Voices in Our Blood (35 page)

Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women with their little hats and their clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heartbreaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.

The crowd behind the barrier roared and cheered and pounded one another with joy. The nervous strolling police watched for any break over the barrier. Their lips were tight but a few of them smiled and quickly unsmiled. Across the street the U.S. marshals stood unmoving. The gray-clothed man's legs had speeded for a second, but he reined them down with his will and walked up the school pavement:

The crowd quieted and the next cheer lady had her turn. Her voice was the bellow of a bull, a deep and powerful shout with flat edges like a circus barker's voice. There is no need to set down her words. The pattern was the same; only the rhythm and tonal quality were different. Anyone who has been near the theater would know that these speeches were not spontaneous. They were tried and memorized and carefully rehearsed. This was theater. I watched the intent faces of the listening crowd and they were the faces of an audience. When there was applause, it was for a performer.

My body churned with weary nausea, but I could not let an illness blind me after I had come so far to look and to hear. And suddenly I knew something was wrong and distorted and out of drawing. I knew New Orleans, I have over the years had many friends there, thoughtful, gentle people, with a tradition of kindness and courtesy. I remembered Lyle Saxon, a huge man of soft laughter. How many days I have spent with Roark Bradford, who took Louisiana sounds and sights and created God and the Green Pastures to which He leadeth us. I looked in the crowd for such faces of such people and they were not there. I've seen this kind bellow for blood at a prize fight, have orgasms when a man is gored in the bull ring, stare with vicarious lust at a highway accident, stand patiently in line for the privilege of watching any pain or any agony. But where were the others—the ones who would be proud they were of a species with the gray man—the ones whose arms would ache to gather up the small, scared black mite?

I don't know where they were. Perhaps they felt as helpless as I did, but they left New Orleans misrepresented to the world. The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world, unchallenged by the other things I know are there.

Liar by Legislation

Look,
June 28, 1955

H
ODDING
C
ARTER

It happened on April Fools' Day. But it wasn't a joke to me or to the majority of the Mississippi House of Representatives who, by formal resolution, voted on April 1, 1955, that I had lied, slandered my state, and betrayed the South in a
Look
magazine article (March 22 issue) about the Citizens' Councils—the militant Southern white groups which have been organized to discourage school integration and Negro suffrage.

Perhaps in the history of state legislatures, often citizens have been made liars by legislation. But I doubt that any of them received the accolade under the same conditions as I did.

April 1 was the final day of a special legislative session at which our Mississippi lawmakers had been seeking feverishly, and finally with success, to find new money to equalize the dual school systems, as a means of avoiding racial integration. April 1 was as usual the opening day of the turkey hunting season. With four friends, a cook, and a guide, I was turkey hunting forty miles from my home town, Greenville, Mississippi. Our headquarters was the
Mistuh Charley,
my newspaper's cabin cruiser, and we were playing cards aboard her that afternoon after an unsuccessful opening day.

The game was interrupted by a low-flying plane that dropped a bundle near the wooded shoreline. I kept on playing cards, but John Gibson, the
Delta Democrat-Times
business manager and my publishing associate, went out and found the bundle. He returned and handed me some sheets of paper. “You'd better read this,” he said.

I did, and for the time being I lost interest in cards and turkeys. Joe Call, a cotton-duster pilot and friend, had dropped a press association report of what the House of Representatives had done, together with a note from my wife. I read the note first:

“We've played the story on page one as second lead. Everybody's calling for your answer. When can we get it and what else shall we do? Love, Betty.”

Then I read the wire service report. It was like being kicked in the stomach by eighty-nine angry jackasses. That number of state legislators, with nineteen opposed and thirty-two others not voting, had officially branded me a liar. During two hours of angry debate preceding the vote, I had been described in terms not often used by lawmakers. I was a Negro lover and a scalawag, a lying newspaperman, a person who “as far as the white people of Mississippi are concerned, should have no rights.” I had sold out the South for 50,000 pieces of silver. (Note to
Look:
You owe me money.)

The elderly Speaker of the House, a perpetual seceder and a backer of the Citizens' Councils, cast a vote for the resolution, gratuitously, although ordinarily he would not vote on any measure except to break a tie. I was defended by a few, notably the two young lawyer-legislators from Greenville and another young representative, Joel Blass of Stone County. Blass told how he also had felt the Councils' lash because he had opposed a Council-backed constitutional amendment making it possible to abandon the state's public school system. The fact that these men are young is important to this story and to the future of Mississippi.

