Mississippi, Race, and Civil Rights: Some Recent Books

Abstract

REVIEW-ESSAY PANTHEA REID Louisiana State University Mississippi, Race, and Civil Rights: Some Recent Books Editor’s note: The following review-essay covers selected works nominated for the 2017 nonfictionawardpresentedbytheMississippiInstituteofArtsandLetters.JasonMorgan WardreceivedtheawardforHangingBridge:RacialViolenceandAmerica’sCivilRights Century. Founded in 1978, MIAL is dedicated to celebrating the rich cultural heritage of Mississippi and to recognizing outstanding achievements by visual artists, musicians, and writers with close ties to the state. I have served on the MIAL Board of Governors and as the coordinator of the nonfiction category since 2015. I was acting in that capacity when I invited Panthea Reid to serve as the nonfiction judge. It was an added benefit that she was willing to share her views on the books most likely of interest to readers of Mississippi Quarterly. – T.A. I LEFT BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA, FOR PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, IN 2001, Princeton for Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2016. My last trip to the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference was in 1993. Thus I write at some distance from the Deep South, geographically and chronologically, but I’m still a southerner. At that last Faulkner conference, a young woman who accompanied the participants to dinner at the Taylor Grocery insisted that Oxford, Mississippi, was the best place ever to live. I recall her remark vividly because it reminded me that James Meredith, who had been heckled, abused, and threatened just thirty-one years before, had hardly found Oxford the “best” place to live. There is the quandary: why is Mississippi so good to some, so egregiously horrid to others, so loved and hated? At the close of Absalom, Absalom!. Quentin Compson answers his Canadian roommate Shreve ambiguously: “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!.” (311). Like Quentin, more than a century after that scene which Faulkner set in Massachusetts, we southerners continue to be torn between love and hate, loyalty and disgust. In The End of White Christian America, Robert P. Jones uses three buildings (the United Methodist Building, 1923, in DC; the Interchurch Center, New York City, 1960; and the Crystal Cathedral in Grove City, California, 1980) as gauges of religious evolution in a country which by 2050 will no longer be a majority-white nation. Jones considers the 578 Panthea Reid effectiveness of accusations against Barack Obama for being neither Christian nor American to be symptomatic of evangelical ignorance and prejudice, especially in the South. He notes, however, that some few churches, even in Mississippi, as well as in the North, “are already pioneering a new kind of Christian community that transcends the color line” (180). Jones cites Walker Percy’s 1965 indictment of Southern Christians for the “Great Southern Sin of Silence” (Jones 221; Percy, “The Failure and the Hope” 329). Jones offers a “A Eulogy for White Christian America.” His “Benediction” did not, however, anticipate Donald Trump’spresidency.Ihopehe’swritingasequelexplaininghowTrump’s anti-Obama myths galvanized disgruntled fundamentalists to demonstrate that “White Christian America” wasn’t dead after all, not yet. Memoirs are by definition self-absorbed, but they must not be merely self-centered. Charlie Spillers writes about himself, but his focus is larger. Though it’s only partly set in Mississippi and is not about race (the color line seems fairly inconsequential both to law breakers and enforcers), I include here his Confessions of an Undercover Agent: Adventures, Close Calls, and the Toll of a Double Life. It describes strata of existence to which most of us who read the Mississippi Quarterly are oblivious, rather as genteel white southerners, especially women, for centuries were oblivious to the intimidation that kept black people “in their place.” Spillers begins with a blockbuster preface listing “a wide-ranging cast of characters in the criminal world” (xi). After that list of unsavory types, he explains that they all had one thing in common —him! He was each of them, working undercover with the Baton Rouge Police Department and then the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics. This memoir includes high drama, close calls, riotous episodes, and appalling outcomes, especially deaths of associates at the hands of corrupt drug smugglers and thieves. Ten years of undercover work threatened his marriage and his health, but he learned “quick thinking,” “planning, directing, and...