And I Said No Lord: A Twenty-One-Year-Old in Mississippi in 1964

Introduction

1 On June 17, 1964, a twenty-one-year-old white boy boarded a Greyhound bus in Hartford, Connecticut . He was bound for Jackson, Mississippi, the farthest he had ever been from home—geographically , culturally, and psychologically. He had with him a Honeywell Pentax H1-A camera, 28 and 55mm lenses of his own, a borrowed 135mm lens, money lent to him by Hillel at Yale and the Church of Christ at Yale, and a written invitation to call on Frank Barber, special assistant to Mississippi governor Paul Johnson. He was on one bus or another for two and a half days. He woke one morning to a beautiful and mysterious dawn in Tennessee, gray green and misty. He talked with, and kissed, an unhappy young wife from West Virginia, with whom he corresponded for a few weeks until receiving a semiliterate but powerfully threatening letter from her husband. Approaching Jackson, the bus passed a woman hanging wash on the front porch of her shack, and he noted in his journal (long since lost) that red dresses appeared somehow much redder on black women than on white women. When he arrived in Jackson, it was early evening . He was carrying one large suitcase and his camera bag, and he stopped for a while outside an open door to a performance of country music on his way to the Jackson YMCA, where he spent most of the next seven weeks. On his way, he noted that introduction 2 and April 1965, shows and tells some of what he experienced in those seven weeks. This introduction will to some extent explain why. I was introduced to photography by a dorm mate in our freshman year at Yale and took to it passionately , both intellectually and in practice. After two intense years of devouring the history and the literature of the medium, I realized I knew what I liked—the social documentary photography of Brassaï, André Kertész, and Walker Evans. I loved Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images—they were decisive but they were moments, too specific and particular to extend backward or forward in space, time, and culture. And Robert Frank! How appropriate that Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the American edition of The Americans: Frank’s photographs are rugged, beat, poetic, grainy, soft in focus, and spontaneous. But it was not that edition, with its photographs treated as art—precious, one to a page, with Kerouac ’s introduction politely isolated at the beginning that so moved me. Rather, it was Alain Bosquet’s French edition, published by Delpire, that inspired the structure and the concept of this book. Bosquet collected text, quotations, reports, statistics, conversations , a seemingly random selection of documents of American social, political, and cultural history. The text ran on the verso of every page, opposite a photograph printed in gravure—deep, intense, the Mississippi state capitol looked almost exactly like the Connecticut state capitol in Hartford; in the Mississippi capitol, however, there were different bathrooms for “white” and “colored.” Not many days after his arrival, the top half of the front page of the Jackson Daily News reproduced the FBI “Missing” poster for Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, who had “disappeared” (a word always enclosed in quotation marks that summer in Mississippi) a few days before. He was young, naive, and assumed he was immortal. In Mississippi, he met people of both races possessed of great dignity, intelligence, frustration , and concern. Befriended by the entertainment editor of the Jackson Daily News, he met James Silverman and Eudora Welty. He photographed Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy and taught at a “freedom school.” He saw young people a lot like himself spat on. He was asked if his parents were niggers by the Jackson police. He was offered death in Vicksburg but politely declined. After about seven weeks, he and a schoolteacher from Detroit left Jackson in her car, bound for Atlanta, where he boarded the bus back to Hartford. Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner had been found in a shallow grave in Neshoba County, near Philadelphia, Mississippi . It was on the front page of the Jackson Daily News. This book, written between September 1964 3 Scholars of the House was a program for a small number of seniors in Yale College. Applicants defined a project, identified a faculty advisor, and developed a reading list. I was the first Scholar of the House in...