Trillin - Jackson, 1964: and other dispatches from fifty years of reporting on race in America

I WAS ONCE THE CITY auditor of Kansas City, Missouri. Only for a day. It was High School Day in City Hall. The mayor for the day was Melba Zachery, who went to Lincolnwhat we would have called then, a year before the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision, a colored school. (Lincoln was also the name of the movie theater that Negroes went to, as well as of a couple of other retail establishments in the black neighborhood. I sometimes wonder if there were children in Kansas City who werent aware that Lincoln was the name of a president and not simply a word that meant colored people allowed.) I didnt realize then that Missouri schools were segregated by law. There were no WHITE ONLY signs or separate drinking fountains in Kansas City; I never heard any speeches extolling segregation as Gods will. It was taken for granted that Negroes had their own schools in their own neighborhoods and that white-run restaurants and white-run hotels and white-run theaters were for white people. It was taken for granted that, after spending a day learning about how democracy worked, Melba Zachery would go back to her school and I would go back to mine. At least, it was taken for granted by me. I cant speak for Melba.

At the time, a lot about race was taken for granted. Much of America was, like Kansas City, segregated without segregationist rhetoricor segregated even though the dominant rhetoric celebrated the sort of tolerance that could enable a mostly white high school population to elect Melba Zachery mayor for a day. Among white Americans, segregation was widely thought of as a problem of the South. Racial views were assumed to be governed by geography, and a belief in white supremacy was widely considered to be a regrettable but essentially immutable regional characteristic of white Southerners, almost like bragging among Texans. It was not considered disabling.

Even after the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-in movementseven after, that is, it was apparent that black people had taken matters into their own handswhite Southerners tended to believe that any racial strife in their part of the country was caused by meddling outsiders, probably operating on instructions from some wily, foreign-looking man in New York. Where you from? was likely to be the first question asked of a reporter whose dead stop at a stop sign had not lasted long enough to satisfy the deputy sheriff who pulled him over. I work out of the Atlanta bureau was not considered an adequate response.

I worked out of the Atlanta bureau of Time from the fall of 1960 to the fall of 1961, in the days when race and the South were thought of as basically the same story by national magazines. It happened to be a busy year on what local reporters sometimes called the seg beat: the sit-in movements, the desegregation of public schools in New Orleans and Atlanta, the desegregation of the University of Georgia, the Freedom Rides. In the midst of these, I watched ordinary people make momentous personal decisionsa black college student trying to decide if hed volunteer to be on the first Freedom Ride bus into Jackson, for instance, or a Greek-immigrant diner owner with tears in his eyes telling black sit-in students in Atlanta that, as much as he sympathized with their cause, serving them would mean the end of his business.

Because Atlanta itself was going through sit-ins, boycotts, and impending school desegregation, even my weekends were spent on the seg beat. I heard so many sermons in black churches that I began holding what I called the Martin Luther King, Jr., Extended Metaphor Contest (King himself was ineligible, since he would have won in a walk every week). I knew all of the verses to We Shall Overcome. My expense account included items like trousers torn in racial dispute and after-prayer-meeting snack, Tuskegee, $3.75. I could calibrate a white Southerners racial views by the way he pronounced the word Negro. Id been exposed to enough Ku Klux Klan terminology to know a kleagle from a klaxon from a klavern. In the mob scene outside Charlayne Hunters dormitory during the turmoil that accompanied the enrollment of her and another black student, Hamilton Holmes, at the University of Georgia, Id heard fraternity boys refer to the Ku Klux Klan, whose arrival was rumored to be imminent, as Tri Kappa.

I was aware that I was expected to keep a certain reportorial distance. I couldnt pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sidesthe side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people acting on such a belief should have their houses burned downhad an equally compelling case to make. It wasnt like trying to remain objective while covering the MichiganOhio State game. But at mass meetings I would have never put any money in the collection cup. When, at the end of the meeting, people in the congregation locked arms to sing We Shall Overcome, I always edged away toward the exit.