Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

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1 November, 1970 I was having dinner across from the state capitol with Bill Minor, the Mississippi correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. We had left the restaurant and were standing outside, in a cold and luminous November evening. Rain clouds were forming to the east, over the state office building decorated inexplicably with Kansas sunflowers, and as Minor talked he gestured in the direction of Mississippi 's officialdom across the way, and to the clouds beyond. He is a sportily dressed man in his late forties , not as young as he looks, and what saves him from seeming dapper is that he is plainly a good old boy, but with reserves of intensity and no doubt contradiction beneath the boyish fac;ade. He has been a journalist in Jackson for almost twenty-five years: his fellows both in and outside Mississippi regard him with an affection deriving not so much from seniority , although that would be sufficient, but from the 119 Willie Morris rare decency and fine humor with which he pursues his calling, and the respect his own doggedness gives to the profession of the working reporter, who seeks no title more grandiose than just that. Many years ago the old master, A. J. Liebling, wrote about him in a "Wayward Press" column for some especially tenacious and courageous piece of work, and he has had many offers to leave the state for better pay on one of the big national papers. He does not want to go. To him, Mississippi is one of the frontiers of our strivings as a people. He has despaired of its failings but he knows, despite his experiences reporting its Emmett Till trials, its Neshoba County killings, its Jackson State shootings, and its more subtle defiances, that it will survive as the last measure of its guilt and travail. A couple of days before, a young white lawyer in Greenville was entertaining some visiting Englishmen who had come down to ascertain if Mississippi did, as rumor had it, exist, and the lawyer had told me, "They simply couldn't understand the emotional investment we have in this place." Minor conjured up for me now the young lawyer's remark. He will not leave Mississippi because he has so much of himself in it, in all its trials, hopes, and woes, and my guess is that it takes a son of this outrageous and immeasurably convoluted state to truly understand that. "Listen. People who argue that the law can't change a society are crazy," Minor is saying. "This state is a perfect example of how law can change a 120 Yazoo place. People down here are out in the bleachers. It's the federal law, the federal government, that's calling the real shots. The politicians down here like Maddox and Wallace and John Bell Williams think they are, but they're not. The changes that have been made in this state in the last few years have been astounding. And it's because of the federal law and the federal government. Even the Nixon Administration can't stop what's been started. All they can do is slow it down." Bill Minor believed that the retreat among white children to the segregationist academies in Mississippi itself, with a much stronger private school movement than the rest of the South, had already reached its peak, and that a steady drift back to the public schools would be inevitable because of the high cost of those academies and because "it's already become SOcially acceptable among whites for their children to go to school with large groups of Negroes." He and his wife had a son in a school with a three-to-one black majority which had just elected a student body president "who is white, with long hair down to his shoulders." When whites complained of the possibility of busing, Minor would remind them that "they've been transporting children to school in Mississippi for forty years, ever since the internal combustion engine" and that the private academies in Jackson run by the Citizens Councils are busing their children, "and not only that, but in 121 Willie Morris buses that are painted completely white." The Citizens Councils, which Hodding Carter once described as the Ku Klux Klan with a clipped mustache, existed now almost exclusively for running the segregationist academies, six of which were in Jackson. There were...