The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  The powerful in Greenwood had always been outnumbered. Before the Civil War, in the Southern states it was common for just a handful of White men to manage a plantation with hundreds of Black slaves. This created a population imbalance that continued even after slavery was abolished and White planters decided to embrace the sharecropping system. In this new system, similar to slavery, one White family could own a farm with multiple emancipated Black families living on their property as sharecroppers, “a form of life Blacks repeatedly said was only marginally better than slavery.”

  By the 1960s, Greenwood’s population was around twenty-two thousand, and it was almost an even split between Blacks and Whites, with Blacks outnumbering Whites by only about seven hundred. However, when the farming communities that surrounded Greenwood were added to the equation, it was an entirely different story. Leflore County had a population of 47,142 people, of whom 16,699 were White and 30,443 were Black. Even though Whites made up only 35 percent of the overall population, they owned 90 percent of the land.

  The passing of the Civil Rights Act threatened the Southern way of life, the collective dream, that Greenwood Whites had grown accustomed to living. If taken literally and executed immediately, the federal law could cause a sudden influx of Blacks making their way into White stores, churches, schools, neighborhoods, their very lives. Whites in Greenwood responded quickly, railing against a change from the outside that felt too quick and too radical.

  Eight days after the law passed, the local chapter of the White Citizens’ Council released a statement urging business owners to resist integrating. The Council went so far as to promise financial support from the White Citizens’ Legal Fund “to anyone involved in litigation for refusal to serve Negroes.” It would appear that local Whites were paying close attention. Almost immediately, several of the restaurants, which had previously been for Whites only, converted into private clubs where only members could enter.

  Sara Criss noted a number of other drastic, spur-of-the-moment decisions Whites in Greenwood were making in order to avoid having Blacks flood their world:

  As soon as the Civil Rights Bill was passed the city ordered the municipal pool closed, along with the Youth Center and the Library. We had had the best city recreation program in the state with a full-time director, and this signaled the end of all of that. Hundreds of children had learned to swim under Red Cross instruction each summer, and closing the pool meant the end of that program.

  There had been all sorts of instructional programs for children at the Youth Center, such as baton twirling, dancing, exercises, etc. All of this, too, ended. The Library opened three weeks later, but all of the chairs had been taken out so that no one could sit down in there.

  Even though it was only closed for a week, the idea of losing the swimming pool was just too much for some Greenwood citizens to bear. A few of the town leaders figured that if restaurants could become private, then certainly the city pool could as well. Within a week’s time, the Kiwanis Club reopened the pool as a private club. According to Sara, “This venture did not last long, as it was too expensive for the club, and the pool finally remained closed. At one point the Junior Auxiliary tried opening the Youth Center as a private endeavor, but this too was not successful.”

  One of the Whites who had the most trouble after the act was passed was the man charged with managing the Leflore Theater, because Blacks had set their sights on integrating it. Night after night they showed up and attempted to enter. These efforts often ended in arguments, and sometimes in violence.

  The manager of the movie theater was stuck between a rock and a hard place. His parent company fully expected him to comply with the new federal law, but many Whites in Greenwood were determined to do otherwise. For the most part, Whites stopped going to the Leflore Theater after the Civil Rights Act passed, because of the nightly commotions. Nevertheless, there continued to be at least a few local Whites in Greenwood who wanted to see movies and really didn’t care what color the other patrons were. Sara Criss writes about how that perspective played out for one prominent member of Greenwood society:

  Thatcher Walt, who was editor of the Commonwealth, decided he did not want to be intimidated and kept from going to the theater by the roughneck whites and agitating Negroes and so attended a movie there. While he and his family were out of town the next weekend, someone shot into his home. Not long after, he resigned his job and moved to Florida, saying he no longer wanted to live here. It was that bad. The decent, respectable citizens who comprised most of the population were caught between two groups who were trying to stir up trouble.

