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3 THE SLEEPING GIANT Nothing in either my upbringing or training prepared me for what I encountered on my first trip to Mississippi in April 1955. I was a thirty-sevenyear -old reporter for Ebony and Jet, two nationally circulated, black-owned magazines based in Chicago, and had worked previously on both Negro and white newspapers, including TheWashington Post. As a black man I had experienced the indignities of segregation in the border states of Maryland and Virginia, and even in the nation’s capital. “Whites only” water fountains, bathrooms, and lunch counters, job and housing discrimination, and unequal schools were not new to me. But Mississippi in 1955 was like nothing I had ever seen. What I witnessed there was not only raw hatred, but state condoned terror. I quickly learned that you could be whipped or even lynched for failing to get off the sidewalk when approaching a white person, for failing to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to whites no matter how young they were, or for the unpardonable crime of attempting to register to vote. Jet photographer David Jackson and I arrived in Memphis after an early morning flight from Chicago. The Tennessee port on the Mississippi River would be the “jumping off” point for most of our future trips into the Delta. In an area known as the “mid-South,” blacks considered the city a “turning point” in many ways, as suggested by the story of the black preacher from Chicago who was so scared on his first trip to the Deep South, he prayed, “Lord, please stay with me.” And the Lord answered, “I’ll stay with you, but only as far as Memphis!” We had a contact at a car rental agency that rented to blacks, and would make sure we got a model so mundane and beat up it would never draw attention. Our destination was Mound Bayou, a small town in the Delta, that part of Mississippi that has been called the southern most place on Earth. That was one reason we were determined to get there before nightfall . We’d heard too many horror stories told and retold by the thousands of blacks who had fled North for us to take lightly our first venture into 1 The Sleeping Giant 4 infamous territory. It wasn’t just poor economic conditions that made Mississippi Negroes flee. It was a culture we would never fully understand until we experienced it ourselves. We were journalists, and although still somewhat naive about the Deep South, we were savvy enough to know that our profession alone might be sufficient to cause us trouble. So we did our best to look like locals, an effort I soon discovered was futile in any situation where it might really count. It didn’t matter which of us took the wheel because Dave was every bit as cautious as I was, making sure we never exceeded the speed limit, or rolled through a stop sign. I was most comfortable trusting no one but myself, unless I was in an area where it was totally unsafe to get around without a savvy local, often a trusted contact, as a guide. But Dave, at thirty-three, with the skilled eye of a veteran photographer, was as adept as anybody at spotting trouble before it spotted us. He was also a pro at driving fast over back roads at night, even with headlights out when necessary to avoid detection. In Chicago in those days, I used to wear a beret, but I knew it would be out of place in Mississippi, so I had stashed it along with an overcoat in a locker at Midway (still the Windy City’s primary airport in the mid-’50s). When we deplaned in Memphis, I also took off my suit jacket and bow tie and stuffed them into my duffel bag. (Most people wore their “good” clothes when traveling on airplanes in those days, and for a black man particularly, looking right and hoping to be treated with a modicum of respect meant wearing a jacket and tie.) The rest of my attire was a white, short-sleeve shirt, black pants, and scuffed-up shoes. On trips such as this, I would leave at home my portable typewriter with the Ebony logo emblazoned on the scratched-up case, and rely on a pocket-size notebook to record thoughts, interviews, facts, and details, waiting until I got back to Chicago...

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