Taking the Fight South

Howard Ball

Description

Taking the Fight South provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if racial justice is to be fully realized.

Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball has written dozens of books during his career, including the landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall, A Defiant Life, and the critically acclaimed Murder in Mississippi, chronicling the Mississippi Burning killings. In Taking the Fight South, arguably his most personal book, Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when, against the advice of friends and colleagues in New York, he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where he received a tenured position in the political science department at Mississippi State University. For Ball, his wife, Carol, and their three young daughters, the move represented a leap of faith, ultimately illustrating their deep commitment toward racial justice.

Ball, with breathtaking historical authority, narrates the experience of his family as Jewish outsiders in Mississippi, an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. Signs and natives greeted them with a humiliating and frightening message: “No Jews, Negroes, etc., or dogs welcome.” From refereeing football games, coaching soccer, and helping young black girls integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night, from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in the history of the South. He was briefly an observer but quickly became an activist, confronting white racists stubbornly holding on to a Jim Crow white supremacist past and fighting to create a more diverse, equitable, and just society.

Ball’s story is one of an imitable advocate who didn’t just observe as a passive spectator but interrupted injustice. Taking the Fight South will join the list of required books to read about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of racism in the United States. The book will also appeal to readers interested in Judaism because of its depiction of anti-Semitism directed toward Starkville’s Jewish community, struggling to survive in the heart of the deep and very fundamentalist Protestant South.

When Klan leader Edgar “Preacher” Killen was indicted for murder in early January 2005, I begged (successfully) the managing editor of Vermont’s Burlington Free Press to give me the cachet of “Special Correspondent” so I could go down to Mississippi again, this time to cover the trial that most people thought would never happen. I wanted to see and hear about the changes in the state that had finally led to Killen’s indictment. I wanted to see and write about the “Preacher.” (The following account of the trial is based on my contemporaneous notes taken there and published in the Burlington Free Press on June 23, 2005, “When Past Becomes Present,” and on June 24, 2005, “60 Years for Miss. Killings.”)

It turned out to be a very different, and a much more dramatic news assignment I gave myself. The trial became much more than a capital case in a state court. In essence, it was a stark drama about two men from the same small town, Union, Mississippi, who were neighbors and knew each other growing up. Each man, however, emphasized the opposite one of two core ways of thinking all humans display in their lives: goodness and evilness.

Marcus Gordon, Judge Marcus Gordon, was the jurist presiding over the Killen trial. He had been a trial judge for more than twenty-five years when the Killen murder case was assigned to him; it was his ninth capital case. Over the course of his nearly four-decade career, Gordon had “earned a reputation for being a no-nonsense, firm and fair judge with a steady hand of control over the proceedings.” (Kenneth Billings, “A No-Nonsense Judge for Killen Trial,” The Neshoba Democrat, June 1, 2005.)

Like Killen, the judge was a big man, more than six feet tall, broad shouldered, with thick white hair. Like so many Mississippians, he grew up in farm country, loved hunting and fishing, and horse riding. To escape the tensions inherent in a trial court, he often returned to his farm in Union, less than a mile from his birthplace, where he saddled his horse and just rode. (Horse lovers know how much good “just riding” does for lowering the rider’s blood pressure and renewing good thoughts. Just ask my wife Carol, my Jewish horse whisperer.)

The judge, unlike Killen, served six years in the U.S. Air Force, including service in Korea, and then went to Ole Miss as a mature first year undergraduate. After graduating with a degree in business, Gordon then went to Ole Miss’s law school. Most of his legal career was as an elected district attorney and as a county court judge. Gordon was elected District Attorney of the 8th Judicial District in the 1970s (1971-1977), he then ran for the position of Judge, in the same district a few years later. At the time of his retirement, March 2016, Gordon was the longest serving circuit judge (thirty-seven years) in Mississippi’s history. Three months later, the 84-year old Judge died.

For the judge, the Killen trial “hit close to home.” Marcus Gordon and “Preacher” Killen lived next to each other on the same road in Union. Killen ran a sawmill operation in town and was a part-time Baptist minister. (One of my State students, Donna Ladd, grew up in Philadelphia and remembered, when she was a little girl, meeting Killen in town. He was a part-time watch repairman and her watch needed to be fixed.)

