(Civil rights leader Ed King during his recent reading in Oxford, Miss.)
Today Labor South
looks a couple Southern heroes who took on the fascists who ruled the land.
The white
Mississippian who stood alongside MLK and Fannie Lou Hamer during the Civil
Rights Movement
OXFORD, MISS. - The Rev. Ed King was certain his days were
numbered back during the long, hot summer of 1964.
“None of us in the leadership expected to live through the
summer,” the lanky civil rights hero recalled during a recent reading from his
book Ed King’s Mississippi
(University Press of Mississippi) at Off Square Books here in Oxford. “We were a band of brothers.”
What made King different from his “brothers” in the
Mississippi Movement, however, was his whiteness. A chaplain at predominantly
black Tougaloo College, King was on the front lines during throughout the
movement, helping lead the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in its
challenge to the whites-dominated state party and serving as an MFDP delegate
to both the 1964 and 1968 national Democratic Party conventions.
The Vicksburg, Miss., native and Methodist minister paid a
hefty price for his activism. Beaten and jailed, he suffered permanent facial
scars in a car accident in 1963 that he blames on white supremacists out to
kill him. His parents were forced to leave the state.
However, it is King’s work as a photographer and writer that
was the focus of his recent visit to Oxford. With co-author Trent Watts, King
offers in his new book dozens of photographs he took with his 35 mm camera,
intimate shots of Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Bob
Moses and other movement leaders not only at public gatherings but in private
moments at COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) offices in Jackson, in
pool halls, and in various Mississippi backwaters.
King proves himself a fine writer in the book’s narrative as
well, drawing on the prevalent use of dogs by Mississippi law authorities as a
metaphor to describe the horrors movement leaders faced. “The leaping, pawing,
snarling police dog, the German shepherd—Nazi beast, fang-bared pet and tool of
the white police—had by 1964 come to symbolize white racist power and
opposition to the civil rights movement.”
Veteran Mississippi political journalist Bill Minor recalled
in a recent column King’s dedication to the cause. “One of my most disturbing
memories covering the civil rights era was seeing Ed King in clerical collar
and ministerial garb yanked off the steps of the old federal courthouse and
tossed into a Jackson paddy wagon. … He had gone that day with several black
ministers to make Christian witness that blacks were not alone in the struggle
for civil rights.”
King’s strong moral compass put him at odds with other civil
rights era veterans during the 1990s when he opposed efforts to make fully
public with names and all the secret documents of the Mississippi Sovereignty
Commission, which had operated like a secret agency to fight racial integration
through intimidation, threats, and smear tactics. King felt that victims of the
agency’s spying might be victimized again if the files were simply opened with
no protections for them. The files eventually were made public.
Now in his mid-seventies, King is an old revolutionary
steeped in the tradition of religious leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin
Niemoeller. They all sacrificed of themselves to take a stand against fascism.
Robert Sherrill,
Southern warrior against the demagogues
My first encounter with Robert Sherrill, one of the South’s
premier warriors with a pen, was in the 1980s in a library in Jackson, Miss.,
where there on the shelf was his blistering indictment of Southern demagoguery,
Gothic Politics In The Deep South: Stars
of the New Confederacy. The 1968 classic ranks up there with A.J.
Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana and
T. Harry Williams’ Huey Long among
the best books ever written about Southern politics.
Sherrill died at the age of 89 this past August. The South
lost a major voice, but, as is typical for the South, I’ve heard hardly a
lament anywhere beyond major publications in the North. In his written
memorial, former Nation editor Victor
Navasky recalled the late Texas muckraking columnist Molly Ivins’ proposed
epitaph for Sherrill: “Here lies a man who never kissed ass.”
A native of Frogtown, Ga., who spent many years in
Tallahassee, Fla., Sherrill graced the pages of Nation, the New York Times
Magazine, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Playboy and other publications over the
years with his no-holds-barred, searing prose.
No ink-stained wretch of the newsroom was better at tearing off the
scabs of the many wounds Southern politicians have inflicted on their region
and the nation.
At one point in Gothic
Politics, Sherrill takes a moment to talk about himself:
“I started writing this in the sub-basement of the Florida capitol: a good place to begin measuring the Deep South. It is a building whose superstructure is appropriately half a foot out of alignment with its foundation. There is a sense of abandonment, a wistful archeological air about the capitol as of ruins nobody cares to dig.”
“I started writing this in the sub-basement of the Florida capitol: a good place to begin measuring the Deep South. It is a building whose superstructure is appropriately half a foot out of alignment with its foundation. There is a sense of abandonment, a wistful archeological air about the capitol as of ruins nobody cares to dig.”
In other words, the Florida capitol was like the rest of the
South—then and still today, a place “of great disrepair as the result of the
business-industry power faction’s having ruled successfully for so long.”
Here are a couple of the mini-profiles of now-deceased
Southern pols Sherrill gave us in Gothic
Politics back in 1968:
Longtime Plaquemines Parish, La., political boss Leander
Perez, “the Swamp’s Gift to Dixie”: “Perez has gathered into one spirit all the
money lust, moon-spawned hatred for the black man and Jew and foreigner, and
painful paranoiac reaction to federalism, that have marked the Deep South for
many years; he has gathered them from many sources, and then slopped them back
upon the land.”
U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, longtime chair
of the Senate Judiciary Committee and “Child of Scorn”: “Like Miniver Cheevy,
James Eastland, child of scorn, loves the days of old but does not know what to
do about it. … He is a loyal Mississippian, and this loyalty, combined with his
hold on the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has given Eastland both
the motive and the position to shape, retard and pervert the civil rights
movement more than any other man in America.”
Oh, could Sherrill skewer a politician who deserved
skewering!
However, he also knew that the true secret to Southern
politics lay beyond the ever-dominant issue of race, and that secret was MONEY.
Southern pols “never describe their control of politics as
originating in financial motives; their objective, they will tell you, has
always been purely to preserve the South as the last outpost of fundamental
founding-father Americanism.” However, “it was not the NAACP’s … racial
emphasis but the CIO and the specter of socialized production and medical care
that … inspired the blackest fears.”
Sherrill spoke with the righteous indignation of an Old
Testament prophet, and his words still ring true today.
