suspicious of the Black Muslims, anyhow. I just don’t like their kind of talk. And when you look them straight in the face, they look mighty close to being something exactly like the Ku Klux Klan for the colored.
Some people argue that we need the Black Muslims to give Negroes the courage they need to stand up and claim their rights.
I’m in favor of us getting up all the courage we can, because that’s what we’re going to need a lot of from now on, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable with my courage if I got it from Martin Luther King.
Maybe it’s because I’m proud of being a Georgia-born Geechee with my kind of tannish color, but anyway I always tell people I’m not black enough to be a Black Muslim.
10
T O COME UPON IT in the lingering twilight of a balmy summer day, Laurel is a languorous tree-shaded town with a name of romantic implications in the pine-crested hills of Southern Mississippi. Flowers bloom profusely in stately gardens and a stranger in town is likely to be mesmerized by the flower-scented air. Under the tall spire of an elegant church there is fervent praise of God, unoffending mention of the brotherhood of man, and a prayer for the less fortunate people in the world.
In the bright light of day, however, the reality of Laurel is made plain and revealing. It is then a place of thirty thousand people arbitrarily confined within inflexible zones allotted to wealthy white citizens on the northside, segregated Negroes on the southside, and impoverished whites in the middle.
Any such socially, racially, and economically regulated allotment of residence is not an unusual custom in Bisco Country. In fact, it is a traditional way of life rigidly maintained and enforced from South Carolina to Louisiana; nevertheless, the contrasts between classes and races are more sharply defined and rigidly fixed in Mississippi than elsewhere.
The stranger in town might say that Laurel, in particular, is remote and isolated from the mainstream of American life and that its people are pathetic in their solitude. But a prideful white citizen of the northside will insist that all of Mississippi, and particularly Laurel, has been endowed with a fortunate heritage that less privileged people living in other states scorn because of envy and ignorance.
All might be well in Laurel, as it could be elsewhere in Mississippi, if prideful residents of the northside would look at least as far away as the southside of their town even if they do not wish to see beyond the borders of their own state. As it is, and as though it is a way to avoid embarrassment, they fail to acknowledge their responsibility for the poverty and degradation of the Negro families on the southside and ignore the fact that it was the labor of Negroes that enabled them to accumulate wealth and social pretensions.
But customs prevail. And arrogance predominates. Instead of acting upon his responsibility as a citizen in modern America to alleviate and adjust economic and social discrimination imposed upon the Negro for generations, the white supremist is intent upon striving by any means to enforce a perpetuation of racial injustice that originated long ago in the time of slavery. As long as this custom can be maintained, the conscience of the white supremist will be quiet and undisturbed. Enforcement of the custom ranges from intimidation to physical punishment to violent death.
The Citizens’ Council, or, as the white supremist organization is more aptly called, the White Citizens’ Council, was founded as recently as the nineteen-fifties in Mississippi. The purpose of the organization is to legalize segregation and prohibit by law any form of integration and racial equality and to relieve the individual white supremist of the do-it-yourself chore of run-nigger-run intimidation.
The White Citizens’ Council is a white-collar club striving by day in business suits—and often in judicial robes and clerical garb—to attain by subtle propaganda and
Some people argue that we need the Black Muslims to give Negroes the courage they need to stand up and claim their rights.
I’m in favor of us getting up all the courage we can, because that’s what we’re going to need a lot of from now on, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable with my courage if I got it from Martin Luther King.
Maybe it’s because I’m proud of being a Georgia-born Geechee with my kind of tannish color, but anyway I always tell people I’m not black enough to be a Black Muslim.
10
T O COME UPON IT in the lingering twilight of a balmy summer day, Laurel is a languorous tree-shaded town with a name of romantic implications in the pine-crested hills of Southern Mississippi. Flowers bloom profusely in stately gardens and a stranger in town is likely to be mesmerized by the flower-scented air. Under the tall spire of an elegant church there is fervent praise of God, unoffending mention of the brotherhood of man, and a prayer for the less fortunate people in the world.
In the bright light of day, however, the reality of Laurel is made plain and revealing. It is then a place of thirty thousand people arbitrarily confined within inflexible zones allotted to wealthy white citizens on the northside, segregated Negroes on the southside, and impoverished whites in the middle.
Any such socially, racially, and economically regulated allotment of residence is not an unusual custom in Bisco Country. In fact, it is a traditional way of life rigidly maintained and enforced from South Carolina to Louisiana; nevertheless, the contrasts between classes and races are more sharply defined and rigidly fixed in Mississippi than elsewhere.
The stranger in town might say that Laurel, in particular, is remote and isolated from the mainstream of American life and that its people are pathetic in their solitude. But a prideful white citizen of the northside will insist that all of Mississippi, and particularly Laurel, has been endowed with a fortunate heritage that less privileged people living in other states scorn because of envy and ignorance.
All might be well in Laurel, as it could be elsewhere in Mississippi, if prideful residents of the northside would look at least as far away as the southside of their town even if they do not wish to see beyond the borders of their own state. As it is, and as though it is a way to avoid embarrassment, they fail to acknowledge their responsibility for the poverty and degradation of the Negro families on the southside and ignore the fact that it was the labor of Negroes that enabled them to accumulate wealth and social pretensions.
But customs prevail. And arrogance predominates. Instead of acting upon his responsibility as a citizen in modern America to alleviate and adjust economic and social discrimination imposed upon the Negro for generations, the white supremist is intent upon striving by any means to enforce a perpetuation of racial injustice that originated long ago in the time of slavery. As long as this custom can be maintained, the conscience of the white supremist will be quiet and undisturbed. Enforcement of the custom ranges from intimidation to physical punishment to violent death.
The Citizens’ Council, or, as the white supremist organization is more aptly called, the White Citizens’ Council, was founded as recently as the nineteen-fifties in Mississippi. The purpose of the organization is to legalize segregation and prohibit by law any form of integration and racial equality and to relieve the individual white supremist of the do-it-yourself chore of run-nigger-run intimidation.
The White Citizens’ Council is a white-collar club striving by day in business suits—and often in judicial robes and clerical garb—to attain by subtle propaganda and
Similar Books
