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Well I think that this guy should be a regular stop on any Civil Rights tour. Here's somebody who, while enjoying his own hard-won Civil Rights, seeks to ensure that the State of Mississippi continues to deny the Civil Rights of persons not like himself (But I gotta say: from the sound of his voice, he seems to me to be exactly like the sort of preacher-man who has had plenty of gratifying experiences, "on the down-low". That seems to be the norm, rather than the exception, where anti-Gay Bible-thumpers are concerned.).
Hate legislation prompts as many of Mississippi's Best & Brightest to leave the state as do the miserably hot climate, crime, or lack of opportunity. When the anti-woman/anti-Gay hate laws are proposed or passed in Mississippi, we are led to envision proponents and voters as pickup trucks full of whooping White Trash males. Mississippi's anti-Gay-Marriage hate law was voted into being by the widest margin with which such legislation has passed in any state.
Mississippi has more of something else than does any other state. Coincidence?
"Reverend" James offers us a clue as to what that 'something else' might be. And I'm not talking about religion.
That's a great idea for the civil rights trail. Perfect. I've long thought Philadelphia would be an amazing site for some kind of world-class museum, given the incident that occurred there 50 years ago.
Presently, there's not a whole lot to see in that area except for hills and forests and some fancy-looking casinos and actually some extremely upscale and luxuriantly landscaped, hilly golf courses (Dancing Rabbit) associated with the casinos.
From what I've read, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws in that county (Neshoba County), although small in numbers, have become savvy businessmen and businesswomen, running numerous industries in addition to gaming. I'm fairly certain the current chief, I believe they still call it, is a woman. I get the impression they are pretty much a model Indian tribe.
That's a great idea for the civil rights trail. Perfect. I've long thought Philadelphia would be an amazing site for some kind of world-class museum, given the incident that occurred there 50 years ago.
Presently, there's not a whole lot to see in that area except for hills and forests and some fancy-looking casinos and actually some extremely upscale and luxuriantly landscaped, hilly golf courses (Dancing Rabbit) associated with the casinos.
From what I've read, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws in that county (Neshoba County), although small in numbers, have become savvy businessmen and businesswomen, running numerous industries in addition to gaming. I'm fairly certain the current chief, I believe they still call it, is a woman. I get the impression they are pretty much a model Indian tribe.
So many of the Choctaws were marched to Oklahoma.....many dying along the way and buried in unmarked graves on the Infamous Trail of Tears.
Choctaw County in Alabama is just across from Meridian MS. I lived in Choctaw Co for a year but never met a descendant of the Choctaw Indians.
This reminds me of the Gangster tours that some entrepreneur in Chicago started maybe twentyfive or so years ago (Al Capone stuff, etc.) The city fought him on it for a long time because of the potential black-eye it gave the city. Eventually, enough time went by, they let go and let it happen. Time, tourism money and all that.
I'm not from Mississippi, and it's been decades, but I'd bet that the mayors of Philadelphia and Greenwood and all those other towns where there were lynchings and beatings and killings etc etc aren't gonna jump up and down and say, "Yes, yes! Please put markers showing how we were a bunch of murderin' redneck white trash hicks and make our town look bad! Please!"
However, in the next ten years, with natural death awaiting the remaining hicks, this trail will become a reality, more than likely. After about fifty or sixty years, the barriers always fall. Could be atrocities created by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, KKK, whatever. When grandpa the Nazi/Japanese imperialist/southern KKK sheriff dies, the apologies and monuments start appearing. (Why do they always give those guys that grace period without embarrassment?) But I'm still looking forward to the road trip in about three weeks.
kpl1228, I'm wonderin' if maybe when you were a baby, your mama didn't drop you on your head while she was listenin' to Neil Young. Otherwise, I'm having trouble figurin' how your notions about the South and Civil Rights might have made their way into your brain.
I'm one of those Native Americans to whom BrickPatio refers, when she says some are "savvy businessmen and businesswomen". I grew up in a place in Mississippi where there were very few truly white people. There were plenty of Melungeons and White-Indian mixes who thought they were white - enough so that when I was little, certain thought-they-were-white administrators in our school would say, "That Gloria girl: she's the ringleader of those coloreds." (That only lasted until issues like beauty and money and intelligence came into play. My playmates ceased being my 'followers', when they started growing into beauties, their relative wealth and prominence made me an untouchable, and my IQ zoomed ahead of theirs.)
