Black Like Me: November 10–15, 1959

I met no rebuffs, only gentleness when they informed me they could not use my services as typist, bookkeeper, etc.

Stupefied that he would walk these miles as a courtesy to a stranger, I suggested he let me buy him a ticket for the show and we could walk back together.

You take a young white boy. He can go through school and college with a real incentive. He knows he can make good money in any profession when he gets out. But can a Negro—in the South?

And yet when they come home in the summers to earn a little money, they have to do the most menial work.

What kind of wisdom can overcome the immense propaganda of the racists and the hate groups?

People read this poison—and it’s often presented in a benevolent tone, even a kind tone.

Second, and almost more grievous, his discrimination against himself; his contempt for the blackness that he associates with his suffering; his willingness to sabotage his fellow Negroes because they are part of the blackness he has found so painful.

It is too poignant, like the little boy peering in the candy store window.

I have heard none of the Negroes speak of police harassment, but they have warned me that any time the police see a Negro idling, especially one they do not recognize, they will surely question him.

The axiom that a man is innocent until proved guilty by a court of law has been flagrantly ignored once again in the State of Mississippi.

The point that crushed most was that the FBI had supplied a dossier of evidence identifying the lynchers, and the Pearl River County Grand Jury had decided not to look inside it.

No one outside of the Negro community could imagine the profound effect this action had in killing the Negro’s hope and breaking his morale.

Knowing the Catholic stand on racism, I wondered if this shop might cash a Negro’s check.

Her performance was so venomous, I felt sorry for her.

She undoubtedly considered it supreme insolence for a Negro to dare to feel sorry for her.

I have heard it said another way, as a dictum: ‘‘He who is less than just is less than man.”

Buses idled their motors, filling the air with a stifling odor of exhaust fumes.

He sat sidewise in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him.

When it was over, he remained still, in profound introspection.

Finally, he nodded gravely to indicate he had deciphered my blood background.

The move was on, but it was quelled by another voice: “No, let’s don’t. It’ll just give them something else to hold against us,” an older man said.

We felt strongly the need to establish friendship as a buffer against the invisible threat.

Everyone’s mind was on the Parker youth’s lynching and the jury’s refusal to consider the FBI evidence against his lynchers.

Bill gave me instructions with such solicitude that I was alarmed.

When I entered the store of my second contact, we talked in low voices, though he made no effort to be guarded or cautious in expressing his contempt for the brutes who made forays into the area.

His bitterness was so great I knew I would be thought a spy for the whites if I divulged my identity.

My room was upstairs in a wooden shanty structure that had never known paint. It was decrepit, but the Negro leaders assured me it was safe and that they would keep a close watch on me.

Canned jazz blared through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera.

Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony.

Then the onrush of revulsion, the momentary flash of blind hatred against the whites who were somehow responsible for all of this, the old bewilderment of wondering, “Why do they do it? Why do they keep us like this? What are they gaining? What evil has taken them?”

Scenes from books and movies came back—the laces, the shaded white-columned veranda with mint juleps served by an elegantly uniformed “darky,” the honor, the magnolia fragrance, the cotton fields where “darkies, happy and contented,” labored in the day and then gathered at the manse to serenade their beloved white folks with spirituals in the evening after supper... until the time when they could escape to freedom.

She said she was long ago inured to shocks, and insisted on having P. D. rescue me.

We drove through the darkened streets to his home, talking in a strangely stilted manner.

Here in America, in this day, the simple act of whites receiving a Negro had to be a night thing and its aura of uneasiness had to be countered by gallows humor.

Another bill, to levy penalizing fines against any church holding nonsegregated services, was, he contended, in flagrant contradiction to the First Amendment of the Constitution.

The local state legislature (in opposition to constitutional law) insisted that whatever it decided was de jure law, a position that wipes out the distinction between true and false judgments.

Even when these have been tested and thrown out as illegal by superior courts, they have in some instances continued to be enforced because “they haven’t taken them off the dockets.”

In The Magnolia Jungle the juxtaposition of the best of these columns against a background of stark horror gives a striking effect.

Except for two Jewish families, they are ostracized from society in Hattiesburg.

I could make little sense of it, except that the arguments were long and full of recriminations on both sides; but the traditional roles were reversed.