My hunting companions thought the whole thing was funny. I didn't, even though they assured me—and I agreed—that a Mississippi legislative majority was mentally and morally incapable of insulting anybody. I ducked below and started writing. I'm glad, I guess, that my fellow turkey stalkers talked me into watering down the original editorial. [The watered-down version is reproduced here.
Ed.
]

Liar by Legislation

By a vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resoluted the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote about the Citizens' Councils for
Look
magazine. If this charge were true it would make me well qualified to serve with that body. It is not true. So, to even things up, I herewith resolve by a vote of 1 to 0 that there are 89 liars in the state legislature beginning with Speaker Sillers and working way on down to Rep. Eck Windham of Prentiss, a political loon whose name is fittingly made up of the words “wind” and “ham.”

As for the article, I stand by it. This action by a majority of the House of Representatives only serves to add new proof to what I wrote. There is one editor of this newspaper. I vote only in Washington County. The Citizens' Councils claim 30,000 members who vote all over the state. That is explanation enough for the resolution.

I am grateful to the 19 legislators, and especially to Greenville's two representatives, who voted against the resolution. I am also appreciative of the sane comments of Rep. Joel Blass of Stone County who likewise has been a target of the dishonest and contemptible tactics used by the Citizens' Councils against anyone who differs with them or their methods.

I am hopeful that this fever, like the Ku Kluxism which rose from the same kind of infection will run its course before too long a time. Meanwhile, those 89 character mobbers can go to hell, collectively or singly, and wait there until I back down. They needn't plan on returning.

Hodding Carter

I decided to wait until the next morning to telephone in the reply I had written. We turned on the radio and heard how I had been done in, and then went on playing cards.

But in the woods on the rest of the hunt I couldn't forget what had happened. I did a lot of thinking about my twenty-three years as editor and publisher of small newspapers, four years in Louisiana and the last nineteen in Mississippi. I had never looked on myself as a starry-eyed crusader or an unfriendly critic of my homeland. No book or editorial or article I had ever written, including the
Look
article, would so identify me. I do like to believe that we've tried on our paper to take seriously the idea of man's equality. But we've been generally orthodox newspaper people, my wife and I.

I have noted, however, that an editor is remembered longest for his unpleasant comments—and for comments made about him. Long ago in Louisiana that odious anti-Semite, Gerald L. K. Smith, said that I had been run out of Mississippi as a young newspaperman and would be run out of Louisiana. Every now and then, some politician will repeat that preposterous fantasy as gospel. When I won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1946, the late Theodore G. Bilbo, then running for re-election to the United States Senate, told his listeners that “no self-respecting Southern white man would accept a prize given by a bunch of nigger-loving, Yankeefied Communists for editorials advocating the mongrelization of the race.”

When, ten years earlier, in 1936, ours had been the first Mississippi paper to print a picture showing a Negro in a favorable light—it was of Jesse Owens, the Olympic triple winner—some of the readers who canceled their subscriptions said that our action was part of a Communist plot to end segregation.

When (and this again was unique in Mississippi) we began using the courtesy title “Mrs.” before the names of Negro women in news stories, the tale spread that we would soon demand “social equality” for Negroes. And every time we have come out for anything that some of our special pleaders or Stone Agers haven't liked—from the Blue Cross nearly twenty years ago to a good word for the United Nations—we have known we could expect the same emotional cacophony, and that the cumulative roaring would echo loudest during political campaigns. But never had we been ganged up on by a state legislature. Most of all, I wanted to know what this thing portended.

I've been trying to figure it out ever since. I think I've come up with some answers, and I'd like to say first that I'm not as worried as I was about Mississippi or our newspaper or anything except our politicians. Perhaps the reaction of so many of my home town and Southern fellow citizens, and my fellow newspapermen, particularly in Mississippi, is what keeps me from being worried.

When I got home, I asked our two Greenville legislators what they thought about the resolution. Both had strongly defended me on the floor. Young Joe Wroten, a lawyer and a minister's son, didn't mince words. “Some of our people who pay lip service to constitutional government pay homage in practice to a government of men,” he said. “The resolution was abortive thought control by legislation against facts, and I don't like it. But maybe those venomous attacks on freedom of the press may wake people to the danger of a clandestine government of men.” And Joe punned: “—a Klandestine klavern of men. . . .”