In any event, it was the few whites in our community, and a few white ladies who commuted to work at our school, who identified my potential, and pulled me out of hopelessness and poverty. I'm sure you would call them "hicks". They had heavy Southern accents, and saved-up for years, so they could order ugly, curvy, modernesque platinum jewelry, with tiny little bits of diamonds, from the Service Merchandise catalogue. I'm sure their parents and grandparents had nearly starved, along with most everybody, of every color, in the century of poverty that descended upon Mississippi, following the Civil War. I'm pretty sure you'd call them "Redneck White Trash Hicks." I frequently am critical of people like that. But I cannot possibly enumerate the many acts of kindness, helpfulness, and generosity, that I have personally experienced "at the hands of" 'Rednecks', 'White Trash', and 'Hicks'.
While brown administrators heartlessly lectured me on my habit of coming to school smelling bad (We lived in a shack without running water, at the back of a plantation owned by one of Mississippi's many old land-owning Black families.), and while my classmates in various shades of brown taunted me and hit me in the halls between classes, it was those White ladies who got my IQ tested, got my bona fides as a Native American, filled out the paperwork for my Native American scholarships... and, finally, bought me a suitcase (and the things inside it) and drove me up to the college.
It was the white ladies working Preregistration prior to my Freshman year, who kindly steered me into Economics. I was terrified. Major? What was a MAJOR? "Uh... I don't know what that is. I just want to work for the rich people." I was probably shaking. I can remember the big room sort of warping in my field of vision. I was so scared. (My brown teachers had repeatedly told me I wasn't college material. My relatives had told me the only place I was going was to the crazy house. I felt guilty for even being at a college. Who did I think I was?). Well, while a nonwhite sitting next to them was rolling her eyes and disgustedly saying something under her breath, the white ladies spent a while looking at my IQ, at my ACT scores, and at a note that had been inserted in some paperwork that came with me. They conferred a bit, and one of them, in a Southern Baptist "Redneck" accent, said, "Honey, it looks like we're gonna put you in Economics. And you're gonna do just fine." There was a hug in her voice, and it made all the difference.
Anyway, I think you need a soundtrack for your Civil Rights Journey through Mississippi. ...just some suggestions for songs to load into the music storage device of your choice. My Decorator and I shop on Melrose a lot, and then like to head up into the Hollywood Hills late in the day... 'Canyon Crawling', looking at houses and plants and vistas. We have a soundtrack, with 'Eye', by Smashing Pumpkins as its nucleus: it had just come out, and was on every station, the first time we went "Creepy-crawling in the Hollywood Hills". That way, I have a happy place to go to in times of stress or insomnia, hearing the music in my head, remembering the apricot-colored light up in those hills - lemons falling, ripe, into the winding streets... But you need a soundtrack to help you remember every scintilla of victimhood and persecution along your route through Mississippi.
For starters:
Warren Zevon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsJlqgoSC_Y When we got to Fashionable Northeast Jackson, and took our place among the Ambitious Young Things, this song was much-loved. For those of us who only wanted to get our homes published; to build our children's trust funds; to amass wealth; to acquire - even if we had to make them ourselves - double-interlined silk brocatelle draperies, with silk passementerie, puddling a whole yard, onto our Cola-colored stained concrete floors, those draperies parted by gilt-bronze holdbacks, and capped with glorious water-gilded antique cornices... For us, the anti-ideologues who wanted merely to have security and beautiful lives, this song was an antidote to the two songs which preceded it. We played it at parties, even. Just as we hated Republicans and Democrats equally, we hated the transmogrified "Southern Culture" which, unless you moved to a place like FNEJ, held you down, and proscribed ambition: and we hated the crazed Yankees telling us we were evil and stupid and wrong (and whose ad men and script writers TOLD Southerners what they were supposed to be).
Zevon's song was a reaction to this one by Skynyrd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cyokaj3BJU This was a Redneck Exploitation Band's reaction to Neil Young's 'Southern Man'. You can divide Mississippians into 'People who love this song', and 'People who hate this song.' Our crowd hated it. To us, it was all about conformity and enforced stupidity.
