Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  At times, the State Sovereignty Commission was indeed capable of forcing people from their jobs, but its predilection for sending large men to examine tiny fingernails can make it seem more ludicrous than ominous. A phrase that keeps popping up in current descriptions of its activities is “Keystone Cops.” A passage in a 1964 report reflects the level of sophistication the Commission sometimes demonstrated in the area of Cold War skulduggery: “In order to receive regularly publications of communist front organizations and preferring that the Sovereignty Commission not be on their mailing lists, we made arrangement with John Kochtitzky, Jr., to be the subscriber and deliver the publications to our office each week. We wanted a name which sounded ‘Russianish.’ ” In 1964, when the Commission began dealing with the Mississippi Summer Project volunteers, many of them students from first-rank Northern universities, reports from investigators and spies began to include sentences like “The Kirschenbaum boy said that he did not believe in Jesus Christ.”

  Of course, what sound like Keystone Cops antics now were probably not funny at all thirty years ago—certainly not to the Kirschenbaum boy if he was being questioned at the side of a lonely country road around dusk by armed officials of the State of Mississippi who wanted to know exactly what he had against the Saviour. In those days, being called a Communist was also considerably less amusing than it might be now. It’s difficult for anyone sitting in the McCain Library in 1995, several years after the end of the Cold War, to take seriously references to the role of the Red Menace in the events of 1964, when black Americans in Mississippi were routinely denied even the elementary American right to vote and a number of people went to the state with the goal of helping to remedy that situation. But Communism was serious business at the time. A Mississippi politician who was asked why black people were not allowed to vote in his state might answer that certain people involved in the voter-registration campaign had once been to a meeting of an organization cited by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a Communist front. Case closed.

  The civil-rights movement itself was seriously split over the question of whether accepting the assistance of organizations that could easily be attacked as subversive was counterproductive, or perhaps even immoral. Association with such organizations could mean the loss of funding in the North, because the concern—some would say obsession—with Communism was national. It was the federal government, in the form of the attorney general’s office and congressional committees, that gathered lists of subversive organizations. In one of the clippings I ran across in Mississippi, Erle Johnston is quoted as saying that the State Sovereignty Commission “operated like a state-level F.B.I.” That characterization seemed grandiose, given the Sovereignty Commission’s penchant for bloodline inspections, but then I started thinking about what the F.B.I. was up to at that time—bugging motel rooms in order to embarrass or blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr., gathering information on law-abiding citizens right down to the names of people they had spoken to at the high-school reunion or the Hadassah dinner dance. Mississippi was not the only state government to keep secret files on its residents. “The Police Threat to Political Liberty,” the report that came out of the American Friends Service Committee project on surveillance, has chapters not just on Jackson but also on Seattle and Baltimore and Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

  In a way, the code phrases Mississippi used—“state sovereignty” for its system of white supremacy, “federal encroachment” for the national pressure to change—offered an accurate reflection of the situation. The Mississippi way of life was always vulnerable to contact with national institutions—the Methodist Church or the United States Air Force or the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. For many years, though, the pressure from Washington was not much more than nominal. Federal civil-rights legislation was bottled up by a powerful bloc of Southern senators. The Presidents in office in the decade after the Brown decision, when Mississippi was doing its best to run what James Silver called the Closed Society, did not treat the restoration of civil rights to black people in the South as a national priority. Dwight D. Eisenhower was identified with the view that you can’t legislate morality. John F. Kennedy seemed to consider segregation a deplorable but essentially unalterable regional situation that was inconvenient mainly because it caused embarrassment overseas. Even Northern politicians who were particularly critical of Mississippi’s single-race elections would not challenge their legitimacy, as Ed King and other delegates of the Freedom Democratic Party found out at the Democratic National Convention of 1964 when they tried to get seated in place of the all-white delegation from Mississippi. Reading through State Sovereignty Commission documents did not change my view that Mississippi had been sui generis, but it did remind me that the Closed Society had existed quite comfortably for years within the society of the United States of America. When I was in Mississippi in those days, I may have had thoughts of slipping over the border, but I was in my own country the entire time.

  Of the hundreds of white people who went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, committed to working for the benefit of black people, one is still at it. His name is Rims Barber, and he is one of the named plaintiffs in the suit to open the files of the State Sovereignty Commission. A Presbyterian minister from Chicago, Barber worked for the Delta Ministry for a dozen years and the Children’s Defense Fund for another dozen. For the past four or five years, he has been lobbying the Mississippi Legislature as a one-man organization called the Mississippi Human Services Agenda. He works out of a ramshackle house a couple of blocks from the capitol, sharing quarters with other lingering troublemakers, like the Environmental Justice Project and Congregations for Children—the Methodists, again. One room of the old house is supposed to be the office of the Mississippi Human Services Agenda, but Barber seems to have migrated to one corner of a large conference table in what was once a living room—a room whose walls have posters like one showing a smiling little girl above the legend “The Arms Race May Kill Her. So Might Poverty. Help Fight Both.” When I walked in, he waved an arm at the disorder around him and said, “Welcome to the Freedom House of the nineties.” It did look like a Freedom House during what civil-rights workers sometimes called Freedom Summer and Erle Johnston, out of an old habit, still refers to as the Invasion. Sitting there in a rickety folding chair next to the messy conference table, I felt for a moment that we were back in 1964, when Jackson seemed full of the eager students referred to by one white woman I met as “those COFO things.”

