is that nobody’s going to get a good education if the schools don’t provide better teaching. It’s a shame the way some of the white teachers misuse the English language.

Those teachers have been to college and they should’ve learned the correct way to use the language if they’re going to be teachers. I’m not educated enough myself to explain what the right way to say something is, but I can tell when something they say sounds wrong. Maybe I ought to watch what I’m saying right now, but the way I feel about it is I wouldn’t want my children or grandchildren go to a school and come out of it speaking the kind of grammar some of the teachers do. And I’ll say that about any teacher—white or colored.

Some of the young colored people right here in Jackson are getting restless and say they want to do something about their civil rights and organize demonstrations and such things. So far, nothing like that’s been done and some people like me keep on telling them not to be too quick about it. I don’t care what the law says, this is still a white man’s town. I’d want to hear what Martin King advised before starting anything like that in a little place like Jackson. Some white men never pay attention to any law and they can be real mean to all colored people when they want to be.

The way I see it, action like that ought to start in bigger cities like Birmingham and Mobile and Montgomery where the colored live in bigger numbers and have some good leadership. The young people in Jackson need a leader with real good judgment before they start something like that and right now there’s nobody to take charge. Without some good leadership, the young people run the risk of not being able to control a demonstration up on the bluff where the white people are. That could start a race riot quicker than anything else I know of. And if things ran wild, all the colored would end up with more harm than good.

It’s the same way about the Black Muslims in Jackson. Some of our people talk about wanting to join the Black Muslims, but there’s no leader for them here so far, and you can’t run that kind of organization without leadership no more than you can have a worthwhile church without a minister.

To tell the truth, I’m suspicious of the Black Muslims, anyhow. I just don’t like their kind of talk. And when you look them straight in the face, they look mighty close to being something exactly like the Ku Klux Klan for the colored.

Some people argue that we need the Black Muslims to give Negroes the courage they need to stand up and claim their rights.

I’m in favor of us getting up all the courage we can, because that’s what we’re going to need a lot of from now on, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable with my courage if I got it from Martin Luther King.

Maybe it’s because I’m proud of being a Georgia-born Geechee with my kind of tannish color, but anyway I always tell people I’m not black enough to be a Black Muslim.

T
O COME UPON IT
in the lingering twilight of a balmy summer day, Laurel is a languorous tree-shaded town with a name of romantic implications in the pine-crested hills of Southern Mississippi. Flowers bloom profusely in stately gardens and a stranger in town is likely to be mesmerized by the flower-scented air. Under the tall spire of an elegant church there is fervent praise of God, unoffending mention of the brotherhood of man, and a prayer for the less fortunate people in the world.

In the bright light of day, however, the reality of Laurel is made plain and revealing. It is then a place of thirty thousand people arbitrarily confined within inflexible zones allotted to wealthy white citizens on the northside, segregated Negroes on the southside, and impoverished whites in the middle.

Any such socially, racially, and economically regulated allotment of residence is not an unusual custom in Bisco Country. In fact, it is a traditional way of life rigidly maintained and enforced from South Carolina to Louisiana; nevertheless, the contrasts between classes and races are more sharply defined and rigidly fixed in Mississippi than elsewhere.

The stranger in town might say that Laurel, in particular, is remote and isolated from the mainstream of American life and that its people are pathetic in their solitude. But a prideful white citizen of the northside will insist that all of Mississippi, and particularly Laurel, has been endowed with a fortunate heritage that less privileged people living in other states scorn because of envy and ignorance.

All might be well in Laurel, as it could be elsewhere in Mississippi, if prideful residents of the northside would look at least as far away as the southside of their town even if they do not wish to see beyond the borders of their own state. As it is, and as though it is a way to avoid embarrassment, they fail to acknowledge their responsibility for the poverty and degradation of the Negro families on the southside and ignore the fact that it was the labor of Negroes that enabled them to accumulate wealth and social pretensions.

But customs prevail. And arrogance predominates. Instead of acting upon his responsibility as a citizen in modern America to alleviate and adjust economic and social discrimination imposed upon the Negro for generations, the white supremist is intent upon striving by any means to enforce a perpetuation of racial injustice that originated long ago in the time of slavery. As long as this custom can be maintained, the conscience of the white supremist will be quiet and undisturbed. Enforcement of the custom ranges from intimidation to physical punishment to violent death.

The Citizens’ Council, or, as the white supremist organization is more aptly called, the White Citizens’ Council, was founded as recently as the nineteen-fifties in Mississippi. The purpose of the organization is to legalize segregation and prohibit by law any form of integration and racial equality and to relieve the individual white supremist of the do-it-yourself chore of run-nigger-run intimidation.

The White Citizens’ Council is a white-collar club striving by day in business suits—and often in judicial robes and clerical garb—to attain by subtle propaganda and forthright political pressure the same discriminatory results that the Ku Klux Klan might fail to achieve by night in bed-sheeted paraphernalia with acts of intimidation and premeditated violence.

In such a racist environment, membership in the White Citizens’ Council quickly became a status symbol for both the dedicated white supremist and the political opportunist. And, because of the organization’s unconcealed appeal to prejudice and opportunism, local chapters were soon founded in towns and cities throughout Mississippi.

