by Jon Meacham
“Where you from?” the driver asked with a complete lack of interest.
“Liverpool.”
“Limey, huh? Well, you’ll be all right. It’s the goddamn New York Jews cause all the trouble.”
I found myself with a British inflection and by no means one of Liverpool. “Jews—what? How do they cause trouble?”
“Why, hell, mister. We know how to take care of this. Everybody’s happy and getting along fine. Why, I like niggers. And them goddamn New York Jews come in and stir the niggers up. They just stay in New York there wouldn’t be no trouble. Ought to take them out.”
“You mean lynch them?”
“I don’t mean nothing else, mister.”
He let me out and I started to walk away. “Don’t try to get too close, mister,” he called after me. “Just you enjoy it but don’t mix in.”
“Thanks,” I said, and killed the “awfully” that came to my tongue.
As I walked toward the school I was in a stream of people all white and all going in my direction. They walked intently like people going to a fire after it has been burning for some time. They beat their hands against their hips or hugged them under coats, and many men had scarves under their hats and covering their ears.
Across the street from the school the police had set up wooden barriers to keep the crowd back, and they paraded back and forth, ignoring the jokes called to them. The front of the school was deserted but along the curb United States marshals were spaced, not in uniform but wearing armbands to identify them. Their guns bulged decently under their coats but their eyes darted about nervously, inspecting faces. It seemed to me that they inspected me to see if I was a regular, and then abandoned me as unimportant.
It was apparent where the Cheerleaders were, because people shoved forward to try to get near them. They had a favored place at the barricade directly across from the school entrance, and in that area a concentration of police stamped their feet and slapped their hands together in unaccustomed gloves.
Suddenly I was pushed violently and a cry went up: “Here she comes. Let her through. . . . Come on, move back. Let her through. Where you been? You’re late for school. Where you been, Nellie?”
The name was not Nellie. I forget what it was. But she shoved through the dense crowd quite near enough to me so that I could see her coat of imitation fleece and her gold earrings. She was not tall, but her body was ample and full-busted. I judge she was about fifty. She was heavily powdered, which made the line of her double chin look very dark.
She wore a ferocious smile and pushed her way through the milling people, holding a fistful of clippings high in her hand to keep them from being crushed. Since it was her left hand I looked particularly for a wedding ring, and saw that there was none. I slipped in behind her to get carried along by her wave, but the crush was dense and I was given a warning too. “Watch it, sailor. Everybody wants to hear.”
Nellie was received with shouts of greeting. I don’t know how many Cheerleaders there were. There was no fixed line between the Cheerleaders and the crowd behind them. What I could see was that a group was passing newspaper clippings back and forth and reading them aloud with little squeals of delight.
Now the crowd grew restless, as an audience does when the clock goes past curtain time. Men all around me looked at their watches. I looked at mine. It was three minutes to nine.
The show opened on time. Sound of sirens. Motorcycle cops. Then two big black cars filled with big men in blond felt hats pulled up in front of the school. The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.
The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.
The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school. And here he came along the guarded walk, a tall man dressed in light gray, leading his frightened child by the hand. His body was tensed as a strong leaf spring drawn to the breaking strain; his face was grave and gray, and his eyes were on the ground immediately ahead of him. The muscles of his cheeks stood out from clenched jaws, a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check as a great rider directs a panicked horse.
A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they had come to see and hear.
No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?
The words written down are dirty, carefully and selectedly filthy. But there was something far worse here than dirt, a kind of frightening witches’ Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage.
Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women with their little hats and their clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heartbreaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.
The crowd behind the barrier roared and cheered and pounded one another with joy. The nervous strolling police watched for any break over the barrier. Their lips were tight but a few of them smiled and quickly unsmiled. Across the street the U.S. marshals stood unmoving. The gray-clothed man’s legs had speeded for a second, but he reined them down with his will and walked up the school pavement:
The crowd quieted and the next cheer lady had her turn. Her voice was the bellow of a bull, a deep and powerful shout with flat edges like a circus barker’s voice. There is no need to set down her words. The pattern was the same; only the rhythm and tonal quality were different. Anyone who has been near the theater would know that these speeches were not spontaneous. They were tried and memorized and carefully rehearsed. This was theater. I watched the intent faces of the listening crowd and they were the faces of an audience. When there was applause, it was for a performer.