  The passing of the Civil Rights Act wasn’t the only event unsettling the waters in Greenwood. The summer of 1964 was also the Freedom Summer, a season in which Blacks were really beginning to mobilize in a concentrated effort to get the vote. But it wasn’t just local Blacks pushing for change. Volunteers were pouring into the South from all over the country to help with their mission. Meanwhile, Whites who were angered by this activity responded with all kinds of violence. Sara said that “there were almost daily reports of Negro churches being burned.” Greenwood had gone from being a family-centered town to a combustible, unpredictable battleground. Reporters from all over the country were coming in to document the discord. Sara, a young mother at the time, had gone from living in a quiet, idyllic town to living in one that felt like a war zone.

  Both Blacks and Whites in Greenwood felt the powerful tide of change as it slammed into their town. But how the experience played out for Blacks was quite different.

  A Force to Be Reckoned With

  In the 1960s, the streets of Greenwood were run by an all-White police force who served the good of White Greenwood while creating what some called a “reign of terror” in Black Greenwood. One resident made a habit of peering down alleyways on Saturday nights just to see which Blacks the cops had chosen to terrorize and beat for no reason other than to remind them, and everyone around, of the extent of their power.

  One of the first Black attorneys in Greenwood, Alix Sanders recalls that the police department was made up of poor Whites who were “abusive to Blacks,” and specifically “abusive to lower-class Blacks.” To many people, it seemed that the local police department’s primary job was to stop integration. Another Greenwood resident said of the time that “there was no protection given to Black citizens, especially when you were attempting to assert certain civil rights, you became an enemy that the forces would have to deal with. The police department was engaged full-time in those kinds of things—to maintain the segregated system that was in place in that day.”

  In 1962, a Black activist named Sam Block moved into Greenwood to open an SNCC office. When he went to the courthouse to learn more about registering to vote, he was greeted by the sheriff, who asked, “Nigger, where are you from . . . I know you ain’t from here ’cause I know every nigger and his mammy.” He then instructed Sam to pack his clothes and leave town for his own good. This was just a harbinger of the resistance Sam and the Black residents of Greenwood would face in their efforts to gain the vote.

  According to Charles Payne, in Leflore County in 1961 “almost 100% of Whites were registered to vote, compared to just 268 of Blacks (2%). In the seven years since the Brown decision, only 40 Blacks have been allowed to register.”

  Ironically, some of the reasoning behind the vehement fight Whites put up against giving Blacks equal voting rights was probably best described by Sam Block at an SNCC conference in 1963, when he acknowledged that they were:

  [A]sking the people in the Delta to do something which they don’t ask of any white person anywhere else. . . . And that is to allow Negroes to vote in an area where they are educationally inferior but yet outnumber the white people and hence constitute a serious political threat. Because in every other area of the country, the Negro votes are ghettoized—the Negroes elect their leaders, but they don’t elect leaders to preside over what we could call a numerically inferior but educationally superior w
hite elite.

  Block was exposing a circular problem in the movement. Blacks struggled to obtain quality educations for a multitude of reasons, including not being allowed to send their children to school because planters wanted them in the fields, little support for teachers, an imbalance of dollars allotted to Black children when compared to White children, and, not least of which, the fact that their schools had still not integrated. Blacks needed political representatives who would protect their right to an education. The only way to get those representatives was to vote.

  When Sam Block first arrived in Greenwood, it wasn’t just Whites who showed resistance. Sam’s efforts to get Blacks registered was met with a hard concrete wall of fear. Blacks were so afraid of all that Sam and his colleagues represented—the violence they were sure to face in their efforts—that Greenwood Blacks crossed the street if they saw Sam coming in their direction. The fear of registering to vote wasn’t a hyped-up fear.