Now, after ten years, there are White Citizens’ Councils in all states of the Deep South and, in addition, there is a mail-order White Citizens’ Council of America to sell memberships and provide pamphlets and insignia for the racist minded in all parts of the United States. In Mississippi and elsewhere, the only purpose of the organization is to incite racial prejudice and promote political action for the establishment of legalized segregation and discrimination in every state in the nation.

The dedicated advocate of white supremacy spoke with the fierce-eyed evangelistic fervor of a revivalist preacher at a country church in Mississippi on a hot summer night.

I’m going to tell you some plain facts. The fate of this whole nation is in the hands of people like us who are working day and night to keep the two races from mixing. That’s us, by God, and you can look at me and say I’m one of them. And I’m damn proud of it, too.

We’re working like hell to save the whole white race from getting wiped off the map. If we don’t have segregation, and have it now, this’ll be a nation of mongrels—not white like us and not black like them. We’d be a dirty gray color in between. It’s up to us to put a stop to that for the good of the white race.

You hear a lot about integration and what a fine democratic thing it is and all that kind of damn radical talk. But we won’t be fooled. We know it’s the Yankees who’re pushing it. It’s a communist trick. When you first hear about integration and don’t stop and think, you might even take it for granted that it’s a natural thing to let the niggers live where they please and go where they please and do what they please. But when you come right down to it in actual practice, no pure-blooded white man is going to be in favor of it.

It’s undemocratic to force integration on pure-blooded white people and make them mix with niggers. Segregation gives a white man the democratic right to choose the kind of people he wants to eat with and do business with and even talk to. That’s why it’s a communist trick to say whites and niggers ought to mix in all sorts of ways. I hope those Yankees get mixed and come out with the half-color they ought to be.

I’ve heard all the Yankee talk about people like us in the White Citizens’ Council being nigger-haters and reactionaries and such things. But there’s no truth to that. Not one little bit of truth. It’s the same old communist trick to call us things like that. We’re loyal white Americans who are brave enough to speak out and do something about the way the niggers are trying to move in on us and take what don’t belong to them. We’re a hell of a lot more patriotic than the Yankees who criticize us.

You hear the niggers say they want to sleep in our hotels and motels, but they don’t have no more right to do that than go to my house and sleep in my bed. They say they want to eat in our cafes and restaurants, but they don’t have no more right to do that than they have to walk in my house and sit down at my table and tell my wife to feed them.

And it’s the same about everything else they make a claim about wanting to do. You go ahead and give the niggers just one little foothold and there’d be no end to what they’d want next.

For one thing, every nigger man in town would want to bed a white woman. That’s right. And it’s not that they’d want to marry your sister, neither. What they’d want to do is strip her naked and then go on from there. Given a chance, they’d make whores out of all white women—and then tell white men to keep hands off. You let a crowd of niggers stand around on the street corner and watch a white woman walk by and you don’t have to guess a second time what they’ve got in mind. You’d be right the first time when you said what they were thinking about was getting their hands on her titties and their balls between her legs.

It used to be that white men would go after good-looking young colored girls whenever they felt like it. There were plenty of them all around and easy to get between sundown and dark. They could always be counted on being better honeyfuckers than ordinary white girls, too. But that’s not the way it is any more—there are plenty of easy-to-get honeyfucking white girls these days.

But what’s happening now is that things have got turned around and nigger men want white women. But nobody’s going to tell me it’s all right for a white girl to intercourse a nigger man. And anybody who’d say that is a Yankee and a communist and ought to be run out of the country.

All this proves we’ve got to keep up all the segregation we’ve already got—and even that’s not enough in these times. What we’ve got to do is to have more of it and make it stick. The way to do that is to find ways to make it legal by law so the government can’t come along and put white people in jail for doing what we know is right.

The niggers don’t know it, because that’s how ignorant they are, but everybody else knows they were a hell of a lot better off in the old days when they couldn’t even read and write. That’s when they were trained to know their place and never made trouble thinking they were just as good as white people and ought to have the same privileges. That’s why when you have hard-and-fast segregation it works for everybody’s best interest—and for the niggers most of all. Then they don’t have false notions when they’re kept segregated—that’s when they damn well know their place and stay in it.

Down here we get too damn much unasked-for advice from Yankees about how to handle the niggers. I don’t mind being criticized by somebody who knows more than I do about something and who can show me where I’m wrong. I’m open-minded about such things. But what I don’t like is being criticized by somebody who don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Up there, Yankees won’t likely see a nigger in a week’s time and he lives as far away from niggers as he can get and won’t eat in the same place with one of them even if the meal was free.

Just the same, the Yankee will be the one to make a big to-do about the way we say nigger children have got to stay out of our white schools and how we try to keep the race from eating in our restaurants and sleeping in white motels. But I’ll tell you something about that. And I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. You let a Yankee come down here to live and he’ll be the biggest talker of all in favor of segregation before the year’s out. He don’t want no nigger getting close enough to fool around with his wife.