Living in Mississippi

An excerpt from my biography of Evans Harrington

Evans Harrington was a longtime English professor at the University of Mississippi. A liberal who was continually under attack by the white supremacists and segregationists, he survived, stayed in Mississippi, and made a difference. My biography of him, Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), takes its title from the essay discussed below.

“Living in Mississippi”

“Living in Mississippi,” an essay Harrington penned in 1966 and subsequently published in the Yale Review, offers an insightful and moving account of a white Mississippi liberal caught squarely in the middle of the changes that race issues had brought to his native state.  The essay poignantly dramatizes what life in Mississippi—and, by extension, the entire American South—was like at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.  All of the affected constituents are present:  the violent extremists on the right and the left, the non-violent traditionalists and reformers, the well-intentioned but perplexed moderates caught in the middle—each group well represented by white and black, male and female, young and old.

“Living in Mississippi” represents a culmination of Harrington’s growth and development as a liberal from his childhood days to the present.  That development had accelerated in recent years.  He had personally witnessed the violence that accompanied the enrollment of James Meredith, the first African-American student to attend the University of Mississippi.  He had actively worked with the Ole Miss chapter of the AAUP to counter the influence of the white supremacists and segregationists on campus.  He had been an active participant in the Mississippi Council of Human Relations, a biracial group that worked to improve race relations throughout the state.  He had become a target of investigation by the White Citizens’ Council and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.  More dramatically, like other Americans, he had followed news accounts of Ku Klux Klansmen’s murders of Medgar Evers, a Mississippi black political leader; three civil rights activists—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—in Neshoba County; and Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP leader and voting rights advocate in Hattiesburg.

The main action of the autobiographical essay, told in first person, takes place in a single day, but the narrator’s thoughts range over his entire life.  The narrative begins with Harrington’s being awakened one spring morning by the loud noises of diesel engines in the woods behind his house.  Rushing to the back of his lot, he watches as the huge machines rip apart and alter the landscape, leveling a neighboring hillside in preparation for the building of a shopping center.  Harrington is upset by the sight, “feeling each slice of the huge blades in the earth like a thrust into my middle-aging flesh, feeling, in fact, uncannily as I imagine a rabbit must feel in his burrow as he listens to claws digging.”   

This alteration in the physical landscape, reminiscent of the South’s “Bulldozer Revolution” that C. Vann Woodward describes in his pivotal study, The Burden of Southern History, is employed as a recurring motif throughout the essay to symbolize the profound changes that are also occurring in the South’s political and social spheres.  Harrington expresses ambivalence toward all such changes.  To his literature students he recommends the poetry of Walt Whitman, “that breaker of old molds, that embracer of Life,” whom the narrator has come to view as “a heartening ally in recent times,” but he finds actual circumstances to be quite more complex than literary situations.  In the present reality he is clearly a man-in-the-middle, alternatively pulled in opposite directions and keenly conscious of the difficulty of arriving at an acceptable compromise.

Driving to the campus to deliver his lecture on Whitman, Harrington sees the contradictions of his society all around him.  Adjacent to what will become the new “concrete and glass and neon” of the shopping center are the “dust and frame shacks, the wan patches of yard and narrow graveled lanes” of Freedmanstown, the Negro section of town.   As he drives past the Negro school, still segregated a dozen years after the Supreme Court had ordered integration, he stares into the “dark young faces” of the Negro youths, inexplicably feeling “something of the same queasy sensation as watching the bulldozers.” Driving on, he watches the town’s only black policeman directing traffic.  Although he takes pride in having been one of the petitioners who pressured the city leaders to hire a black officer, he still cannot quite repress the shock deriving from his segregationist, racist upbringing.  “Well, by God,” he thinks, “Because, in spite of all the books, in spite of my active liberalism since my conversion in the Navy during the Second World War, the sight of this first uniformed Negro policeman right here in what I have come to consider my truest home evoked that old half-literate, blasphemous Southern child in me.”   

The sight of the black policeman recalls to Harrington’s mind his experiences with blacks while growing up in south Mississippi.  While he was allowed to have black playmates, his parents made it clear that he was not to imitate their language or behavior—and he was not to consider any of them his equal.  In any violent encounter with a black, his father instructed him, he should pick up any object at hand to use as a weapon, but he “was not to hit him with my fists, since a Negro’s head or jaw or cheekbone was too tough for a white man’s fist.”

In contrast with the racist attitudes bequeathed him by his parents, and still held by a majority of white Mississippians, Harrington reflects on his recent activities as a Mississippi liberal.  He had befriended, and even eaten with, James Meredith during Meredith’s student days at Ole Miss; and he had once visited in the home of Aaron Henry, the controversial head of the Mississippi NAACP, fearing all the while that a pipe bomb or Molotov cocktail might come hurtling through the front window.  He had even received a threatening letter with the message, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Is Watching You.”  Still, even though “my credentials and, within reason, my conscience had long since been redeemed,” he finds himself thinking, as with the sight of the black policeman, “like the transmogrified redneck I am.”

After meeting his classes, Harrington goes for coffee with a group of his colleagues, “all in the humanities, all students of current events.”  Among the topics of discussion are the recent investigation of the Ku Klux Klan by the federal House Un-American Activities Committee and the arrest of one Klansman in Hattiesburg “on suspiciously flimsy charges” not unlike those used just a year earlier against civil rights activists in the same city.   While most of the conversationalists take great delight in the possibility that such actions portend the death of the Klan, Harrington, a member of the Civil Liberties Union, worries that congressional investigations and trumped-up charges aimed at any group, even one as vile and offensive as the Ku Klux Klan, send “a warning for all unpopular minorities in America.”  