Neil Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LkCSrLGIRs And this one got the ball rolling. I can't imagine anything more self-righteous and insulting (not to mention STUPID). And I suspect that as a youth, Neil Young kept a dog-eared copy of Mandingo under his sock drawer, along with the Jergens lotion and the underwear section of the Sears Catalogue. "Tall white mansions and little shacks..." Well, some of my Indian ancestors actually owned a tall white mansion. It passed from the family during the Century of Poverty. I bought it, had it shored-up, and gave it to some cousins, just to get it back in the family. I grew up in a "little shack". Never heard any bullwhips crackin', though. Never knew anybody named 'Lilybelle', either.
Last edited by GrandviewGloria; 12-15-2014 at 01:20 AM..
(Why do they always give those guys that grace period without embarrassment?)
Because it isn't "those guys" when you're dealing with locals. At first it's "my brother and cousin" or "my best friend from high school"; then it becomes, "my parents and uncles" or "my friend's parents"; and finally "my grandparents".
The apologies and such generally don't happen while the perpetrators are alive and free and staring at you from across the Thanksgiving table. They happen when 1) the perpetrators go to prison, or 2) when they die off. Generally about the time the 3rd or 4th generation are old enough to actually do anything (in their 20's-30's) the perpetrators have all finally kicked the bucket. That's when things start really happening.
Grandview, what a beautiful post. Are you sure Eudora Welty didn't write that? Gorgeous...
It's been years since I've read Welty's "One Writer's Beginnings", but my main takeaway from that book was Eudora's vivid descriptions on every page of her great-aunt's (or someone like that, if memory serves, or at least in my imagination) home in the Delta, in which every page seemed to drip with descriptions which in memory were things such as the fabric of her aunt's curtains, to the scent of the flowers in the garden out the window, to the shades of sunlight coming into the house at dusk, to her afternoon dreams lost amid the wide Delta horizons, to the dampness of the nearby crossing bayou, to the sound of frogs and gnats and crickets in the yard, to the smell of books and lamps and rugs and vases and the other intricate person belongings - all of which encapsulated that particular, unique time and place in the verdant Mississippi Delta, that can never be replaced. Your post reminds me of just those things in my imagination!
Your worldview (trying to enter into and exceed those vaunted FNEJ circles) contrasts with mine which leads to a question of just what is the real Mississippi? Is it truly those people with the stunning polished concrete floors and restaurant-quality Viking kitchens and outdoor patios complete with fireplace, grill, and 50-inch television, accessible through exquisite cypress French doors and distressed paint up 20-foot walls to the vaulted living room ceilings? (and with $75,000 SUV's standing guard in the 3-car garage)...?
Or is the real Mississippi, say, people whose great grandfather was head of the Episcopal church of Mississippi and who teach at Millsaps or practice at UMMC and live in a cozy cottage in Belhaven (or Natchez or Vicksburg or Greenwood or Corinth or Brookhaven or Oxford or Pass Christian), quietly and lovingly filled with antiques and rugs and books amassed slowly over four or five decades? Or is Mississippi those women who reached out and lifted you up in the world? Or is it the people you mentioned who didn't lift a finger?
Or is it something else? Fishermen and military men and women and casino workers on the Coast? Or Fed-Ex workers in DeSoto County? Furniture plant workers in Tupelo? And so on.
To me, it's just those questions reflected in Faulkner and Welty that makes the subtle but so-intricate tapestry of Mississippi alluring and irresistible - and to me like a cashmere sweater on a brisk and sunny December day, amid the deep Mississippi woods and leaves and streams and soil and wildlife, and/or on those amazingly moist summer days beside blue pools and Mississippi lakes and freshly cut green grass and impossibly tall pine trees and regal draping live oaks, that define in my mind the rich canopy of this place.
Yeah! Some of them Alabamiites might grab ahold of ya an'...do something!
Yeah, I am not sure where that poster was going with that comment. Philadelphia is a small town and not very dangerous at all. The most danger that you could really get into is in going to the tribal casinos and losing some money.
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Yeah! Some of them Alabamiites might grab ahold of ya an'...do something!
