Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  In the 1959 race for governor, Barnett had the all-out support of the White Citizens’ Council, more commonly known as the Citizens’ Council or just the Council. The Council had been founded five years earlier, in July 1954, up in the Delta, to draw lines in the earth against mixing and the mixers. The Council had been established less than two months after the United States Supreme Court, in that despised thing called Brown v. Board of Education, had struck down the half-century-old Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal,” which was a lie and a sham in all of the South but most especially in Mississippi. Because of Brown, it was now federal law that every school in the nation be integrated, or open to all races, though certainly it wasn’t any kind of recognized law in sovereign Mississippi. In 1959, the emerging power in the Citizens’ Council—in the capital city and across the state and in other Southern states as well—was William J. Simmons. He and Barnett lived close to each other in the fine old Jackson college neighborhood of Belhaven. Simmons was a large and disturbing man with hooded eyes and a mustache and a big chunky head. He wore dark suits and talked in a deeply pleasant drawl about the idea of a “supine surrender on our part” to those who’d come in and wish to destroy Mississippi’s way of life. No way, was his answer. Simmons was the “prime minister of racial integrity,” as one Mississippi columnist described him. His Jackson council was in the process of building up a card file that held the racial views of almost every white person in the city—and also in the process of identifying organizations subversive to the Mississippi way of life: the Red Cross, the FBI, the Elks, the YWCA, the Jewish War Veterans, the National Lutheran Council.

  So the folksy, wily, not-too-bright Christian fundamentalist Ross Robert Barnett, with the Council and William Simmons standing at his elbow, had emerged as the leading candidate in the gubernatorial race almost in spite of himself. There was a great sense in that campaign that white backs were against the wall—a spirit not unlike what had prevailed a hundred years before, in the decade preceding the Civil War. At one point in the race, the candidate got out of a small plane in the town of Olive Branch and walked into a propeller blade that was still turning lazily—but he survived and grinned it off and went on to win his landslide victory. He came into office in January 1960 (along with the new sheriffs of Adams and Leflore and Grenada and Claiborne Counties and all the other counties in the state) as the bellowing champion of states’ rights, which, as everyone understood, was a fig-leaf name for white supremacy. That’s how historian James Silver, in his book Mississippi: The Closed Society, painted Barnett. He was, said Silver, “an inflexible racist with a mind relatively innocent of history, constitutional law, and the processes of government.” The governor was a deacon and taught the men’s Sunday school class at Jackson’s First Baptist Church. First Baptist, an immense white stone thing in the center of town, right across the lawn from the State Capitol, occupied a city block. Inside was a stage like Radio City’s. There were several levels of balconies and tiered rows of dark pews in the main chamber, in this carpeted amphitheater of prayer. Also in the first pews of First Baptist were Thomas and Robert Hederman, owners of the state’s largest-circulation and most unashamedly racist dailies, the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. (After Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss, a columnist for the Daily News would write: “Watch the peace-lovers come to the fore, grab a nigger-neck and start bellowing brotherly love.… For us we’ll just go on being a bigot, a reactionary, a rebel and lick our wounds till the next fight starts and plan to win somehow. We are licked but not beaten.”) The theology of the flock of First Baptist, not unlike the theology of Mississippi, not unlike the theology of the Clarion-Ledger and the Daily News, was an unparsable mix of stone-white piety and righteous racism.

  Once in, Ross hadn’t rolled so well. He spent much of his time putting off job seekers. “Just kick open the door and ask for Old Ross,” he used to say on the campaign trail. Some mornings the line outside his office door in the state capitol was forty yards long. He was ineffectual with the legislature. Word got out that he and his wife had spent $312,000 of taxpayers’ money on such renovations as gold-plated handles on the bathtub faucets in the governor’s mansion. He took to posing for official portraits with his head cocked and his wire specs dangling from two manicured fingers that were held aloft—like some fey backbencher in the English Parliament. An old wire-service reporter, Lewis Lord, who’d covered the Barnett administration, remembers how relaxed things were. Back then, Lord said, if you wanted to see the governor, you just walked into his office and said hello to Miss Jean. There wasn’t any press secretary. Miss Jean would nod you in. Lew Lord remembered that the governor would get up from behind his desk and take him over to a little anteroom “where there was an old-fashioned Coke machine with pull handles. He’d fish two nickels out of his pocket and get two six-and-a-half-inch Cokes and we’d sit there and talk. I think he was relieved not to have to talk to some office seeker he’d promised something to in one of his three campaigns. I think half the time he forgot I was a reporter.” When you hear stories like that, you almost want to start smiling at the historical memory of a long-deceased politician and demagogue named Ross Barnett. Forget it. He was as opportunistic and craven in his need to remain in power as the far-smaller-time James Ira Grimsley—and he’d prove even more craven and opportunistic than Grimsley in the events at Oxford, two and a half years up the macadam in his mocked and troubled administration. By then, having found the saving cause of James Meredith trying to despoil Ole Miss, the governor would be exhorting the youth of his state: “If you and I and all Mississippians had the courage of our old daddies and granddaddies, we could perpetuate our ideals and way of life forever.”