Killen was the Baptist minister who “preached at the Church Judge Gordon’s parents attended and presided over their combined funerals [they died within a day of each other] just a year after the [three civil rights workers were] murdered.” Gordon, when he was District Attorney, also knew Killen professionally: “he once prosecuted Mr. Killen for making a threatening phone call.”

Nearly forty years after the 1964 killings, not one of the nineteen Klansmen involved in the murders had faced homicide charges until Killen’s indictment in 2004. The majority were never convicted of the murders in both federal and State trial courts. They all had church services and burial in its cemetery.

Preface

1. Going Down to Mississippi

2. The Jewish Community in Starkville, Mississippi and We "Fast Talkin' New York Jews"

3. Refereeing Football Games in the Magnolia State

4. Confronting Racism While Serving On the Mississippi Chapter, ACLU Board of Directors

5. Defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act

6. A Solitary Hebrew Working on Campus and in the Field

7. Leaving the "Magnolia" State

8. Conclusion. Reflecting on the Yin/Lang of Life in Mississippi: Two Men from Union, Marcus Gordon and “Preacher” Killen, Collide in 2005

Sujets

• justice
• Political Science
• Civil Rights
• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• Social Activists
• HISTORY
• U.S.
• Dólar
• Jews
• History of the United States
• Civil and political rights
• 20th century
• United States
• États-Unis
• FL
• KY
• LA
• US
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• Mississippi Burning
• Discrimination
• VA
• Ku Klux Klan
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268109189
• Langue: English

Extrait

Taking the Fight South
TAKING the
FIGHT SOUTH
Chronicle of a Jew’s Battle for
Civil Rights in Mississippi
HOWARD BALL
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
“Justice” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes , by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950325
ISBN: 978-0-268-10916-5 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10919-6 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10918-9 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
This story of a Jewish kid from the Bronx tenements
who moves his family to Starkville, Mississippi, to teach
and try to do justice would not have been told but for
the loving care provided to me by my sole tutor in
possum-ology and other South-isms, my dear friend
and spiritual brother-in-arms for justice,
DR . CHARLES D. LOWERY , of blessed memory,
professor of history, dean emeritus, at Mississippi
State University—and a talented woodsman
Contents
Foreword by Jennifer A. Stollman Preface Acknowledgments C HAPTER 1 Going Down to Mississippi C HAPTER 2 The Jewish Community in Starkville, Mississippi, and We “Fast-Talkin’ New York Jews” C HAPTER 3 “Hey, Rabbi”: Refereeing Football Games in the Magnolia State C HAPTER 4 Confronting Racism While Serving the ACLU in Mississippi C HAPTER 5 Defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act C HAPTER 6 A Solitary Jew on Campus and in the Field C HAPTER 7 Leaving the Magnolia State C HAPTER 8 Conclusion: The Yin/Yang of Life in Mississippi, and Two Men from Union Collide Appendix Notes Index
Foreword
Jennifer A. Stollman
The Mississippi specter haunts the minds of individuals and communities who do not call it home. I grew up understanding that the state, so far away from my reality, was like the other side of the world. It was the antithesis of America. Mississippi and other states in the Deep South represented the loud and frightening death rattles for white supremacy. Mississippi was Goddamn and Burning. Mississippi was Till, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. Mississippi was also Freedom Riders and Fannie Lou Hamer.
When I accepted the privilege of writing the foreword for Taking the Fight South, I assumed, following a routine that I had done previously, that I would read and write a few pages about what Mississippi was and wasn’t, is and isn’t, and how the state has changed and how it hasn’t. Curiosity and deep respect for Howard’s social justice work in Mississippi and around the world encouraged me to accept reflexively the task of writing the foreword. What should have been a few days of work stood me still for weeks. His reckoning and recounting of his work and life in Mississippi caused me to face my personal Mississippi experience. I sat with Howard Ball’s work, and I expect that readers who are committed to social justice will experience the same responses. As he carries us along his journey, you will recognize the familiar signposts of success and strategy and fear and failure in the labor for justice.
I first came to Mississippi in 2002, almost three decades after Howard. Similarly, I arrived as a visiting professor at the University of Mississippi. Like Howard, I was cautioned by my Jewish family and friends not to go. They were frightened. Mississippi remained in their minds as a space of unreconciled violence. They could not understand why I would take this job when, back then, the job market was a bit easier for newly minted academics. Admittedly, I was curious. My Ph.D. focused on antebellum southern Jewish women and their complicated religious, regional, and racial identities. In my research, I followed nineteenth-century southern Jewish migration and settlements and traveled through Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. A one-year position drew me to Mississippi, but a call to action awakened my lifelong journey fighting racism. During that year, I worked with like-minded individuals, traveled in the Delta, offered workshops on storytelling and interviewing for high schoolers, and created a tiny nonprofit dedicated to highlighting through the arts the lives of often silenced and ignored individuals. Like Howard, I learned to seek out and work with others who wanted to make a change. At the time, our impact was small. But we had dined at the welcome table of freedom and justice, and we were never going to leave.
After the reelection of Barack Obama, I returned to the University of Mississippi as the academic director for the William Winter Institute. Mississippi had changed. The campus was full of brave, outspoken, and action-oriented faculty, staff, students, and Oxford residents. In my six years there, we collaborated with folks across the state using our numbers and adopting others’ models to push for civil rights for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, women, immigrants, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. The struggle was filled with victories followed quickly by defeats and then victories again. We continued the work that Howard and tens of thousands of Mississippi citizens and transplants initiated, all of us linked to a dedicated ancestral chain of action aimed at decentering white supremacy.