  It was well-known that in Brookhaven, just over a few hours’ drive from Greenwood, a Black man named Lamar Smith had been shot dead at ten in the morning in front of the courthouse where he was helping Blacks complete absentee ballot forms so they could vote without being threatened at the polls. In spite of his murder taking place in front of multiple witnesses, no one was ever charged. The reality was that any White person who felt strongly about Blacks not being allowed to vote could go to any extreme to stop them without the threat of prosecution.

  In spite of the cold reception Sam received from both Whites and Blacks, he and his colleagues continued to canvass, and one by one, Greenwood Blacks began joining the movement. By the end of 1962, everything had changed. The civil rights movement efforts in Greenwood were like a well-oiled machine. On almost every single block in the Black neighborhoods were people who were supportive of the movement and willing to help on the many occasions when SNCC workers were fleeing from violence.

  In February 1963, four Black-owned businesses were firebombed, and when Sam Block claimed that the fires were arson, he was arrested for making statements to disrupt the peace in Greenwood. On the day of his trial, over a hundred Black protestors made their way to city hall in what some said was the “first mass protest by Greenwood Blacks in living memory.” Sam was sentenced to pay a fine and spend six months in jail.

  Later that month, two hundred Blacks went to the courthouse to register to vote, and that same night, members of the KKK fired a machine gun into a car carrying three SNCC workers, severely wounding one. In the coming months, Blacks who went to the courthouse to register to vote were met by helmeted police officers with attack dogs and nightsticks. That summer, a young historian and activist named Howard Zinn visited Greenwood and described the SNCC office as having “the eerie quality of a field hospital after battle.”

  In the midst of Greenwood’s volatile, racist environment, Booker continued working at Lusco’s and running Booker’s Place. Aside from allowing activists and movement workers to eat at his restaurant for free and having his building vandalized by Whites, Booker seemed to have gone through those years relatively unscathed. The White Citizens’ Council seemed to be everywhere, in everything, trying to keep Blacks from making any form of progress. It’s likely that their members were aware that Booker entertained movement workers, but what, if anything, the Council did about it is unclear.

  There was one afternoon at Booker’s Place when he wasn’t around but the restaurant was still open. The last of the lunch crowd had shuffled out, so the restaurant was pretty empty, with the exception of the staff, who were cleaning and preparing for the dinner rush. The restaurant door opened and a White police officer came in. Usually when people entered Booker’s Place they’d pause and look around to decide where to sit or to see who was there. But this officer acted as if he was entering his own home. His gait didn’t slow as he crossed the threshold and walked straight back toward the kitchen without acknowledging any of the workers he passed by.

  He entered the kitchen, walked over to the stove, and put his hand in a pot of turnip greens. At that time of day there was almost always a pot of greens, with chunks of ham hock, cooking on the stove. When the dinner rush began, the connective tissues and tender chunks of muscle would have melted into the greens, giving them a succulent, mouthwatering flavor. When the officer pulled his hand out of the pot it held a juicy piece of ham hock. He continued to stand over the stove and began to eat it. Then, while his mouth was still full, he began to make meaningless small talk, as if to further humiliate them by eating their food with his mouth open.

  The officer was tall, with the kind of cheeks that always looked deeply flushed, like they’d just been pinched. He stood there in Booker’s kitchen talking about nothing while the juice from Booker’s greens ran down the sides of his hands and onto the floor.

  One night, several Blacks gathered at a grocery store owned by a local police officer, and four people were arrested. Sara was in the station and “John Handy, a light-colored Negro who had been involved in other incidents during the summer, was standing in the station when Curtis Underwood, one of the policemen, lost his temper and gave him a heavy blow right in his stomach.”

  During that same summer, 1964, Silas McGhee got into an argument with a Greenwood cop over how his car was parked. The officer became outraged by Silas’s disrespect and said that someone should “blow his brains out.” Later that night, while sitting in his car with the window down, Silas was shot in the face from just a few feet away. While he was slumped over on the seat, waiting for death to come, he heard a woman’s voice over the police scanner he’d installed in his car. She was calling out in celebration, “They got the n—! They got him!”

