Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [165]
As school busing battles tore apart Boston and other cities, Mississippi schools did their own dance around integration. “Seg academies” continued to flourish, but whites who could not gain admission and those unafraid of “mixing” sat beside blacks in public schools. Cafeterias remained self-segregated, but in locker rooms, in hallways, at pep rallies, black and white talked, sometimes fought, and discovered they could get along. Lyndon Johnson had predicted as much during Freedom Summer. “I can’t make people integrate but maybe we can make them feel guilty if they don’t,” he had told an aide. “And once that happens, and they find out the jaws of hell don’t open, and fire and brimstone doesn’t flood down on them, then maybe they’ll see just how they have been taken advantage of.”
Late in 1979, the Mississippi legislature finally obeyed the U.S. Supreme Court. The Delta again became one congressional district. Hundreds of blacks were elected as mayors, city councilmen, and state legislators. In 1986, Mike Espy became Mississippi’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, and the following year, a black woman was crowned Miss Mississippi. Throughout the 1990s, black political power steadily grew, giving Mississippi more black elected officials than any other state. At the time of this writing, 28 percent of the legislature is black, and the list of cities run by black mayors reads like a tour of Freedom Summer: McComb, Jackson, Hattiesburg, Itta Bena, Greenville, Greenwood, Holly Springs, Ruleville, Drew. . . . In 2009, even Philadelphia, Mississippi, elected a black mayor. Today, the Mississippi Delta still holds America’s deepest pockets of poverty. Black income there remains just over half that of local whites, and in Greenwood or Greenville, as in towns throughout Mississippi, railroad tracks still demarcate stark differences in housing, education, and living standards. Yet in any town from Biloxi north to the Tennessee border, one can enter a café and see whites and blacks talking in ways one rarely sees farther north. And no one taken into custody has to fear the sheriff, his deputies, or the terror the night used to bring. But is Mississippi’s racial progress more than skin-deep?
“The Promised Land is still far off,” Hodding Carter III observed. “Black folks are still on the outside, looking in when it comes to jobs, equal education, housing, etc. But here, sadly enough, that does not much distinguish Mississippi from the rest of the country. What did distinguish us—racism red of fang and claw, in the saddle and riding hard—no longer prevails. What is in the hearts of individuals is one thing; how they now find they must operate in public is another. We are talking about fundamental change, which has left the state still far from the mountaintop, but it has been climbing for some time. It may go sideways from time to time, but it isn’t going back.”
Poet Margaret Walker Alexander agreed: “I believe that despite the terrible racist image Mississippi has had in the past, despite her historic reputation for political demagoguery, despite racial violence and especially lynching, despite all the statistics about being on the bottom, Mississippi, and especially urban Mississippi, offers a better life for most black people than any other state in which I have lived or visited.”
In just a generation, Mississippi had progressed so far that its children were shocked by stories from the recent past. In 1984, when a former activist told kids about having to duck down in integrated cars, the kids gasped. “Not in Mississippi!” some said. But as Mississippi shed its past, would anyone dare to dredge up the horrors of Freedom Summer?
After the savage season, volunteers had gone separate ways—careening through the 1960s, then settling into the rest of their lives. Tenth and twentieth anniversaries of Freedom Summer passed but no one had the energy to mend a broken circle of trust. In 1989, however, feelers