Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [4]
While King’s soaring baritone described his dream that “one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” 71 percent of whites said, “Negroes smell different.” While crowds cheered King’s hope that someday his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” half of those polled claimed, “Negroes have less native intelligence.” And as King rose to a crescendo, dreaming of a time when “all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands,” 69 percent said, “Negroes have looser morals,” three of every four said, “Negroes tend to have less ambition,” and 90 percent said they would never let their daughter date a Negro.
“Negroes are oversexed,” a Nevada man said. “They’re wild.”
“I don’t like to touch them,” a Pennsylvania woman admitted. “It just makes me squeamish.”
Revealing prejudice from sea to shining sea, the poll also documented what northerners loved to crow about—that racism ran rampant in the South. There, 73 percent thought blacks less intelligent, 88 percent thought they “smelled different,” and 89 percent thought they had “looser morals.” The numbers were not broken down by southern state, but everyone knew where the deepest prejudice festered. When Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi that June, the head of the NAACP had not even feigned surprise. “There is no state with a record which approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality, and racial hatred,” Roy Wilkins said. “It is absolutely at the bottom of the list.”
For all its natural beauty, its proud heritage, its subsequent racial progress, Mississippi in 1963 was a mean and snarling state, run by tight-lipped politicians, bigoted sheriffs, and cops “not playing with” anyone who crossed them. Mississippi’s mounting brutality had disgraced many of its own citizens. “During the past ten years,” native son and novelist Walker Percy wrote, “Mississippi as a society reached a condition which can only be described, in an analogous but exact sense of the word, as insane.” Across America, Mississippi had become a symbol of racial terror. Singer Nina Simone crooned, “Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn,” and nightclub comedian Dick Gregory never missed a chance to mock the state. Seems he was fired from a Chicago post office, Gregory told audiences, for putting letters to Mississippi in a sack marked “Foreign Mail.”
In the twenty-first century, the joke would fall flat. Modern Mississippi, having achieved a racial reconciliation to rival South Africa’s, has more black elected officials than any other state. Even its former Klan enclaves boast black city councils, black mayors, black police chiefs. But in 1963, for nearly a million blacks too broke, too rooted, or too beaten down to follow Highway 61 north, life in Mississippi was no joke. Before Freedom Summer and the changes it jump-started, Mississippi was a place where a black body floating in a muddy river was “as common as a snake”; spies and informers working for the state kept dossiers on 250 organizations and 10,000 individuals backing integration; black sharecroppers picked cotton from “kin to cain’t”—from sunup, when you “kin see,” to sundown, when you “cain’t”—for three dollars a day; civil rights workers were routinely arrested and beaten while cops laughed off charges of “police brutality”; and the slightest tremor of racial equality unleashed shock waves of raw brutality.
The violence had most recently