  A Self-Portrait

  Frank De Felitta met Booker Wright at Lusco’s during an unseasonably cold winter in 1965. At the same time, two states north, river waters were rising higher and higher. The waters would continue to swell until they created a weather event that would come to be known as the worst flood in the Upper Mississippi in recorded history. But weather wasn’t on the filmmaker’s mind. He was still young, and arrogance ran through him like a delicious spice. Frank was years away from developing age spots or an appreciation for the ominous ways of nature. When the filmmaker interrupted the waiter’s life, he was a different man from the one who, four decades later, sat on the other side of the camera to tell the story.

  There’s a black-and-white photo of Frank taken during his trip to the Mississippi Delta. In it he’s standing, or perhaps balancing, on uneven debris in front of an ashen-colored, abandoned plantation house that’s in wild disrepair. The structure has no doors or windows and is leaning on thick, wooden pillars. Tall weeds clutter the foreground and tangled wooden boards that may have once been a balcony hang precariously just a few feet above his head.

  In this scene of utter ruin, Frank is wearing an unwrinkled suit and tie, smoking a cigar, and maintaining a cool, relaxed posture. He has broad shoulders, hair as black as ink, and dark, knowing eyes that look directly into the camera. Everything about him reads as effortless except his expression, which is intense and focused, just shy of showing irritation, as though he’s willing the photographer not to screw up the shot.

  Though Booker and Frank were from vastly different worlds, they were equals in many ways, not least of which was this quality. Be it a blessing or a curse, both of them had something living just beneath the surface, creating both an air of greatness and of great solitude.

  Frank, who was neither tall nor wide, managed to exact an imposing presence as if he took up more space than the product of his height and weight. With a personality that blended authority, charisma, and curiosity, he was the kind of man who longed to follow his instincts and was unsettled when not doing so. But those times were few and far between because Frank was savvy enough to pull together the resources to embark on almost any adventure.

  The son of Italian immigrants, Frank grew up in New York City. In his early twenties, he became a pilot, flying large trans
port planes in World War II. At the end of the war, he was asked to fly US officials to Europe.

  For three months we were to tour all of the concentration camps that we could get into and there were about 100 of them. And it was a dreadful time when they were exhuming bodies.

  And I, as a youngster, had to see things I never believed I would ever see. The death of the Jewish people came home to me. I knew very little about Jews and what have you and I didn’t know what the war was about at the time, I was just trying to labor through it. But I learned. It was a great lesson to have to go through horrid camps and see their methods of killing, their method of burning them in ovens, huge ovens. It was the most hateful time of the war, the worst time of the war. That was by all means the most terrible experience I’ve ever been through in my life.

  When Frank returned home to New York, it quickly became clear that the experience had changed him. The simple, mundane trivialities of life now struck him as not only meaningless but also heartless, because he, and everyone around him, knew that somewhere in the world people were being tortured, starved. Like a man running underwater, Frank’s efforts to build a new postwar life pressed up against the density of what he had learned but could not accept about mankind: There were individuals in the world who would harness all their talents to engineer ways to destroy innocent people, and there were others who would stand by and watch.

  It took two years, but Frank managed to drag himself out of the darkness. First he became a writer and then a filmmaker. He moved up in the industry, and by the late 1950s, he held a position at NBC that enabled him to work full-time creating two documentaries a year.

  Frank was a lover of jazz and thought it would be interesting to explore on film how jazz music was influenced by blues and ragtime traditions in the American South. This project took him deep into the Southern states, where he visited with and filmed Black sharecroppers. Each morning at first light, men, women, and children dressed in shapeless rags made their way out into the vast cotton fields. As the day wore on, the heat grew more aggressive and the humidity more intense, yet they remained in the fields until the unforgiving sun took back the last of its rays. Then the workers returned to their shacks, where they consumed meals made from scraps before collapsing, exhausted, only to wake and do the whole thing all over again the next day.