Howard’s work debuts while the United States is in the midst of its most recent human and civil rights movement. On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, continued police brutality, and the murder of Black men and women, both cis-and transgender, pushed the second phase of the Black Lives Matter movement into the forefront of American hearts and minds. With much of the country shut down, Americans are forced to confront their country’s pernicious historical and contemporary legacies and the impacts of systemic, institutional, and interpersonal white supremacy. An endless news feed, combined with an absence of live sports and new television series, earn us a front seat to demonstrations in support of civil rights and fearful and violent responses against shifts in economic, political, and social status quos. In the past, many of us turned away from these realities, but the present does not allow us to do so easily. More and more people with extended power are joining with those who have had to scrap for every inch to create a new future. Unbelievably, a groundswell of public and private support for Black civil and human rights has moved across our towns and cities. The moral pulls of justice and empathy have driven people from their sequestered states to demand, in words and deeds, racism’s end. The silence created by COVID-19 is now replaced with the sounds of stomping feet and impassioned shouts of individuals across hundreds of cities, visually spectacular street art, inbox pings, and flickering web pages detailing tens of thousands of organizational statements committed to anti-racism. Millions of Americans engage in book studies internalizing concepts like institutional, structural, and interpersonal racism, fragility, and bias, and almost a billion dollars have been committed to combating racism and in support of Black equality and equity.
These are awesome times, full of energy and promise. Change does come in an instant when we have enough people dedicate themselves to the mission and commit time and action to the movement. Leaders from the front and the rear show us different ways to express citizenship and build community. They educate and inspire. We learn to be curious about and value other people’s experiences that do not match ours. We follow, carried by the thrill of change and the possibility of fulfilling our constitutional and national aspirations.

We have been here before. Those who work for social justice know that the portals of interest and enthusiasm for equity and equality open and close like a wonky elevator in an old building. It’s a fast and furious push to change mindsets and convert apathy into action. We know that interest fades when ending racism requires deep and uncomfortable self-reflection and confrontation beyond anti-racism performativity.
It does not have to be this way. We can choose a different path. We know that substantive equity does not happen solely by removing symbols and statues, jawboning support, and familiarizing ourselves with the historical and theoretical underpinnings of racism and bias. We know that leaders move us but cannot force us to act when we experience discomfort, are risk-averse, or do not wish to return unearned power and privilege. Sustainable change is not made in big moments and by prominent people. Change happens in our everyday conversations and actions. Change happens when ordinary people accomplish extraordinary things.
Howard’s memoir demonstrates this brilliantly. Committed to equity and justice from his days in a Bronx tenement to now, as a retired professor, Howard understands that succeeding at racial justice is a lifelong endeavor and a daily struggle. His work lays out all we need to know to make deep and lasting impacts on equity and against racism. To enter the fight, as he did when he accepted an academic position at Mississippi State, we need curiosity and a desire to see i