The genius of the Citizens Council, the thing that made them both the most effective and the most evil, was that they equated segregation with good citizenship. It was in their name. Fighting to keep our schools segregate equated to patriotism and cultural loyalty. If you read their literature, that was clearly the message.
The Citizens Council started in the Delta, in areas where the black population outnumbered the white population, areas where the idea of “separate but equal” was as problematic as the idea of integration. They didn’t see these descendants of slaves as peers or equals or fully citizens and saw the interference from the federal government, both through the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, as an impingement on their sovereignty. For them, this was the heart of “states’ rights.”
In Jackson, the Citizens Council was, at first, fully accepted in business and social circles. Doctors, Lawyers, and Bankers all became members, along with tradesmen of every sort. The Citizens Council was a great equalizer with regard to the issue of class but the most significant divider with regard to the issue of race.
By the mid 70’s, the social and economic tides turned against the Citizen’s Council. The rest of the world began equating the Citizen’s Council with the Klan. Jackson's business, legal and religious leaders began seeing it the same way. There were men in Jackson who remained loyal to the Citizens Council, including some prominent physicians, but by 1975 they saw their professional progress hampered by their membership in the CC. Offers for board memberships and professional advancement started slowing and stopping. Thompson, who had been Mayor of Jackson, was in the Citizens Council; he was replaced by Davis and then Danks, who were not. The tide was changing.
The idea that the federal intervention in our culture, our education, our economics, and our society didn’t go away though, but it did change names. Mississippi had been a yellow-dog Democratic state ever since the civil war, but by the mid-seventies, a growing number of Mississippians saw the Democratic party as against us, an interference in how we lived.
When you look at early adapters of the Republican Party in Mississippi, I can just about promise you they never sat down and discussed the “Southern Strategy” as such. They didn’t have to. Saying you wanted to get the federal government out of your business, even if your business is oil, banking, insurance, or the like, Nobody ever had to say, “Boy, we sure would have been better off if they left our damn schools alone.” Nobody ever had to say it because the great majority of Mississippians believed in their hearts and still do.
There were guys out there who believed in an evolved Democratic party and believed it was good for Mississippi. Guys like Charlie Deaton and Bob Fortenberry built their careers trying to apply these new, expansive ideas of the Democratic Party to the boots-on-the-ground situation in Mississippi. They had some success, but the most successful was William Winter. Winter and his Boys of Spring were the last great stand for the new Democratic Party in Mississippi.
Likened to Camelot, both the play and the Kennedy administration, Winter’s tenure as Governor of Mississippi was, and is, seen as a golden age of progressive politics and moves to equalize, at least educationally, the experience of white and black Mississippians.
Ray Maybus rose out of Winter’s team and became governor at a time when a lot of Mississippians thought we were turning over a new page and Mississippi was changing. It was not. Toward the end of his term, preparing for his next move, Maybus ran full force into the rising Republican Revolution in Mississippi. The Young Republicans were becoming more popular than over-starched Oxford shirts at Ole Miss, and at an SEC game in Jackson, Mabus was booed when the announcer asked the crowd to greet him before the game started.
In my mind, that moment when a bunch of guys my age began to boo a sitting governor at an Ole Miss game loudly was a sea change in Mississippi culture. I’d seen them cheer Ross Barnett, both before and after his tenure as governor. I’d seen them cheer Cliff Finch, even knowing that all the stories about Finch were true, but they were booing Ray Mabus–Herman Hine’s son-in-law, a champion of education and public benefit in Mississippi, a genuinely nice guy with a career drive like nothing I’d ever seen before somehow equated to a bad thing among my peers. To them, being in favor of Mabus and his pro-education platform was unpatriotic. I still don’t get it. Not even a little. In my heart, I will always pin some of that moment on feelings about the Democratic Party forcefully integrating Mississippi.
Even today, there are people in Mississippi who straight-up blame the Democratic Party for changing the Mississippi State flag, even though every single person involved in pushing that move through our legislature was Republican, and it was signed by a Republican governor. People don’t want the truth. They want somebody to blame.
I was five years old when the Jackson Citizens Council started sending out fliers saying they would accept students into their five different schools. Council Schools were priced considerably lower than Prep, JA, St. Richards, or St. Andrews. They were actually priced too low to pay their bills using tuition money. The Citizens Council promised fund-raising efforts to make up the difference, and for a while, they did, but they couldn’t sustain it. The business community distanced itself from the Council, limiting its ability to raise money. Pretty soon, the council schools began closing.
What happened next is a matter for the history books. Much of Jackson’s white population did what they must to pay and send their children to Prep, JA, St Andrews, and St. Richards. That made Jackson Public Schools the majority black. Dr. Walker, the superintendent, retired almost as soon as integration began. He was replaced by a series of men who didn’t stay until Bob Fortenberry came back to Mississippi to take the job. Bob fought for Jackson and for JPS, and he did a great job, but he was ambitious and wouldn’t stay forever.
By the 90s, with Dr. Fortenberry retired, people who couldn’t afford private school began leaving Jackson for cities in Rankin and Madison counties that still had a majority white population. This created an avalanche of white flight out of Jackson that we’re still dealing with. Jackson is still losing population, even though we were at an all-time high in the 80s.
Life is like a series of domino pieces standing on end. When you knock one over, it knocks the one next to it over, and that knocks over the one next to it, and so on, and so on, until you get to a space quite a distance away from where you first tipped over a domino, but the causation remains the same.
A lot of people want to say that what happened in the sixties and seventies has nothing to do with what’s happening now. That’s just not true. What’s happening now is a direct result of what happened in the sixties and seventies, even though we had to go through many steps to get here from there.
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