Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

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7 January 7, 1970, dawned clear and bitterly cold, a cold that rarely comes to Mississippi. It was 16 degrees on South Main Street, the trees along the older avenues were seared and deathly, and the water in the potholes of the roads in the Negro sections was frozen solid. All over Yazoo there was a cold eerie calm. The "nationals" were out in force, for Yazoo is only forty-eight miles from the Jackson airport, and with its fifty-fifty population and its origins in both the hills and the delta, this was where the stories would go out from that day, telling the nation and many parts of the world how the first major test of massive school integration in America in a district with a black majority would work in a "typical Mississippi town." The New York Times was there, and the Washington Post, the TV networks, the wire services, the Boston Globe, Time, the Detroit News, and the Chicago Sun-Times. 39 Willie Morris At my high school, whites and blacks waited on the grounds or walked inside in separate groups; two police cars were parked nearby. I drove into the Negro section of town to the old black high school, which today was to become the town's junior high; across the street was a previously black grade school, about to become grades four and five for whites and blacks. (Three years or so ago, I gave a talk to the black high school, to a sea of black faces, and gave five autographed copies of Invisible Man to the school library. A white lady who was there came up to me later and said, "Who were you talkin' to? The little niggers didn't understand you," and I said I guessed I was talking to one person, and that was myself.) Cars were parked in all directions, some with Confederate flags on their windows or bumpers, and parents of both races were bringing their children into the school buildings. Roy Reed of the Times, a Times photographer , and I stood outside the front entrance to the junior high; we were soon to be joined by the Boston Globe. I went inside, to try to get a seat at the first meeting of the new student body of the amalgamated Yazoo Junior High. aWinkiel" a booming voice shouted in my direction , using the nickname I have not been called since the sixth grade. "You're not allowed in there." I was escorted out by a man I did not recognize, rejoining the nationals at the front door. In a few moments, a Yazoo cop with the dimensions of any of the L.A. 40 Yazoo Rams' front four, who would make Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night seem benign and nunlike in comparison, came up to our group and shouted, "You from the press?" Without waiting for anyone's answer , he said, "The minute somebody tells you move, you mover "No one's asked us to move yet, Officer," Reed of the Times, who traverses the South forever, as a man seeking lost and holy visions, a wandering nomad of the Arab tribe of Sulzberger, said, with some dignity. "Move if anybody says move," the cop repeated, then drifted away. I remembered him from the Greyhound station fourteen years before, when I was putting a friend on the midnight bus stopping briefly here between Memphis and New Orleans. He got on the bus with a flashlight and went up and down the aisle, and when he came out, I asked him if there was any trouble. "No," he had said, "I was lookin' to see if any niggers were sittin' up front." By now the school assembly had begun, and everything was oppressively quiet. It was much the same all over town. At one of the grade schools later, black and white children were playing together in the schoolyard. One group, dancing in a circle for ringaround -a-rosy, were all white, but in the circle next to them white and Negro children held hands and kicked their feet. Over in the high school, where a meeting of the student body was taking place, the situation was slightly more dramatic. In a new twist, 41 Willie Morris all the black students sat together in the front seats of the auditorium, and all the whites sat together in the back. When...