Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

12

12 March,1970 I came back two months later, when the wildflowers and bushes, the vines and trees, were just beginning to show the wild disordered promise of the great Mississippi springtime. I had kept in touch by telephone; there had been one bomb scare, and a fist fight between a black girl and a white boy, but these had been the only serious incidents. After a few troubles (a teacher in study hall lost his temper at a Negro student , and all the blacks raised a commotion and gave the power clench), the white student president, Kenny Graeber, and the black president, Cobie Collins , gave speeches to the student body urging good manners. Ken and Cobie got identical letters from President Nixon praising them for encouraging "educational excellence." The NAACP had filed a contempt motion before the Fifth Circuit to completely integrate the classrooms, but it was apparent that such an order would not be made before the end of the 98 Yazoo semester. "The students have suffered a little from all this abnormal tension," one of the teachers told me, "but I think most of it's gone away." Everyone was a little tired, she said. "You can't wave a wand and create a new social environment. It takes a lot of hard routine work. There's no spirit of inspiration, which the school badly needs." But Bubba Mott editorialized in the Herald in March, under the title "Future Looking Good": "We perceive a distinct wave of optimism prevailing in this community. We believe the majority are aware Yazoo has weathered the worst of some adverse situations, which proved not as calamitous as one thought. Also there is a feeling that not only the worst is over, but that we are in an even better position to capitalize on the opportunities ahead." More important, the white enrollment figures had remained reasonably firm. The public schools had lost seven hundred whites to the private schools since September. Harold "Hardwood" Kelley was still optimistic , and believed the white students who could not afford to keep paying the private tuition would gradually return to the public schools. Rudy Shields struck a pessimistic posture. He was carrying a .38 up West Powell Street to the NAACP house when I cruised by in a car to meet him, and inside he put the pistol on his desk and complained about the segregation of classes and the demotion of all the black principals and assistants. "The black 99 Willie Morris principals have only one function, and that's to discipline the black students. Black kids have to look up to some men in the schools, not just yes men. It's becoming apparent the whites don't want integration, and I'm not sure the blacks do now." Charles Evers and the other leaders would disagree with him, he said. "We tell our kids to try and get along and make friends but they haven't." In the last two months, however, he had seen a bright spot: "A few of the white and black students in high school are gettin' together and socializiil'." Ken Graeber, the white student-body president, star quarterback, forward, and shortstop who had been offered a golfscholarship to Ole Miss, came over from his house next door. He was a little boy the last summer I spent in town, and I took him around to watch baseball, and gave him dimes to ride the horses in front of the A. & P. He is now six feet two like all his brothers, and we talked about his father, Johnny, who used to sit with me on the porch in that dusty summer of 1956 and shout greetings at all the people riding by on Grand Avenue. When the two high schools merged, the basketball team had to reschedule the rest of the season, and they couldn't get any games at such short notice. They had to wait until the Big Eight tournament started, where they played four games. "I get along fine with the athletes," Ken said. "If we could've played twelve games or so after integration, it would've had a good 100 Yazoo effect. We've always considered the athletes to be the leaders. We figured if we could show 'em it would work as a team, it would be a big help all over. I had to prove to the black kid that I...