  In the late summer of 1962, the eve of Meredith’s moment in history, a thirty-one-year-old photojournalist was living miserably in a fifth-floor walkup in New York City’s East Village. Charles Moore’s unhappiness, as that summer began to dwindle down, in what could be called the twilight of American apartheid, had less to do with his living conditions (his flat’s one window looked out on the brick wall of another building), or with the suffocation of a city he’d not dreamed could be so large and dirty and vertical, than with the condescension and rejection he was encountering in trying to get a freelance career off the ground.

  He was two years and three months older than Meredith. Like Meredith, he was a native of the poor and rural Deep South. He was soft-voiced and had a gentle, open face—which belied the tensile toughness of a former Marine who’d also done a lot of prizefighting in his teens as a welterweight Golden Glover. Like Meredith, Moore was wiry and slight of build. He had four small children—three of his own, one stepchild—who were back in Alabama with his estranged spouse. He owned a metallic-silver Austin-Healey sports car. Two months before, in June 1962, he had driven east in it with his stake of $1,500. And the stake was fast disappearing.

  His own piece of native South was the northwestern corner of Alabama—a little community called Valdosta, on the edge of a somewhat better-known place called Tuscumbia (Helen Keller was born there), hard by burgs called Sheffield and Muscle Shoals and Florence. He had grown up in these culturally dunned environs thinking segregation was the way things were supposed to be. “I didn’t dwell on the problems of blacks,” he’d say years later. “In my naïveté and lack of knowledge of the world, I accepted this.…”

  His father was a Baptist preacher, although not the hellfire-and-brimstone variety commonly associated with Southern Baptists. The Reverend Charles Walker Moore was known in that country as a decent and quiet man, a persuader and exhorter rather than a screamer, and sometimes he was even invited to preach at Negro churches. “Big Mo,” black folks called him. Occasionally, he’d take along his two sons. This had made a deep impression—it was the communal fervor, the power of the singing, the depth of belief spilling from those backwoods, pine-board sanctums. In his older son’s memory—that was Charles—Reverend Moore never used racial epithets at home. He typica
lly referred to blacks as “colored folk,” a term of dignity and respect. Was he an integrationist? No. Segregation was what God and man had designed, even if the races came into close contact with each other every day, as they did all over the rural Deep South.

  In the Marine Corps (he’d gone in at seventeen, in 1948, with a parental signature, before finishing high school), Moore had trained to be a combat photographer. Upon his discharge, back in Alabama, he’d quickly set his dreams on fashion photography. He loved pretty women in sexy clothes. Soon he was restless, something that would prove a lifelong trait. With very little money, he’d departed Alabama again, for California, where he’d studied portraiture and composition at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara. A year later, family problems, especially the illness of his grandmother, forced him back home to be with his father and brother. For a while, he’d seemed without focus. He’d found a job taking pictures at a local Olan Mills studio, where he became a first-rate hack, spending his day shooting squalling babies and the dressed-up families who trooped in for their portrait packages at various price levels. He’d gotten good at putting rubber balls on his head and rolling them off, distracting the babies so he could jump behind the camera and knock off the shot. The lights and camera stand were on a large X that was taped to the floor; his subjects were eight feet away, posing in front of backdrops. He’d learned much about the quickness of the mind’s eye and the reflex of a finger, so that what was being glimpsed within the small frame of a lens could be acted upon almost instantaneously.

