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378 ChapterThirteen A Closed Society’s Response to Challenge At the end of the Second World War, Mississippians faced a dilemma. Most Mississippians wanted the new world of supermarkets,automobiles,movies, factory jobs, and suburban homes, but at the same time, whites wanted to preserve racial segregation and deny that lifestyle to blacks.Black Mississippians wanted to end segregation and to attain a standard of living equal to whites. As a minority population before the war, white Mississippians created a society devoid of public spaces. Every restaurant and railroad waiting room became a private club to which they were admitted on the basis of the color of their skin. Whites denied the black majority entrance and enjoyed membership in a closed society. In white minds, their segregated spaces became extensions of family territory, and blacks who demanded admittance to white schools or restaurants violated the sanctity of what whites considered their personal space. To the white caste, a black person wishing to attend Ole Miss would not be entering a public space, but a personal one, an extension of white homes. Black integrationists understood restaurants, waiting rooms, and schools as public spaces such as they encountered in the North, Europe, or Asia, where humans interacted freely with at least the outward appearance of equality.Almost evenly divided between black and white in 1945, Mississippians eyed one another uncomfortably.Traditional segregation remained intact, but all knew that it had been challenged by wartime experiences. In the 1940s and early 1950s the two races maintained an uneasy truce. Fragments of personal relationships between individuals of different colors survived into the postwar world and enabled some men and women to continue to deal across the racial divide with respect and common humanity, but incidents of racial conflict multiplied, and black Mississippians reached out to a sympathetic wider world to support their demands for an end to segregation. The climax came in 1955 with the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago visiting his uncle in Mississippi. The publicity 379 A Closed Society’s Response to Challenge | and international condemnation of the state generated by the subsequent trial acquitting the murderers led white Mississippians to withdraw into their closed society, where they attempted for a decade to evade the inevitable destruction of their whites-only society. Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, typified the manner in which many blacks handled race relations in this period.Wright left home at sixteen and worked as a sharecropper raising cotton and the devil on Saturday nights until his first wife converted him to Christianity. He joined the Church of God in Christ and educated himself by reading the Bible until he began to preach. During World War I, he claimed conscientious objector status when drafted and spent thirty days in jail as a result. After his release, he became a local celebrity and his preaching career expanded. His first wife died in the influenza epidemic that swept the world at the end of the FirstWorldWar,and he married Elizabeth, the light-skinned granddaughter of a white slave owner. She worked as a schoolteacher before the marriage and further increased his standing in the black community. In 1945 Wright’s plantation owner of over a decade sold his land to another white man. Wright did not like the new owner because he did not consider him to be as decent and trustworthy as his longtime boss, so Wright established a new relationship with a white man whom he did trust and moved to a farm near Money, a small Delta town. Elizabeth Wright called her husband “Preacher” and urged him to move to Chicago, where they had relatives.Wright refused because he loved his native state and lived a decent life in it. Mose Wright, a minister and farmer, hosted his nephew Emmett Till, identified Till’s killers in court, and fled north with his family after his court appearance. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 42.196.27] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01:45 GMT) 380 | A Closed Society’s Response to Challenge His post-1945 home had previously belonged to his new plantation owner. It had a screened-in porch across the front of the house and contained four bedrooms.Wright worked hard, rising early to care for his livestock and a large garden. He tended the plantation owner’s garden, but did not work the cotton fields as his children did for day wages.With a milk cow, pigs, and chickens as well...

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