My body churned with weary nausea, but I could not let an illness blind me after I had come so far to look and to hear. And suddenly I knew something was wrong and distorted and out of drawing. I knew New Orleans, I have over the years had many friends there, thoughtful, gentle people, with a tradition of kindness and courtesy. I remembered Lyle Saxon, a huge man of soft laughter. How many days I have spent with Roark Bradford, who took Louisiana sounds and sights and created God and the Green Pastures to which He leadeth us. I looked in the crowd for such faces of such people and they were not there. I’ve seen this kind bellow for blood at a prize fight, have orgasms when a man is gored in the bull ring, stare with vicarious lust at a highway accident, stand pati
ently in line for the privilege of watching any pain or any agony. But where were the others—the ones who would be proud they were of a species with the gray man—the ones whose arms would ache to gather up the small, scared black mite?
I don’t know where they were. Perhaps they felt as helpless as I did, but they left New Orleans misrepresented to the world. The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world, unchallenged by the other things I know are there.
Liar by Legislation
Look, June 28, 1955
HODDING CARTER
It happened on April Fools’ Day. But it wasn’t a joke to me or to the majority of the Mississippi House of Representatives who, by formal resolution, voted on April 1, 1955, that I had lied, slandered my state, and betrayed the South in a Look magazine article (March 22 issue) about the Citizens’ Councils—the militant Southern white groups which have been organized to discourage school integration and Negro suffrage.
Perhaps in the history of state legislatures, often citizens have been made liars by legislation. But I doubt that any of them received the accolade under the same conditions as I did.
April 1 was the final day of a special legislative session at which our Mississippi lawmakers had been seeking feverishly, and finally with success, to find new money to equalize the dual school systems, as a means of avoiding racial integration. April 1 was as usual the opening day of the turkey hunting season. With four friends, a cook, and a guide, I was turkey hunting forty miles from my home town, Greenville, Mississippi. Our headquarters was the Mistuh Charley, my newspaper’s cabin cruiser, and we were playing cards aboard her that afternoon after an unsuccessful opening day.
The game was interrupted by a low-flying plane that dropped a bundle near the wooded shoreline. I kept on playing cards, but John Gibson, the Delta Democrat-Times business manager and my publishing associate, went out and found the bundle. He returned and handed me some sheets of paper. “You’d better read this,” he said.
I did, and for the time being I lost interest in cards and turkeys. Joe Call, a cotton-duster pilot and friend, had dropped a press association report of what the House of Representatives had done, together with a note from my wife. I read the note first:
“We’ve played the story on page one as second lead. Everybody’s calling for your answer. When can we get it and what else shall we do? Love, Betty.”
Then I read the wire service report. It was like being kicked in the stomach by eighty-nine angry jackasses. That number of state legislators, with nineteen opposed and thirty-two others not voting, had officially branded me a liar. During two hours of angry debate preceding the vote, I had been described in terms not often used by lawmakers. I was a Negro lover and a scalawag, a lying newspaperman, a person who “as far as the white people of Mississippi are concerned, should have no rights.” I had sold out the South for 50,000 pieces of silver. (Note to Look: You owe me money.)
The elderly Speaker of the House, a perpetual seceder and a backer of the Citizens’ Councils, cast a vote for the resolution, gratuitously, although ordinarily he would not vote on any measure except to break a tie. I was defended by a few, notably the two young lawyer-legislators from Greenville and another young representative, Joel Blass of Stone County. Blass told how he also had felt the Councils’ lash because he had opposed a Council-backed constitutional amendment making it possible to abandon the state’s public school system. The fact that these men are young is important to this story and to the future of Mississippi.
My hunting companions thought the whole thing was funny. I didn’t, even though they assured me—and I agreed—that a Mississippi legislative majority was mentally and morally incapable of insulting anybody. I ducked below and started writing. I’m glad, I guess, that my fellow turkey stalkers talked me into watering down the original editorial. [The watered-down version is reproduced here. Ed.]
Liar by Legislation
By a vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resoluted the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote about the Citizens’ Councils for Look magazine. If this charge were true it would make me well qualified to serve with that body. It is not true. So, to even things up, I herewith resolve by a vote of 1 to 0 that there are 89 liars in the state legislature beginning with Speaker Sillers and working way on down to Rep. Eck Windham of Prentiss, a political loon whose name is fittingly made up of the words “wind” and “ham.”
As for the article, I stand by it. This action by a majority of the House of Representatives only serves to add new proof to what I wrote. There is one editor of this newspaper. I vote only in Washington County. The Citizens’ Councils claim 30,000 members who vote all over the state. That is explanation enough for the resolution.
