https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/08/29/letter-from-jackson
"To people who happen to be admirers of Spanish Civil War literature,
Jackson as the headquarters of the Mississippi Summer Project is likely
to conjure up visions of Madrid as the capital of the Spanish Loyalists.
Physically, Jackson could hardly look less like Madrid, but the Summer
Project—a statewide program of voter registration and other civil-rights
activities which is being carried out by some six hundred volunteers and
some one hundred paid workers—is so thoroughly caught up in a tangle of
frenetic planning and propagandizing that a reader of George Orwell and
Ernest Hemingway half expects to come across military strategists
mapping out campaigns against mountain villages or to see clusters of
ideologists arguing and plotting in small, dark bars, their
conversations occasionally interrupted by a stray bomb. One difference,
of course, is that the Council of Federated Organizations, or COFO—the
amalgam of civil-rights groups that runs the Summer Project—does not
actually control even the part of Jackson where it is permitted to
exist, and there are constant reminders of who does. A number of
editorialists and columnists on the Jackson daily newspapers are not
merely segregationists but segregationists of the type who are inclined
to indicate their position by referring to Martin Luther King as “the
Rev. Dr. Extremist Agitator Martin Luther King, Jr.,” or by suggesting
that President Johnson’s theme song should be “The High Yellow Rose of
Texas,” or by telling cannibal jokes; the community bulletin board of a
local radio station occasionally includes among reports of rummage sales
and church suppers the announcement that Americans for the Preservation
of the White Race will hold its weekly meeting that evening and “all
interested white people are invited to attend;” the chatty gray-haired
lady in charge of a local bookstore, whose inventory appears to begin
with the writings of the John Birch Society and move to the right, is
available for political arguments with the civil-rights workers she
refers to amiably as “those COFO things;” one can telephone Dial for
Truth, a recorded announcement by the Jackson Citizens Council of the
evils that race-mixing has brought upon the world during the previous
week; and the Mississippi Numismatic Exchange, Inc., has a sign in its
window reading, “Kennedy Half Dollars 25¢. That’s All We Think They’re
Worth!” (The sign says in smaller letters that the case that goes along
with one costs fifty cents.)"
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "A 1964 article from the New Yorker, in
which Calvin Trillin recounts a plane ride with MLK and an exchange with
a white passenger."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
