Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

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10 In the total school-age population of Yazoo, grades one through six have a heavy black majority; grade seven is the break-even point, after which the whites gradually become the majority. But the drain to the private school, even if not as large as the private school may have expected, had resulted in the blacks' outnumbering the whites right up through high school. What of the young people? They are groping in pain and innocence toward something new, toward some blurred and previously unheeded awareness of themselves . They have suddenly found themselves growing up in a human situation fraught with nuances and possibilities they did not know existed before. The implications of this change in their lives, and the implications in the community itself, have hardly yet come to the surface. They are the first white and black children in America brought together under the courts' specific doctrine of massive integration, 85 Willie Morris and they are intensely curious about each other. They fumble for words to express their new feelings. Black and white, they are children of the South, Southern to the core, and in this regard they are different from children in, say, New Rochelle or Los Angeles or Indianapolis . Yet like all young people in America, as Ralph Ellison suggests, "they have been unable to resist the movies, television, jazz, football, drummajoretting , rock, comic strips, radio commercials, soap operas, book clubs, slang, and any of a thousand other expressions of our pluralistic and easily available popular culture." They are as American as they are Southern, but it is this common bond in the South -the rhythms and tempos, the ways of speaking and of remembering, the place and the land their people knew and out of which they suffered together-that makes them, young blacks and whites, more alike than dissimilar; and it is this, before it is all over, that will be their salvation.* *Unlike the period from 1963 to 1965, when one could hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper without reading of the region's latest barbarisms, there had by 1971 been very little written in the national journals of the South's move toward wholesale school integration. One of the notable exceptions was Marshall Frady's article in Life magazine, of February 12, 1971. "For all the violence and evasions since the Supreme Court's pronouncements in 1954," Frady wrote, "for all the continuing scattered incidents of rearguard viciousness, what is under way in communities like Americus ... poses, even if flickeringly, the first authentic suggestion that it may be the South after all where the nation's general malaise of racial alienation first finds resolution. Not in the order of division prophesied by the old segregationists' apologists, but in the formal advent of a single people unique and richly dimensioned." 86 Yazoo 1 had set up a meeting with a number of Negro students from the eleventh and twelfth grades the first week of the new semester. Several of them had gone to the white school for a semester under the token freedom-of-choice plan, but others had just come over from the Negro high school. At first they seemed shy, reluctant to talk in the presence of a white Mississippi adult, but after a time they warmed up to the prospect. One of the girls said, "When we first got here, when they were by themselves they tried to be sort of friendly. But in a mass they were very standoffish. They didn't seem to know what to do. The poorer the kids, the less friendly they were. When they get by themselves with you, they talk about their family, their personal lives and all. 1 guess they think they can tell us everything and it won't get back to any whites. "Some of the white girls try to be friendly, but 1 think they're a little bit scared. 1 sure do like the way they dress. Some of 'em are real cute." Almost without exception, they said they had not made any "real friends" with white students, but one girl, who was the first Negro to integrate the white school two years ago, pointedly disagreed: "I havewell , not the type of friends who'd invite you to go ridin' around and go to parties and all that, but to talk about things. The first year 1 came over, 1 was just sittin...