  One day—it was 1957 now, and he was twenty-six—Moore had heard about a newspaper job down in Montgomery, the state capital. The “Cradle of the Confederacy,” as white Montgomery was proud to call itself, was a pleasant and still almost entirely segregated little Southern metropolis at a sharp bend in the left bank of the Alabama River. The city made syrup and brooms and window sashes and boiler parts. License plates were festooned with the Rebel flag. Lunchrooms still had “Colored Only” sides and “White Only” sides. He got hired—by both the Montgomery Advertiser and its sister paper, the Alabama Journal. These were important dailies, segregationist sheets, although less virulent in their bigotries than some Southern papers. The Montgomery bus boycott had occurred two years before, but the new hire from the northwest corner of the state had barely heard of that nationally watched event, which began in December 1955 and lasted a year. (He’d never heard the name Rosa Parks when he started at the paper.) His was the usual photo staff work on a city daily: politicians cutting ribbons, society shoots by the swimming pool at the all-white country club, high school football games. Within a year, he had become chief photographer of the Advertiser, and it seems accurate to say, from the vantage point of a lot of years removed, that a sympathy for black people and for the incipient revolution going on in America and in his own city was something seeping into him by circumstance of employment rather than something being embraced for its own sake. In any case, the photographer had begun to hear a lot about a Montgomery pastor, a native of Atlanta named Martin Luther King, Jr., just a little older than he was, who’d come to town in 1954 and had helped lead the bus boycott, and who’d recently helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). “Mike” King, as parishioners at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church thought of him, was a fast-rising national figure, but he was still a Montgomery pastor, too. The downtown church where King orated on Sundays was little more than a rock throw from where Jefferson Davis once stood and took the oath of the Confederacy.

  On September 3, 1958, Moore made a photograph of King being shoved against a booking desk at police headquarters. The arresting cop has the minister in an arm lock. Another city cop is nearby, ready to help. They’re booking the preacher for loitering and refusing to obey an officer, but the real reason they’re booking him is because he’s an uppity nigger. (King had showed up in City Recorder’s Court to testify on behalf of a fellow black, and the cops didn’t want him there.) The photographer got the picture from behind the police desk, shooting straight at the clergyman. During the confusion of the arrest, Moore had slipped around behind the counter, understanding that that was the only spot from which to capture the abusive weight of white people in the world—not that he thought of the instant in those terms, exactly. He shot over the blurry shoulder of the desk sergeant (who has his fist cocked), so that what you see, in the middle of the frame, is a well-dressed man (fedora, silky tie, nice watch), his torso bent toward the counter, his arm twisted behind him, his frightened wife looking on. The shot went out on the AP wires and appeared in papers across the country, and then Life picked it up. It was his first time in the magazine. It would become one of the great civil rights photographs.

  He kept seeing, kept shooting, kept finding himself involved with black people in ways he’d not previously known. Still, he didn’t have to take moral sides. He was earning his living—covering news in the festering city where he lived. His press pass and the box being held up to his eye were protecting him from larger questions. The governor of Alabama, John Patterson, had taken to telling fellow bigots that the reason that photographer for the local paper was shooting so many racial scenes is because he wished “carnal knowledge of nigger gals.” In early 1960, segregated lunch counters had begun falling throughout the South. (The sits-ins had begun at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, and had spread to Nashville and even to northern climes such as Madison, Wisconsin. Within a year, black collegians and others had desegregated hundreds of lunch counters in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and the border states of the South—but not in Mississippi. Many of the new recruits to the movement enlisted with SNCC. Far more radical than King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC originated at a collegiate conference sponsored by SCLC in April 1960.)

  In late February of 1960, in Montgomery, thirty-five black students from Alabama State University had tried to enter the basement cafeteria in the State Capitol. They were denied. The local supremacists were aroused. Vigilantes went out looking for protesters on downtown streets. Some carried eighteen-inch clubs inside their jackets or in paper bags. On Saturday afternoon, February 27, reacting to a tip, the chief photographer and the city editor of the Journal ran from their offices to the corner of Perry Street and Dexter Avenue, where whites and blacks were shouting and shoving at each other. The ruckus was across the street from Green’s and just down from Kress’s—each a popular five-and-dime with a lunch counter. Just as he got there, Moore saw a man wearing a tam and a short jacket reach down and pull a piece of tapered wood from a bowling bag. It was a miniature baseball bat. According to the account in the next morning’s paper, the assailant “darted in and struck the girl from behind with a baseball bat.” The photographer didn’t even have time to get the camera up to his eye, so he made the shot on the run—literally. He took it at a tilt, which only added to the power, the picture’s sense of violent immediacy. He clicked the shutter as the man in the tam and jacket is cocking back with a flat baseball-like swing, and just as the victim—a black woman whose face also can’t be seen—is putting up her hands to ward off the coming blow. Her purse is on the curb, and a stick of gum and maybe a tissue and a compact case have fallen from it. In a way, the cocked toy bat, halted at its backswing, was a prefiguring of another grab-shot two years later on a college campus under some trees in an adjoining state. Incidentally, the hater with his bat, Sonny Kyle Livingston, had a kid sister who was about sixteen, who lived just down the street from Moore, and she’d recently done babysitting at Moore’s home. Moore had had no idea of the connection. It’s the way the layered South works.