When a Negro student walks past the table where the conversationalists are seated, the talk turns to a discussion of Negro enrollment at Ole Miss now four years after the Meredith riot.  Collectively the group can identify a dozen or so black students from their classes.  Someone remarks that the university now receives federal grants supporting integration.  Someone else notes that one department is actively promoting the application of one black student for a prestigious graduate fellowship and, with no voiced concern for what will later be judged reverse discrimination, it was believed that he would be favored over his white peers, “simply because he was a Negro from Ole Miss.”

Later in the morning Harrington and his wife, along with a few others, leave Oxford to drive to Jackson to attend a meeting of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations.  En route, they stop in Grenada for lunch, where a waitress demonstrates that, with regard to race, not much has changed in Mississippi.  Initially the waitress is very cordial and helpful to Harrington and his friends, but when they begin to converse with a biracial group of students headed to the same Council meeting, the waitress turns cold and neglectful.  Staring at the group of black and white students together, she is heard to mutter, “Anything can walk in here these days.”

The participants in the Council meeting receive similar treatment at the host hotel, one of the city’s finest, in Jackson.  Before the first session several Council members gather in the hotel’s coffee shop, where they are welcomed graciously; but when black participants begin to join the group, Harrington notices a sharp decline in the level of service.  At the first program intermission, when participants return to the coffee shop, they find that the entrance from the assembly hall into the shop has been locked. 

The highlight of the Council meeting is a panel presentation on the progress of the civil rights movement across the state.  The discussion quickly turns into a heated debate, as a representative of the Freedom Democrats, nearly all black, challenges the socioeconomic identification of the Council membership: “Where are the field hands and cooks, the janitors and yard boys—the majority of the Negro population of this state—represented in this meeting?”  Looking over the group of teachers, students, lawyers, doctors, and ministers in the audience, Harrington recognizes the truth of the speaker’s words, but he is bothered by the tone of the speaker’s remarks.  The Freedom Democrats were “a new breed for the state: an ideological proletariat, disciples of a sociopolitical vision.” Observing them, Harrington concludes:

I noticed that they behaved very much like another group of Mississippi ideologues, also disciples of a sociopolitical vision: the white supremacists, the segregationist states-rightists, the devotees of Our Southern Way of Life.  Like those zealots at a Ross Barnett rally, these black enthusiasts did not listen for the logic and substance of their prophet’s words.  They were already convinced of his rightness, whatever he said.  They sat smiling while the Misguided—all his opponents—argued with their Man; then they leaned forward in anticipation of his answer, concerned only with his performance, the force and cleverness with which he laid low Error, which is to say all deviations from the The Line. 

Here again, Harrington demonstrates the dilemma of the man caught in the middle.  Disdaining the absolutism of the Freedom Democrats’ claims and tactics, he nevertheless concedes the truth of their complaint:

The poor are exploited.  The system does not include them.  And though I felt with one of their opponents in the Council that there would be little chance of greater justice if this group got the power, I had a conviction that society would be restructured.  There were bulldozers at work there which made those in my backyard seem like toys. 

The Council program also features an address by a U.S. Congressman from a Northern state [Birch Bayh of Indiana]. Harrington is impressed with the speaker’s youth and charisma, but he feels the Congressman is speaking more to the cameras and microphones that will carry his message back to his home constituency than to the Council members seated in the audience.  And Harrington facetiously wonders if the speaker is aware that the “Northern urban brand of paternalism” that he advocates is not greatly different from “the time-honored Southern plantation one.”

Leaving the meeting, Harrington finds himself on the sidewalk among several of the black Freedom Democrats.  Observing them are “three young Anglo-Saxon types, with very low brows, very red necks, tight khaki clothes and cowboy boots.”  And standing beside a police car parked nearby are “three or four other large young Anglo-Saxon types, with very low brows, very red necks, tight pistol belts, and policemen’s uniforms.”  The close proximity of these groups makes Harrington nervous.

Between the two groups, I could not decide which made me most uneasy.  And knowing Mississippi well, I was wondering which of the Klan types was married to which policeman’s sister, or vice versa.  At any rate, I remembered that less than a year ago the secretary-treasurer of the Council on Human Relations was shot down only a few blocks from where I was standing.  So I paused thoughtfully to fill my pipe and let the Negroes get well ahead of me.

On the way back home to Oxford, Harrington and his wife take a slight detour in order to visit and have dinner with his parents.  The unsettling events of the day have created in Harrington “an ache . . . just to see them, not to do or say anything in particular, but just to be with them.”  For a while the reunion goes well—good conversation, a good dinner prepared by his mother, a feeling of togetherness, “like old times”—causing Harrington to contemplate and be grateful for “the phenomenal chances which yoke strange parents to even stranger children, and of the even greater miracle of caring and patience and conciliation by which these strangers bridge their abysses, climb out of their strangeness.”

But the evening is ruined when the mother interjects race and politics into the dinner-table discussion.  “All this integration and Communism.  Why just last week y’all had ole Bobby Kennedy right up there at Oxford, and the students fell all over him.” 

The essay concludes:

Much later, when everyone had apologized and my parents had retired, my wife and I decided to call our daughter, who was a freshman in a college in Virginia.  She was surprised and touched that we weren’t calling about anything.  Yes, she was hardly homesick at all anymore.  But why did we call! We said we guessed we got lonesome.  We told her to be good and learn all she could.

“Lonesome” seems to be the perfect word to describe a white liberal, caught in the paradox of his progressive leanings and his conservative upbringing, in the state of Mississippi in 1966.         

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