Booker: Preparing for a civil rights rally in the Deep South

Into the Delta

Like me, Jet photographer David Jackson was dressed in the style of a rural black man out to do no harm to the status quo. But even though he tried to “blend in,” his cameras were always a dead giveaway, and got him into trouble on more than one Dixie assignment.

The car had a radio, but it didn’t keep a station very long, so for the most part, we rode in silence, each wondering what lay ahead. Down the highway was our destination, the first scheduled voting rights rally in Mississippi since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954) had sent shock waves across the nation. Nowhere was the shock felt more emphatically than in the Deep South, where politicians such as U.S. Senator James O. Eastland (D-Miss.), a plantation owner, were fiercely opposing the court’s ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

In the early 1950s, segregated public schools were the norm in most of the United States, and were mandated in the entire former Confederacy. Although all the schools in a given district were supposed to be equal, black schools were far inferior to their white counterparts. I had a close look at the disgraceful neglect of black education while working at the Cleveland Call and Post, a black weekly, where I reported in-depth on that city’s shamefully neglected Negro schools, and won a national award for the series, the Wendell L. Willkie Award for Negro Journalism, sponsored by the Washington Post. Although the Supreme Court’s decision required only the desegregation of public schools, and not other public areas such as restaurants and restrooms, Southern whites were worried that it signaled a threat to all racial segregation—and white supremacy.

While other manifestations of the South’s Jim Crow system were bound to be mentioned, the primary focus of the rally we were about to cover was voting rights. Dave and I wondered whether there would be trouble, and specifically whether the local sheriff’s men would hassle people heading to the rally, even try to break it up. Or was the local white power structure so secure it would ignore the event and continue with business as usual? We doubted it, but we were outsiders; we just didn’t know.

Civil rights issues up to this time were argued in federal courts, mostly in litigation brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The bus boycotts, sit-ins, and mass marches came later. Voter registration drives were almost nonexistent except in this unlikely place, in the alluvial plain of the Mississippi Delta. The black town of Mound Bayou had hosted three in past years, but none since the Brown decision gave the state’s minority white population cause for alarm. (Blacks far outnumbered whites in Mississippi.) And so we drove toward a town that had long ago been dubbed “The Jewel of the Delta,” and wondered what really lay ahead.

One thing we knew was that there was nothing “antebellum” about the Delta. Framed by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, there wasn’t much happening in the area until after the Civil War. Virgin forests and fields covered almost the whole area in 1870. Twenty years later, railroad tracks opened up new markets for King Cotton, the South’s labor-intensive lifeblood. It was a life from which most of the blacks who’d fled North wanted to escape. The proliferation of tractors and other harvesting equipment in the 1940s left many of them little choice when the only work they’d had, as bad as it was, became insufficient to support their families. All along the highway, we could see evidence of the race-based system that kept white planters at the top and black workers, mainly sharecroppers, at the bottom. The shanties and rundown houses that lined the fields usually were not home to whites.

Outrageously racist sheriffs and judges rode roughshod over black people, wielding powers that became a brutal and intractable part of the system. Sometimes they left it to vigilantes to do the worst dirty work.

Despite this, or maybe because of it, a massive rally was scheduled in Mound Bayou on Friday, April 29, 1955. It was the state’s largest civil rights meeting in almost fifty years. Whatever happened, we knew it would make news for Jet’s national readership. We only hoped we’d live to file the story.

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