Free Freedom Summer by Bruce W. Watson

politics, Mississippi set about redeeming its honor. History written by the defeated does not often become the official version, yet as an American apartheid spread from Texas to the Mason-Dixon line, historians rewrote Reconstruction. In an era of minstrel shows, weekly lynchings, and calls to “Take up the White Man’s Burden,” North and South suddenly agreed: freed slaves had been slothful politicians, Klansmen were liberators, and vigilantes had been not white but black. Popular books such as The Clansman and The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization sold white supremacy to the whole nation. Northerners, the New York Times noted in 1900, no longer denounced the suppression of black voting because “the necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized.” Reconstruction soon became “The Tragic Era.”
    The nationwide best seller by that name recounted “the darkest days in Mississippi,” when the legislature was “one of the most grotesque bodies that ever assembled. A mulatto was Speaker of the House, a darker man was Lt. Governor.” Evil carpetbaggers and traitorous scalawags had labored to “inflame the Negroes,” causing them to attack white women. “Rape,” The Tragic Era noted, “is the foul daughter of Reconstruction.” Riding to the rescue, as Klansmen did in the popular film Birth of a Nation , the Klan “was organized for the protection of women, property, civilization itself.” Revisionism did more than justify Jim Crow—it pacified the North and solidified the South. In his landmark study of race, An American Dilemma , Gunnar Myrdal observed, “The South needs to believe that when the Negro voted, life was unbearable.”
    The generations came and went. The price of cotton rose and fell. The Mississippi River did likewise. Through sweltering summers and gray, bone-chilling winters, descendants of Confederates and descendants of slaves shared a volatile truce. Segregated yet strangely intertwined, the two cultures coexisted—tar and biscuit dough, cordial, edgy, neither separate nor equal. White folks had their side of town and all the twentieth century could add—fine and finer homes, Model Ts, shopping trips to Memphis or New Orleans. And black folks had their side of town and what little they could scrape together—a few barnyard animals, perhaps a mule, and a shack barely big enough for two, let alone the eight or ten crammed inside. Life in white Mississippi was intensely social, based on kinship and the camaraderie of cotillions and hunting trips. But life in black Mississippi was more hopeless than any other in America. In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Among the “colored” of Mississippi, the problem was Mississippi itself, where “Mr. Charlie” cheated sharecroppers at annual “settlements,” where dresses had to be made out of flour sacks, where submission was ground into the soul.
    During World War I, blacks fled north to factory jobs. So many left that those left behind joked, “What are the three largest cities in Mississippi?” Hint: none were actually in Mississippi. Back home, a few blacks in each town inched ahead, bought a little land, opened a barbershop or funeral parlor, kept up modest homes. But the vast majority, serfs under the feudal rule of King Cotton, lived for Saturday-night revelry at “juke joints.” When that turned violent—over women, usually—some ended up in Mississippi’s own corner of hell, Parchman Farm Penitentiary, whose bestial murders, rapes, and tortures made it “worse than slavery.” Those who survived Saturday night repented on Sunday in churches where the spirit was barely contained within wooden walls. And then came Monday, when hordes of blacks rose at dawn and headed again for the fields, not to return till dusk.
    In the 1920s Harlem hosted a Renaissance of art, jazz, and literature. In Mississippi, blacks sat on