  “Why are you still here?” I asked.

  “Ignorance and stubbornness,” Barber said.

  Rims Barber believes that the State Sovereignty Commission files should be opened under the privacy guidelines constructed by Judge Barbour. He thinks that most of the dirt in the files was spread when it was acquired, and that the rest wouldn’t make much difference at this point anyway. “I know there are lies in there,” he said. “So what? You can tell that they’re lies. And they’re thirty years old. I have seen some of the lies in there—one that says we paid people to register to vote. If you smudged that over, you wouldn’t know what kind of lies they were telling, and if you smudged my name out there’d be no way the lie could be checked. Also, it reflects the thinking of these people. They believed that. It’s important to know what they thought. And without names it isn’t real.”

  Barber first worked in the capitol in 1968, as an administrative assistant to the state’s first black legislator since Reconstruction, and even then he was irritated by hints that legislators he dealt with every day might have seen Sovereignty Commission documents about him that he had never seen himself. There are now forty-two black legislators, and they form the core around which Barber tries to build coalitions on issues having to do with poverty and welfare and crime and education. Republicans dominate Mississippi politics now, and they are not the sort of Republicans that Dwight D. Eisenhower might have appointed to the federal bench. They are modern right-wing Republicans who talk abou
t smaller government and personal responsibility and how idyllic everything was in the fifties—a period, Barber is quick to point out, in which women were in the kitchen and black people were in the back of the bus. These days, of course, there are a lot of people in Washington as well as in Mississippi talking about the evils of federal encroachment on areas of life that should be the province of the states. People around the country who refer to federal agents as “jackbooted thugs” speak of the Tenth Amendment with as much fervor as Ross Barnett and the Citizens Council once did. If all of them were united in a national umbrella organization, State Sovereignty Commission wouldn’t be a bad name.

  In that sense, I suppose you could say that Mississippi is now more like the rest of the country—or that the rest of the country is more like Mississippi—but not in ways that please Rims Barber. While I was in Jackson, the legislature was dealing with a measure to introduce caning into prisons and a measure to privatize certain areas of welfare. “Nobody says ‘nigger’ anymore,” Barber says. “It’s usually in code words.” But he sees the issues he deals with now as simply extensions of what was being fought over in 1964. In fact, he sometimes says, “The gains we made are hanging by a thread, and they want to cut the thread.” If you’re talking to Rims Barber in what he calls the Freedom House of the nineties, the documents in the State Sovereignty Commission files don’t seem to be about a peculiar and encapsulated era in American history.

  Before I left the house, I asked Barber if he had expected the lawsuit to open the files to take this long.

  “No,” he said. “But then I didn’t expect the civil-rights movement to take this long, either.”

  Grady’s Gift

  The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 1991

  HOWELL RAINES

  Grady showed up one day at our house at 1409 Fifth Avenue West in Birmingham, and by and by she changed the way I saw the world. I was 7 when she came to iron and clean and cook for $18 a week, and she stayed for 7 years. During that time everyone in our family came to accept what my father called “those great long talks” that occupied Grady and me through many a sleepy Alabama afternoon. What happened between us can be expressed in many ways, but its essence was captured by Graham Greene when he wrote that in every childhood there is a moment when a door opens and lets the future in. So this is a story about one person who opened a door and another who walked through it.

  It is difficult to describe—or even to keep alive in our memories—worlds that cease to exist. Usually we think of vanished worlds as having to do with far-off places or with ways of life, like that of the Western frontier, that are remote from us in time. But I grew up in a place that disappeared, and it was here in this country and not so long ago. I speak of Birmingham, where once there flourished the most complete form of racial segregation to exist on the American continent in this century.

  Gradystein Williams Hutchinson (or Grady, as she was called in my family and hers) and I are two people who grew up in the ’50s in that vanished world, two people who lived mundane, inconsequential lives while Martin Luther King Jr. and Police Commissioner T. Eugene (Bull) Connor prepared for their epic struggle. For years, Grady and I lived in my memory as child and adult. But now I realize that we were both children—one white and very young, one black and adolescent; one privileged, one poor. The connection between these two children and their city was this: Grady saw to it that although I was to live in Birmingham for the first 28 years of my life, Birmingham would not live in me.

  Only by keeping in mind the place that Birmingham was can you understand the life we had, the people we became and the reunion that occurred one day not too long ago at my sister’s big house in the verdant Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook. Grady, now a 57-year-old hospital cook in Atlanta, had driven out with me in the car I had rented. As we pulled up, my parents, a retired couple living in Florida, arrived in their gray Cadillac. My father, a large, vigorous man of 84, parked his car and, without a word, walked straight to Grady and took her in his arms.

