What Mississippi Teaches Us (Again) About Escaping from the Past
William Faulkner, the legendary Mississippi-bred writer who wrestled in his novels with the tortured legacies of the South, noted that “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” Through a number of recent high-profile trials and investigations we have been reminded that the past cannot be so easily buried, especially when justice languishes. With the FBI opening an investigation of the 1955 brutal murder of the black teenager, Emmett Till, and a Mississippi jury finding Edgar Ray Killen guilty of manslaughter in deaths of civil rights workers, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, it appears that some of the historical injustices that defined Mississippi’s past have been or are about to be remedied.
Another current effort to confront the horrific history of the South found the U.S. Senate apologizing for its failure to ratify the more than 200 anti-lynching bills that were proposed over numerous decades. Although the symbolic legislation, offered by Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and Virginia Republican Senator George Allen, achieved overwhelming approval, the two Republican Senators from Mississippi, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, refused to join their 80 or so colleagues who co-sponsored this bill. Apparently, Lott and Cochran felt a need to uphold the legacies of a Mississippi past where its then Democratic Senators, James Eastland and John Stennis, participated in losing filibuster campaigns against the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s..
Ironically, it is now liberal Democrats who are the most enthusiastic proponents of the sanctity of Senate filibustering. With Republican majorities in the House and the Senate proposing and, often, sustaining reactionary legislation and the right-wing mandates of the Bush Administration, the very filibuster that had been used historically by Southern segregationists to protect white supremacy is now coveted by Northern liberals to prevent further erosion of the legislative gains made by minorities and women on the crest of the activism of the 1960’s.
In the 1960’s civil rights activists in Mississippi, such as Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer, and their liberal allies, such as Allard Lowenstein, developed the Freedom Vote and Mississippi Freedom Summer to highlight the profound racial disparities in the electoral arena. They especially highlighted what they saw as an oppressive Mississippi reality that seemed far outside the mainstream of American civil and political society. Lowenstein recruited northern students to the Mississippi civil rights projects by speaking on campuses, such as Stanford and Yale. In a dramatic speech entitled “ Mississippi: A Foreign Country in Our Midst?” Lowenstein criticized that state as a place where “you can’t picket, you can’t vote, you can’t boycott effectively, can’t mount mass protest of any kind, and can’t reach the mass media.”1 At the 1964 Democratic Convention, a convention that saw the parting of the ways of northern liberals and southern civil rights activists, Fannie Lou Hamer argued for the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic delegation in her moving testimony where she “questioned America.”
On the other hand, Bob Moses saw the ideological link between the political power in Mississippi and those national forces that prosecuted and legitimized the Vietnam War. In an interview in October 1965, Moses contended that the “rationale this nation uses to justify the war in Vietnam turns out to be amazingly similar to the rationale that is used by the whole South to justify its opposition to the freedom movement.” 2 Such an insight suggests another irony that at the very moment when the Senate and even the Bush Administration decry the torture embodied in past lynchings it justifies the torture practiced at Guantanamo and Abu Graib. Thus, Mississippi and its two Republican senators seem to be in tune with the dominant foreign policy enacted in Washington, D.C.
On the domestic front, the Republican majorities in the nation’s capitol continue to exacerbate the impoverishment of the poor. If part of the motivation for changing the conditions of African-Americans in the Mississippi in the 1960’s was their abysmal economic condition, the black poor there still remain in economic bondage with wide gaps between whites and blacks. A final irony, however, is the fact that for all the heroic ventures to achieve enfranchisement for Mississippi blacks in the 1960’s close to 30 percent of all black males in Mississippi are permanently disenfranchised because they are ex-felons.
While the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner had to wait forty-one years to the day for a Mississippi court felony manslaughter conviction, there is much in the Mississippi and American past which still cries out for justice. From reparations for slavery to full political and human rights, we have yet to confront the awful legacies of the past and to seek their just remedies.
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Notes
1. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965, p. 123.
2. Eric Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi, p. 214.