Mississippi’s evolution hidden by racial history

“Part of the new Mississippi is you have a group of older people, white and black, that always cared about black people.”

Eric Powell

Mississippi state senator

CORINTH, Miss. (AP) — On a small-town Saturday night, a half-block from the town square where a deteriorating Confederate statue stands guard, state Sen. Eric Powell walks into a restaurant for dinner.

Powell orders fried pickles. Bubba Carpenter, a Republican state representative, ambles over with his 5-year-old son, Noah. The two freshmen legislators make small talk about a Civil War reenactment.

Noah wordlessly reaches his hand across the table, palm up. Powell gently slaps him five, his large brown hand swallowing Noah’s tiny white one.

This is the new Mississippi — where Powell, a Democrat, is the first black person ever elected to the state Legislature from a rural white district. Where a combination of the murderous past and the nation’s largest percentage of black residents have, in some surprising ways, pushed Mississippi race relations ahead of the rest of the nation.

Bubba Carpenter, whose district adjacent to Powell’s has only one stoplight, says people in the area “don’t look at Eric as a black man. They knew his character, his beliefs, what he stood for. They elected a person, not a Democrat, Republican, black or white.”

Make no mistake, though — Powell is black and knows it. Growing up near Corinth in Tishomingo County, which is 98 percent white, he and his father were once told to order at the back door of a hamburger stand. Recently, Powell and his son were left waiting half an hour for service at a barbecue restaurant.

Everyone in Mississippi, which is 37 percent black, understands that racism lives on. And what of the rest of the country, which is 12 percent black? In a recent AP-Yahoo poll that found racial attitudes could cost Sen. Barack Obama a close election, 55 percent of whites said “a lot” or “some” discrimination exists, while almost all blacks felt that way.

Powell, 42, attended integrated schools and got hooked on politics after being elected class president at Tishomingo High in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. He works at an integrated paper mill and lives with his wife and three children in an integrated neighborhood. He saw blacks elected mayor of Corinth and come within four votes of being elected Tishomingo sheriff.

So when Powell was first asked to run for state Senate in 2003, he was unfazed by his district’s 91 percent white and solidly Republican population. Powell lost then by 630 votes. Last year, he ran again and received 8,571 votes, 497 more than his opponent.

“Part of the new Mississippi is you have a group of older people, white and black, that always cared about black people,” Powell says. “They’re not going to say a whole lot. But they go to the polls and vote.”

“Mississippi is probably frozen in time with images from the past,” says Charles Reagan Wilson, a history professor at the University of Mississippi and former director of the school’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “Those are such dramatic images it’s hard to forget them, unless you are exposed to the new Mississippi.”

Deborah Posey, a nurse from Philadelphia, Miss., can’t forget. For years now, she has been stopping at the roadside site in her hometown where three civil-rights workers were abducted in one of America’s most infamous race murders.

“Blood is on the land, and the land cries,” Posey says.

So does Posey, 54, as she recounts her unlikely involvement in the case that helped pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and inspired the Oscar-winning 1988 film “Mississippi Burning.”

She grew up in segregated Philadelphia, “terrified of black males, don’t know why, can’t tell you why.” Her ex-husband’s father, Billy Ray Posey, has admitted he was one of the killers, documents show. Her cousin reportedly hid the car used to transport the bodies. For years she was deeply afraid and ashamed of her hometown, and could not believe that justice would ever be done.

Then, in 2004, she joined a multi-racial coalition planning to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the killings. The group’s acknowledgment of the heinous crime and call for justice helped spur the prosecution of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, who was convicted in 2005 of manslaughter and received a 60-year sentence.

“I cannot say I’ve been the same since,” says Posey, pressing fingers to her wet eyes.

But before the Philadelphia coalition could begin its work, roadblocks emerged. A debate over calling for a march or a resolution — each one anathema to the opposing racial group — made them realize that a basis of trust and communication was needed.

So for the next six meetings, coalition members simply talked about why they were there.

“Those were the most emotional six weeks of my life,” says Leroy Clemons, head of the Neshoba County NAACP. “It was like we lanced this wound and drained the pus from it. For the first time, I understood that white people were just as offended as I was by these killings. And they realized that the black community did not hold them personally responsible.”

After the Killen catharsis, coalition members turned their attention to other issues — education, jobs, plus the everyday community concerns that can grow from small misunderstandings into full-fledged battles.

“I don’t want to be Pollyannish here. Like the song ‘Dixie’ says, old times here are not forgotten,” says former secretary of state Dick Molpus, a Philadelphia native who received death threats after apologizing to the three families at a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the killings. “But I really do believe Mississippi can be a beacon for the United States to follow when it comes to race.”