I am grateful to the 19 legislators, and especially to Greenville’s two representatives, who voted against the resolution. I am also appreciative of the sane comments of Rep. Joel Blass of Stone County who likewise has been a target of the dishonest and contemptible tactics used by the Citizens’ Councils against anyone who differs with them or their methods.
I am hopeful that this fever, like the Ku Kluxism which rose from the same kind of infection will run its course before too long a time. Meanwhile, those 89 character mobbers can go to hell, collectively or singly, and wait there until I back down. They needn’t plan on returning.
Hodding Carter
I decided to wait until the next morning to telephone in the reply I had written. We turned on the radio and heard how I had been done in, and then went on playing cards.
But in the woods on the rest of the hunt I couldn’t forget what had happened. I did a lot of thinking about my twenty-three years as editor and publisher of small newspapers, four years in Louisiana and the last nineteen in Mississippi. I had never looked on myself as a starry-eyed crusader or an unfriendly critic of my homeland. No book or editorial or article I had ever written, including the Look article, would so identify me. I do like to believe that we’ve tried on our paper to take seriously the idea of man’s equality. But we’ve been generally orthodox newspaper people, my wife and I.
I have noted, however, that an editor is remembered longest for his unpleasant comments—and for comments made about him. Long ago in Louisiana that odious anti-Semite, Gerald L. K. Smith, said that I had been run out of Mississippi as a young newspaperman and would be run out of Louisiana. Every now and then, some politician will repeat that preposterous fantasy as gospel. When I won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1946, the late Theodore G. Bilbo, then running for re-election to the United States Senate, told his listeners that “no self-respecting Southern white man would accept a prize given by a bunch of nigger-loving, Yankeefied Communists for editorials advocating the mongrelization of the race.”
When, ten years earlier, in 1936, ours had been the first Mississippi paper to print a picture showing a Negro in a favorable light—it was of Jesse Owens, the Olympic triple winner—some of the readers who canceled their subscriptions said that our action was part of a Communist plot to end segregation.
When (and this again was unique in Mississippi) we began using the courtesy title “Mrs.” before the names of Negro women in news stories, the tale spread that we would soon demand “social equality” for Negroes. And every time we have come out for anything that some of our special pleaders or Stone Agers haven’t liked—from the Blue Cross nearly twenty years ago to a good word for the United Nations—we have known we could expect the same emotional cacophony, and that the cumulative roaring would echo loudest during political campaigns. But never had we been ganged up on by a state legislature. Most of all, I wanted to know what this thing portended.
I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since. I think I’ve come up with some answers, and I’d like to say first that I’m not as worried as I was about Mississippi or our newspaper or anything except our politicians. Perhaps the reaction of so many of my home town and
Southern fellow citizens, and my fellow newspapermen, particularly in Mississippi, is what keeps me from being worried.
When I got home, I asked our two Greenville legislators what they thought about the resolution. Both had strongly defended me on the floor. Young Joe Wroten, a lawyer and a minister’s son, didn’t mince words. “Some of our people who pay lip service to constitutional government pay homage in practice to a government of men,” he said. “The resolution was abortive thought control by legislation against facts, and I don’t like it. But maybe those venomous attacks on freedom of the press may wake people to the danger of a clandestine government of men.” And Joe punned: “—a Klandestine klavern of men. . . .”
Jimmy Robertshaw, likewise a lawyer, was more amused than disturbed. “It’s partly because they were scared, partly because they’re sore at the Supreme Court, and partly because they were on edge after twelve weeks of looking for money,” he said. “And some of them, don’t forget, are Council members. But I would like to think that they’re ashamed, too, and don’t want people outside to know that the Councils really exist.”
Joe and Jimmy are two of the legislative minority that wouldn’t go along. Numerically, they aren’t important. But numerically and otherwise, the letters that continue to pile up as an aftermath of the Look article and its legislative sequel do seem to me to be important. I have received more than 2,000 letters about the Council piece. They’ve run about three to two in my favor in the South, and better than that elsewhere. Heartening is the preponderance of letters from young people, especially servicemen; clergymen of all faiths; educators and fellow newspapermen, and the accent of so many of them has been upon the Christian challenge. The several hundred that quickly followed the resolution favored our side at least nineteen to one. I think this shows that Americans dislike seeing people ganged up on.