With Mississippi likely to vote for Barack Obama for president today, we should all remember how far we’ve come since the bad old days.
In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation. 86% of all non-white families lived below the national poverty line. In addition, the state had a terrible record of black voting rights violations. In the 1950s, Mississippi was 45% black, but only 5% of voting age blacks were registered to vote. Some counties did not have a single registered black voter. Whites insisted that blacks did not want to vote, but this was not true. Many blacks wanted to vote, but they worried, and rightfully so, that they might lose their job. In 1962, over 260 blacks in Madison County overcame this fear and waited in line to register. 50 more came the next day. Only seven got in to take the test over the two days, walking past a sticker on the registrar’s office door that bore a Confederate battle flag next to the message “Support Your Citizens’ Council.” Once they got in, they had to take a test designed to prevent them from becoming registered. In 1954, in response to increasing literacy among blacks, the test, which originally asked applicants to “read or interpret” a section of the state constitution, was changed to ask applicants to “read and interpret” that document. This allowed white registrars to decide whether or not a person passed the test. Most blacks, even those with doctoral degrees, “failed.” In contrast, most whites passed, no matter what their education level. In George County, one white applicant’s interpretation of the section “There shall be no imprisonment for debt” was “I thank that a Neorger should have 2 years in collage before voting because he don’t under stand.” (sic) He passed.
I’ll be very interested to see from the Exit Polls how well Obama did with the white voters. I hope to be pleasantly surprised. Regardless, I think today is a good day to remember all the people that sacrificed during the Freedom Summer and all those that fought to give the vote to all the people of Mississippi.
Again, as a white Mississippian, I get an almost surreal feeling reading about those tragic and shameful days. I’m grateful that I’m young enough to have missed pretty much all of that. But I wonder sometimes if I HAD been a product of THAT time, of THAT place, if I’d have had the strength to push as hard as I could have for what was right. I think so, but I’ll never really know, will I?
Even so, my own school district wasn’t integrated until 1970. That’s right–MAN WALKED ON THE MOON before white kids and black kids could make fun of the beef stroganoff together in the school cafeteria. What a thought. Glad I started school a few years later.
By the way, my father was a freshman at Ole Miss when James Meredith was admitted. He won’t really talk too much about it–tear gas, screaming, scuffling, people dying. But he’s never said how it made him feel–what he learned from it, how it changed him. I’m still not sure he knows. Thanks for reminding us how far we’ve come and how far there is to go still.
One more thing: the old white segregationists really DID know what they were doing. They knew blacks and whites truly living and struggling together really WOULD be the death of that most contemptible brand of overt racism. They knew removing that ONE brick– the brick of school segregation–from the wall that supported the old South would lead to its eventual collapse. Maybe they WERE smarter than we think. Then again… NAH.
So, what do you think the exit polls will show?
Whether we are indeed witnessing a change in American politics or a false spring.
I’m jes a li’l ol’ white librul from Miss’ssippi, so I don’t really know as much as the analysts do, but I DO feel that Obama may well pull upwards of 30% (a full third?)
of the white vote. This cycle feels a little different to me.
My own experience can’t allow me to speak for voter patterns in a whole state, but… people I’ve talked to give me the sense that there’s a watershed election around the corner. If not this one, then soon. Maybe it’s the Bush fatigue thing. A lot of people down here will say (though not necessarily in public, mind you) that he’s screwed the pooch mightily and they’d favor a reckoning. Hillary, for her part isn’t terribly loved in general here, either. They give Bill points for his Bubbaness, though. Honestly, I think Obama may very well beat expectations in the white vote here. Here’s to hoping.
When I was in college I knew kids who went down to Mississippi to register voters. One of them was killed in the ‘Mississippi burning.’ Another had his lung punctured. The stories were all the same. It was a third world country in the Delta. You hardly knew you were in the United States, and the dialects white and black were almost incomprehensible. Yes. We’ve come a long way.
But not all the way.
Let us not forget the upcoming race in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania of Hillary Clinton’s Ed Rendell as governor. The Pennsylvania long and rightly characterized as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.
York, Pennsylvania 1992 (25 miles south of the state capital of Harrisburgh, PA)