Jimmy Robertshaw, likewise a lawyer, was more amused than disturbed. “It's partly because they were scared, partly because they're sore at the Supreme Court, and partly because they were on edge after twelve weeks of looking for money,” he said. “And some of them, don't forget, are Council members. But I would like to think that they're ashamed, too, and don't want people outside to know that the Councils really exist.”

Joe and Jimmy are two of the legislative minority that wouldn't go along. Numerically, they aren't important. But numerically and otherwise, the letters that continue to pile up as an aftermath of the
Look
article and its legislative sequel do seem to me to be important. I have received more than 2,000 letters about the Council piece. They've run about three to two in my favor in the South, and better than that elsewhere. Heartening is the preponderance of letters from young people, especially servicemen; clergymen of all faiths; educators and fellow newspapermen, and the accent of so many of them has been upon the Christian challenge. The several hundred that quickly followed the resolution favored our side at least nineteen to one. I think this shows that Americans dislike seeing people ganged up on.

It is significant, too, that the critical letters were overwhelmingly emotional, often anti-Semitic, and, when unsigned as many were, contained filthy personal attacks and threats. Some, of course, came from people honestly disturbed over the Supreme Court ruling and wondering whether the Councils' program of economic terrorism is not the South's only anti-integration weapon.

A man in Alaska sent $100 to be used as I saw fit to oppose the Councils. Three priests, each from different communities and one of them 300 miles away, came to Greenville within a few days of each other to offer aid and comfort to this battered Episcopalian. But an unidentified telephone caller told me to get out of town before I was carried out.

Less trivial than threats or insults have been the efforts at boycott, only spasmodic before the
Look
article appeared, but now accelerated. We've lost circulation in some areas, but we've managed to hold to our 12,500 average. We've been hurt a little in our commercial printing and office-supply sidelines. So far, none of our advertisers has knuckled under to the arrogant demands of Council spokesmen that they join the Councils, or taken away their advertising from us on penalty of losing the trade of Council members. This economic weapon was announced last summer as being planned for use only against Negroes who tried to vote or enter their children in white schools, but it has been turned against anyone who doesn't go along with the Councils.

It seems to me that the general reaction to the legislature's blast, and the failure so far of any boycott, points up something that our non-Southern friends possibly don't know. The thinking people of Mississippi and the South are a long way ahead of their politicians; and those of us who seem to be in a completely rebuffed minority aren't as alone or as out of step as legislators and Councils might lead the outsider to believe.

I don't mean that many white Southerners are willing to have public schools integrated now, especially in the Deep South where numerical pressures are greatest. But they know that inflammatory political behavior and the formation of vigilante groups aren't the answer any more than would be a Supreme Court edict ordering complete integration next fall. There must be a middle ground.

That brings up something personal. I've been pretty much a middle-of-the-roader all my life. Some of my fellow Southerners think otherwise. They've been conditioned largely by political demagogues to believe that anybody who challenges extremism in the South is in league with the Supreme Court, the N.A.A.C.P., the Communist party, the mass-circulation magazines, and everybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line to destroy the Southern way of life. There's a lot of it I do want destroyed. There's a lot I want to keep.

And some of my non-Southern correspondents have been wrong also, though in a kindlier way. They envision a dangerous life for the Southern dissenter, or, at the best, a social and economic martyrdom. That, I am glad to say, just isn't so, though it could have been twenty years ago.

We live normal small-town lives in Greenville. That means we're busy with all kinds of matters besides racial problems. According to my calendar for the general period between the
Look
article and the legislature's resolution, I was chairman, so help me, of the Rotary Club's Ladies' Night; planned a spring boating weekend with the skipper of the Sea Scouts whose unofficial flagship is the
Mistuh Charley,
and gave a wiener roast for the Cub Scouts, including my youngest, whose den father I am; met three times with my fellow directors of the Chamber of Commerce; awarded the annual
Democrat-Times
plaques to the outstanding man and woman citizen; served as ringmaster for our neighborhood teen-agers' Cypress Saddle Club show; met with our monthly discussion group, a dozen business and professional men, in my home; judged a college and high school newspaper contest; went to two square dances; attended the Tulane University annual Board of Visitors meeting; began work on a talk for the convention of the Mississippi Bankers Association; helped my wife entertain for two engaged daughters of friends, and for each of our two older sons home from college and school for Easter holidays; planned a board meeting of the Mississippi Historical Society, of which I'm president; and worked with my wife on the 150-year history of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. This accounting is only partial, but it doesn't leave much time for scalawagging.