Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [164]
Jim Crow was always based on privilege and power as much as hatred. Mississippi could not hold back the tide of law, but it could enact a new round of legislative voodoo. Responding to the Voting Rights Act, the state legislature passed a dozen bills curbing black political power. City and county elections suddenly became “at-large,” allowing white votes to dilute black votes. School superintendents became appointees. Getting on the ballot became tougher, requiring ten times as many signatures. And the Delta’s “black belt,” a single congressional district for as long as anyone could remember, was carved into three bloated districts aptly resembling pigs at a trough.
In 1967, 108 blacks ran for office in Mississippi. Just twenty-two were elected, most to low-level county positions. A lone black entered the all-white legislature. For the next few years, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged every new voting law, and in 1969, theirs and similar challenges reached the Supreme Court. By a 7-2 margin, the court invalidated all efforts to dilute black votes. The Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, should have “the broadest possible scope.” But as with the Brown ruling, compliance would take a decade or more. In 1972, two-thirds of all blacks in Mississippi could vote, yet just 2.7 percent of state officials were black.
Throughout the 1970s, while Mississippi’s politicians patched their leaky “wall of Never,” ordinary people changed the state. Not by fiat and no longer at a shotgun standoff, white and black slowly came together. Most found that, in hailing from that unique place called Mississippi, they had something in common. “After Freedom Summer,” said Batesville publisher John Howell, a teenager in 1964, “we met black people who, when we got over our grudge at them for having the audacity to want to do things like vote and go to decent schools, were, almost without exception, such sweet and forgiving people.” Bigotry did not disappear, but each act of kindness, each common concern helped southern hospitality melt age-old hostilities. No one can pinpoint a date or time, but at some point “boy” no longer referred to a black man. Titles of respect were bestowed on white and black. And sidewalks, though no wider than before, had room for black and white, sometimes side by side.
When Panola County pioneer Robert Miles ran for county supervisor, he lost a run-off but was stunned when a white man handed him fifty dollars to help take blacks to the polls. “I never dreamed I’d live to see such a day,” Miles said. Medgar Evers’s brother was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, the state’s first black mayor since Reconstruction. “Hands that picked cotton can now pick the mayor,” Charles Evers said. A few years into his term, Evers got the backing of a former Klan leader. “I count Mayor Evers as a friend now and I have a lot of respect for the man,” E. L. McDaniel said. “We realized it’s not blacks against whites, but the little folks against the big shots.” Ten years after the Ole Miss riots, students elected a black football player as “Colonel Rebel,” the university’s top sports honor. Another first came in 1977 when Unita Blackwell, Muriel Tillinghast’s pupil, became Mississippi’s first black female mayor. Blackwell remained