  “I never thought I’d ever see y’all again,” Grady said a little while later. “I just think this is the true will of God. It’s His divine wish that we saw each other.”

  This was the first time in 34 years that we had all been together. As the years slipped by, it had become more and more important to me to find Grady, because I am a strong believer in thanking our teachers and mentors while they are still alive to hear our thanks. She had been “our maid,” but she taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn, which is to try to see—honestly and down to its very center—the world in which we live. Grady was long gone before I realized what a brave and generous person she was, or how much I owed her.

  Then last spring, my sister ran into a relative of Grady’s and got her telephone number. I went to see Grady in Atlanta, and several months later we gathered in Birmingham to remember our shared past and to learn anew how love abides and how it can bloom not only in the fertile places, but in the stony ones as well.

  I know that outsiders tend to think segregation existed in a uniform way throughout the Solid South. But it didn’t. Segregation was rigid in some places, relaxed in others; leavened with humanity in some places, enforced with unremitting brutality in others. And segregation found its most violent and regimented expression in Birmingham—segregation maintained through the nighttime maraudings of white thugs, segregation sanctioned by absentee landlords from the United States Steel Corporation, segregation enforced by a pervasively corrupt police department.

  Martin Luther King once said Birmingham was to the rest of the South what Johannesburg was to the rest of Africa. He believed that if segregation could be broken there, in a city that harbored an American version of apartheid, it could be broken everywhere. That is why the great civil rights demonstrations of 1963 took place in Birmingham. And that is why, just as King envisioned, once its jugular was cut in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham in 1963, the dragon of legalized segregation collapsed and died everywhere—died, it seems in retrospect, almost on the instant. It was the end of “Bad Birmingham,” where the indigenous racism of rural Alabama had taken a new and more virulent form when transplanted into a raw industrial setting.

  In the heyday of Birmingham, one vast belt of steel mills stretched for 10 miles, from the satellite town of Bessemer to the coal-mining suburb of Pratt City. Black and white men—men like Grady’s father and mine—came from all over the South to do the work of these mills or to dig the coal and iron ore to feed them. By the time Grady Williams was born in 1933, the huge light of their labor washed the evening sky with an undying red glow. The division of tasks within these plants ran along simple lines: white men made the steel; black men washed the coal.

  Henry Williams was a tiny man from Oklahoma—part African, part Cherokee, only 5 feet 3 inches, but handsome. He worked as the No. 2 Coal Washer at Pratt Mines, and he understood his world imperfectly. When the white foreman died, Henry thought he would move up. But the dead man’s nephew was brought in, and in the natural order of things, Henry was required to teach his new boss all there was to know about washing coal.

  “Oh, come on, Henry,” his wife, Elizabeth, said when he complained about being passed over for a novice. But he would not be consoled.

  One Saturday, Henry Williams sent Grady on an errand. “Go up the hill,” he said, “and tell Mr. Humphrey Davis I said send me three bullets for my .38 pistol because I got to kill a dog.”

  In his bedroom later that same afternoon, he shot himself. Grady found the body. She was 7 years old.

  Over the years, Elizabeth Williams held the family together. She worked as a practical nurse and would have become a registered nurse except for the fact that by the early ’40s, the hospitals in Birmingham, which had run segregated nursing programs, closed those for blacks.

  Grady attended Parker High, an all-black school where the children of teachers and postal workers made fun of girls like Grady, who at 14 was already working part-time in white ho
mes. One day a boy started ragging Grady for being an “Aunt Jemima.” One of the poorer boys approached him after class and said: “Hey, everybody’s not lucky enough to have a father working. If I ever hear you say that again to her, I’m going to break your neck.”

  Grady finished high school in early 1950, four weeks after her 16th birthday. Her grades were high, even though she had held back on some tests in an effort to blend in with her older classmates. She planned to go to the nursing school at Dillard University, a black institution in New Orleans, but first she needed a full-time job to earn money for tuition. That was when my mother hired her. There was a state-financed nursing school in Birmingham, about 10 miles from her house, but it was the wrong one.

  Between the Depression and World War II, my father and two of his brothers came into Birmingham from the Alabama hills. They were strong, sober country boys who knew how to swing a hammer. By the time Truman was elected in 1948, they had got a little bit rich selling lumber and building shelves for the A.&P.

  They drove Packards and Oldsmobiles. They bought cottages at the beach and hired housemaids for their wives and resolved that their children would go to college. Among them, they had eight children, and I was the last to be born, and my world was sunny.

  Indeed, it seemed to be a matter of family pride that this tribe of hard-handed hill people had become prosperous enough to spoil its babies. I was doted upon, particularly, it occurs to me now, by women: my mother; my sister, Mary Jo, who was 12 years older and carried me around like a mascot; my leathery old grandmother, a widow who didn’t like many people but liked me because I was named for her husband.

  There was also my Aunt Ada, a red-haired spinster who made me rice pudding and hand-whipped biscuits and milkshakes with cracked ice, and when my parents were out of town, I slept on a pallet in her room.