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By Root 1796 0

be Maintained for the White and Negro Races.” They sent volunteers house-to-house to survey racial attitudes. Their list of subversive organizations—those backing integration—ranged from the Methodist and Episcopal churches to the Elks Club, the YWCA, and the U.S. Air Force. The Citizens’ Council’s primary weapon was the mimeograph machine, churning out some five million pages of pamphlets and press releases to rally “right thinking” Mississippians. Many spouted the familiar tenets of white supremacy; others served up a more mendacious venom. In 1956, the South was deluged with mimeographs of a speech by Professor Roosevelt Williams of Howard University. At an NAACP meeting in Jackson, Williams claimed that white women yearned for black men and any black man could get any white woman he wanted. The speech was widely quoted until a Georgia journalist found there was no Professor Roosevelt Williams of Howard University. The “speech” had been distributed by the Citizens’ Council in Mississippi. But as the Citizens’ Council gained enough power to elect Governor Ross Barnett—“God was the original segregationist”—disinformation proved a mild tactic compared to economic warfare. Blacks who dared register to vote, who joined the NAACP, who signed petitions demanding school integration, quickly had their credit cut off, their taxes audited, their insurance canceled. Soon the phone threats started. For most “agitators,” these were enough. They stopped fooling around with “dat Brown mess.” Those who persisted were handled by citizens not quite so “uptown.”

Rednecks. Peckerwoods. White trash. By whatever degrading name, the impoverished whites of Mississippi kept one rung up on the social ladder by beating down the blacks below them. Shunned by better-off whites, they carved out hardscrabble lives in shacks and hovels where, living close to the unforgiving earth, they absorbed its cruelty. Growing up in Yazoo City, writer Willie Morris knew them well. “And then there were the redneck boys,” Morris wrote.

Almost all of them were rough and open, and you learned early to treat them with a diffident respect; they were bigger and often older, from failing a grade or from having to stay out of school, sometimes for days at a time, during picking season. . . . Pity the poor colored child who walked past the schoolhouse when they were outside. There would be cries of “coon” or “nigger baby,” followed by a barrage of rocks and dirt clods. When I was a grown man and saw the deputy sheriffs and the mobs pummeling Negro demonstrators on television, I needed no one to tell me they had been doing the same thing since the age of eight.

The “redneck boys” hung out in packs where they hardened each other with a junkyard meanness passed down from father to son. Bottled up throughout boyhood, it exploded when mixed with moonshine and a mob mentality, especially when blacks tried to climb the ladder.

In May 1955, George Lee, a minister who had urged fellow blacks to register, was driving through Belzoni when shots rang out. His face blown off, Lee died en route to the hospital. The murder was reported in Jackson papers as an “odd accident.” That August, a black veteran was gunned down on a crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven. Two weeks later, teenager Emmett Till, having come from Chicago to visit relatives, flirted with a white woman in Money, Mississippi (pop. 55). No African American of “the Emmett Till generation” would ever forget the photo of Till’s monstrously mangled face in the casket his mother left open to let “the world see what they did to my boy.” More than one hundred reporters sat in the segregated courtroom where the sheriff greeted the black press—“Good morning, niggers”—and where the defense urged the jury, “every last Anglo Saxon one of you,” to find the killers not guilty. The jury complied in just over an hour. William Faulkner observed, “If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.