It is here that Barbour offers his most bald and sickening claims. Asked what it was like growing up at Ground Zero of the civil rights revolution, he recollected, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” and volunteered his recollection when “Martin Luther King came to town, in ‘62. He spoke at the old fairground….I was there with some of my friends,” he said. “We wanted to hear him speak.”
King did apparently make a stop in Yazoo during a three-day tour of the Delta region in February 1962, but it was his 1966 visit to the town that is much more famous. Early that June, James Meredith — the black man whose entry to the University of Mississippi in ‘62, when Barbour was 15, spurred riots that brought federal troops and the cream of the nation’s media to Barbour’s future alma mater — announced he would march “against fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. When he crossed the border into the Magnolia State, a farmer emptied a double-barreled shotgun into his hide. In solidarity, all of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders, and hundreds of their followers, vowed to complete his march. It produced one of the Movement’s grandest melodramas. On June 16, at a rally in the courthouse square in Greenwood, militant Stokely Carmichael delivered his infamous “Black Power” address and cleaved the freedom movement forever more into armed versus nonviolent factions. On June 21, King detoured off the line of the march fifty miles to the east, to Neshoba County, symbolically confronting the perpetrators of a notorious murder two years before: “In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered. I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.”
That utterance is significant to the case of Haley Barbour. He says the King speech he saw in ‘62 was “full of people, black and white” — part of his longstanding pattern of radically distorting the degree of comity between the races in Mississippi during his youth. In fact, during Mississippi’s race revolution, when blacks and whites occupied the same space (except when the former were virtual servants and the former masters), the scene in greater or lesser degrees resembled the chaos that day in Philadelphia. This was as true in 1966 as it was in 1962. As The New York Times described the scene in Philadelphia, white “onlookers” toppled a network camera, “[s]ome 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flared in to the line of march, their eyes wide with anger,” and police didn’t intervene against the ensuing stones, bottles, clubs, and firecrackers until “[h]alf a dozen Negroes began to fight back.”
Then it was on to Yazoo.
Martin Luther King followed a speaker for the pro-violence Deacons of Defense who said, “They ain’t a redneck or a cracker in Mississippi that I’m afraid of…They ain’t gonna be enough of people to keep black people from hurting white people.” King delivered one of the greatest speeches of his soon-to-be-snuffed-out life. You can watch it at the broadcast museums in New York and Los Angeles:
“I am disturbed about a straaaaange theory that is circulating, saying to me that I ought to imitate the worst in the white man and the worse in our oppressors. Who have a specter of killing and lynching people and throwing them in rivers! It’s our oppressors! And now people are telling me to stoop down to that level, oh no! The reason that I will not do it is that I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetrate evil throughout our civilization.
“I’m sick and tired of violence.
“I’m tired of the war in Vietnam.
“I”m tired of war and conflict in the world.
“I’m tired of shooting. I’m tired of hate. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of evil! I’m not going to use violence, no matter who says it.”
I am almost certain it is this scene of menace, foreboding, and transcendence that Haley Barbour is “describing” when he says, “I don’t really remember.” He elaborates, “We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
Which is where things get honestly creepy. I hope Haley Barbour is just making that last detail up. The menacing white mobs that gathered at the periphery of civil rights rallies in places like Yazoo City were almost exclusively male. If he truly remembers the moment through a cloud of testosterone, the imagery invokes to me the most Gothic nastiness imaginable. In “Black Like Me,” the 1961 classic in which journalist John Howard Griffith blackened his face to see how race relations worked in the South, Griffith learned through one white interlocutor “how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. ‘And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them since before they ever got on the payroll…We figure we’re doing your people a favor to get some white blood in your kids.’”
No way, not in a million years, am I accusing Haley Barbour of being like this guy. I’m making a different point. At every important turn in the story, Barbour emphasizes how little he remembers of this most intense period imaginable in his beloved home town — it really was no big deal, he insists. When he does so, this is what he is forgetting: the entire bad-faith stew of race, sex, and corrupt plutocracy — and its public repression in images of towns like “families” and happy Negroes until outsiders stirred things up — that defined his formative years. He’s a middle-aged Southern conservative. That is what his job is: to opportunistically “forget.”
What was the role of the Republican Party in all of this? In 1964, the Mississippi Republican Party changed its platform to reassure potential recruits it bought the whole package: “We feel segregation of the races is absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations and the continued progress of both races in the State of Mississippi.” (It worked: Barry Goldwater got 87 percent of the vote.) In 1965, Haley’s older brother Jeppie Barbour became one of the first among the Delta’s gentry to join the Republican Party. In 1968, with Haley as campaign manager, he became the town’s mayor. These were years when the challenge of Massive Resistance became merely bureaucratic, as Lyndon Johnson’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare established legal guidelines to finally force Southern school districts to honor Brown v. Board of Education. The forcing didn’t work, in part because Southern Republicans, in concert with President Nixon, kept on devising new ways to stall. Finally, federal courts starting issuing draconian rulings that put the full force of federal police power behind desegregation.
