BOOK EXCERPT | A not-too-subtle threat

The fourth of a five-day serial from a book by renowned journalist and Youngstown native Simeon Booker Jr., a portion of which details his first trip to the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1950s. “Shocking the Conscience” is in book stores now. Booker is commencement speaker Sunday at Youngstown State University.

By SIMEON BOOKER JR.

Excerpt from “Shocking the Conscience”

Our host, Dr. T.R.M. Howard, or “Doc” as we called him, was expecting us, and put us up in a modest, two-unit guesthouse he owned across the road from his own home. It was considerably more comfortable than many of the accommodations we would find in the future, especially when reporting on lynchings. On those assignments, we would get a black undertaker to sneak us into the funeral home after dark so we could photograph the body and get an account of the murder. Sometimes we’d spend the night and slip out before dawn. Most blacks in the vicinity would be too frightened to be seen with us.

This rally would be the first to be covered by a national news outlet, because even though the previous years’ rallies had each attracted around 10,000 participants, no one outside of Mississippi had taken any notice. This time, news of the rally would reach far beyond Mississippi. Chicago publishing pioneer John H. Johnson’s Jet magazine, launched in 1951, was already a staple in black households and businesses nationwide, and every week, Johnson was fulfilling his promise to bring its readers “complete news coverage on happenings among Negroes all over the U.S.”

Doc also had reason to believe that local reaction to this rally was likely to be different this year because of the Brown decision. From the time the case was argued before the Supreme Court, and continuing tenfold in the year since the decision had come down, racist tracts and pamphlets were being disseminated throughout the South, calling the school case Communist-inspired and supported.

Meeting with us at his home the morning after we arrived, Doc handed me a yellow, 5-by-7-inch envelope, bearing an illegible postmark over four cents in canceled stamps. It was addressed to: T. R. M. Howard, negro, Mound Bayou, Miss.

Opening the metal clasp on the flap and removing the contents, I asked him who had sent them. Doc shook his head. “I have no idea,” he shrugged, “but I don’t think it was a friend.”

There was no note inside, just a handful of documents, including two crude booklets on construction paper, three racist pamphlets, and a copy of an editorial, “NEW JERSEY NEGRO EDITOR WARNS HIS RACE OF THE DANGERS OF INTEGRATED SCHOOLS IN THE SOUTH,” by Davis Lee, publisher and editor of The Newark Telegram.

Lee’s controversial argument was that if schools were desegregated, blacks would lose out in every way to whites, including, most significantly, the loss of teaching positions and income. Lee’s preference was for “separate but equal.” The problem was that in reality, despite the handful of examples of black success that he cited, separate was never equal and never would be.

Lee’s editorial had inspired a slew of racist tracts, some claiming to reflect the sentiments of other Negroes, arguing for maintaining the status quo. Mississippi’s White Citizens’ Councils had actually retained Lee to map a pro-segregation drive among the state’s blacks, but it was not clear whether he had any input into the two most creative, as well as particularly offensive, articles in the envelope which, using poor grammar and spelling and what was intended to look like Negro dialect, argued against desegregation.

One was titled, “Mammy Liza’s Appeal to Her People (On the Question of Integration in Southern Schools),” while the other was characterized as a “sequel,” under the title “Uncle Ned Warns His People of the Dangers of Integration in Southern Schools.” Both reduced Lee’s arguments to minstrel-show perversions, as in the final couplet of “Uncle Ned’s five-page “verse:”

De angels in heaben each has deir own level.

Stay in yo’ place . . . quit flirtin’ wid de devil.

“Take a look at the back page, too,” Doc suggested, pointing out that the booklet contained some not-so-subtle threats, as well.

Turning the pages, I found a cartoon depicting a fenced yard in which a bulldog stood warily eyeing his bone near a sign that warned “Keep Out.” The caption explained, “A dog, kind and friendly when it’s let alone, might turn in fierce anger to save its white bone.”

In case that was too subtle, Doc noted the booklet’s opening lines as well:

Years ago, when ole Marse had a matter to settle,

Outsiders knowed well dat dey’d better not meddle.

It wasn’t too subtle for us.