Free Freedom Summer by Bruce W. Watson Page A

swaybacked porches playing beat-up guitars with bottlenecks and table knives. To some their music sounded like fingernails on a blackboard, to others like human anguish distilled into song. It came to be called the Delta blues. By the 1930s, textile mills dotted the upper South. Atlanta was a bustling city, Birmingham a steel town. But Mississippi remained a state of rural hamlets, zoned by race and railroad tracks, surrounded by snarled backwoods and linked by dirt roads. This gave the state a quaint charm locals loved—you could still hunt, fish, live as your granddaddy lived. Yet to “outsiders” riding the Illinois Central through the Delta, it seemed the twentieth century had yet to come downriver from St. Louis. Even into the 1940s, sprawling plantations were tended by blacks in overalls stuffing cotton into bulging sacks. Even into the atomic age, Baptist tent revivals drew the devil out of sinful small-towners. And the generations came and went. The price of cotton rose and fell. The river did likewise.
    Justifying the economics was an ideology, also in black and white. In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash explored how the Civil War shaped the thinking of an entire region. Refusing to repent for their secession, southerners romanticized the antebellum world the war had rendered “gone with the wind.” Slavery had not been one of the worst crimes in history but a humane, paternal system. “Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other,” recalled Confederate president and Mississippian Jefferson Davis. The slave system had protected white women—“the loveliest and purest of God’s creatures”—from lustful black men. And not a word was said about why some Negroes had lighter skin. A genteel culture with cotillions and calling cards preferred to talk about acts of kindness—and there were many—between black and white. Yet the same culture also required savage retaliation against any black who through “reckless eyeballing” dared to offend whites, especially white women. Atrocities, including the lynching of more than five hundred Mississippi Negroes—more than any other state—were ennobled as righteous. Lynching went unpunished, murder was “self-defense,” and many towns announced their meanness in a road sign—“Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You Here.” Whites who disapproved learned to keep quiet. Criticism of Jim Crow became disloyalty to be dealt with, Cash noted, by “making such criticism so dangerous that none but a madman would risk it.”
    Yet until the 1950s, criticism was marginal. All but a few northerners dismissed “the Negro problem” as a southern problem, and all but a few southerners chose not to see a problem. Understanding is a two-way street, but it ran one way through Greenwood, Jackson, and Liberty, Mississippi. Black women cleaned and cooked in white homes, cared for white children, were often “a part of the family.” They knew too well how whites lived. Yet whites, though they might play with blacks as children, never went to “Niggertown” and rarely compared their own comforts to those of their maids and cooks. Blacks smiled a lot, therefore they must be happy. “When civil rights came along, a lot of us were shocked,” said one Natchez woman. “I was shocked to find black people we knew participating in the marches, because we didn’t know they were unhappy.” And when Freedom Summer focused the eyes of America on Mississippi, many whites there would not recognize the state others saw. Seemed they had never been to black Mississippi, even though it was just across town.
    To sidestep the minefield of class, Mississippi politicians played the race card expertly. Because Mississippi was a one-party state—almost no one voting for the party of Lincoln—incumbent congressmen held their seats for generations, becoming the most powerful men on Capitol Hill. And whenever an election was at risk, politicians found a convenient