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179 10. THE KLAN In the Klan fight the very spirit of hatred materialized before our eyes. It was the ugliest thing I have ever beheld. —William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee As Percy was writing In April Once and subsequently enjoying its reception, he was also practicing law and living at home with his family. He maintained the pattern of living that characterized his working life: he would work enough to save money and then take a long, distant trip. He competently argued cases for companies such as the Illinois Central Railroad and the O. B. Crittendon Company, and then, just as competently, albeit with more enthusiasm, he would leave for months at a time on trips to Italy, to Greece, and to New York, among other places. In Greenville, he also began to engage more directly with what he and others called the “Negro Problem.” Up to this point in his life, he had not written much about the South’s particular arrangement concerning race, labor, and etiquette. But like most other Americans in the years after World War I, the race question was everywhere before him. Indeed, on a rainy night in 1923, it would come to his front porch. Like his father and grandfather, Will Percy came to feel responsible for articulating and defending the Mississippi Delta’s regime of race relations. They called their own point of view noblesse oblige, a sense of duty that led a gifted and privileged race to protect and provide for an uncivilized and inferior race. This was a structure of racial hierarchy that accommodated both a cultural style and a set of market values; it allowed families like the Percys to maintain their self-image as benevolent aristocrats, and it also aimed to maximize the labor output of African Americans. It was a system of social and economic authority packaged in the rhetoric of paternalism: elite whites, who had intellectual and material attainments, would provide fatherlike care for blacks under them. In some ways—such as the Percys’ steadfast opposition to racial violence—this paternalist concern was more than mere rhetoric. But even in this, economic priorities were also at stake. Lynching was bad for business, especially in a place where Chicago-bound 180 : The Klan trains left the station every day. Greenville elites wanted the black population to stay just where they were, focused on their work while remembering their place. From the black perspective, paternalism may have created a local culture that was less violent, but it did not create one that was more hopeful.1 At its best, paternalism was a racial ideology that allowed for acts of kindness and a degree of mutuality between blacks and whites. There is much evidence from both black and white Mississippians that speaks to LeRoy and Will Percy’s concern for black individuals—paying hospital bills, providing free legal counsel, and even paying for schooling in some instances.2 And from the perspective of blacks working for the Percys, either in the Percy home or on their plantation, paternalism allowed them to wring concessions from their employer. They pressed their own advantage by appearing deferential and loyal, and in turn they negotiated better hours, better living conditions, and more time for family, religion, and community. The fact that most sharecroppers on Percy plantations had screens on their porches, vegetable gardens in their yards, and Christmas bonuses was not because the Percys insisted on these things; it was, rather, because the sharecroppers insisted on them (and, it should be said, because there were potential economic advantages for landowners having a relatively contented labor force less likely to move). But despite these soft edges, paternalism—and paternalists like the Percys—subscribed to the central tenets of white supremacy: there was a real and measurable difference between black and white people; white people were intellectually, culturally, and morally superior; and social inequality was the natural and inevitable outcome of blacks and whites living side by side. This did not mean, however, that Delta planters viewed all white people as equal. Shortly after he had returned from the war, Will Percy sent an unsolicited letter to the New Republic explaining southern race relations. In it, he argued that the Negro Problem was not so much a matter of race as of class. The Negro race, he explained, was “a race which at its present stage of development is inferior in character and intellect to our own.” They were a tragic, pitiful, and...

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