The young civil rights lawyer from Seattle who ventured to Mississippi some 60 years ago is now 90 years of age. But Henry Aronson carries vivid memories that are salient as the Trump administration seeks to rebuild components of Jim Crow in the Deep South.
“There was no trust whatsoever,” recalls Aronson. “Not even the rudiments of common courtesy. No limits were put on conduct.” The sheriff of Dallas County, one Jim Clarke, greeted Aronson’s presence with these words: “You tell that son of a bitch if he comes into the county alive he won’t be leaving.”
Aronson drove carefully to Jackson, but still was pulled over, in a remote part of the Delta. Elsewhere in the Mississippi, three young civil rights workers were slain, the bodies not recovered for a half century and only then because of a deal with their killer.
A University of Mississippi historian, James Silver, wrote it all down in his book, Mission: The Closed Society, only to be driven out of the state. He ended up teaching at Notre Dame, bringing with him fascinating reminiscences carried forward to my years at that college.
Back then, just eight African Americans were registered to vote in Dallas County. Nowadays, the Trump administration is restoring obstacles that Black citizens have to circumnavigate to gain rights of citizenship. In addition, Trump’s GOP seeks to gerrymander the state’s lone Democratic congressman from office.
In an interview, Aronson recalls that segregation had a class system. The White Citizens’ Council were respectable, while the Klan drew “buffoons.” The buffoons used the “n” word, while town gentry wrapped their tongues around “nigra.”
At the behest of Sen. James Eastland, D-Miss., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, President Kennedy named Harold Cox to the federal bench, and Cox used the n-word in his federal courtroom. “He had a profound disrespect for black people,” recalls Aronson. Kennedy named Cox as a sop to Eastland, paying the price of moving other judicial appointments.
Faith figured in the politics of the time. Black churches baptized the civil rights movement, and Aronson has high praise for the National Council of Churches, noting “a large number of clergy came south. But,” he adds, “the Jewish community would call me in,” nervous over its standing in a closed society.
What to make of this long ago racism? It is nearby, and a recurring American affliction. The country experienced Know Nothings in the 1830s, Klansmen in the 1860s and 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, and is enduring the MAGA movement today.
This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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Morning Joel,
As you may remember, the northwest was never immune to the offense of racism. I still remember the ONE black family that had the audacity to live in Bellingham, Wa., where we grew up. We went to high school with Herb, the only black student in an otherwise lily white school in a lily white city. I remember his family was forced to move somewhere outside the city limits and later Herb and his family disappeared completely. And, the arm-chair liberals on 16th street raised a genuine ruckus when Dr Thad Spratlen moved to town. First African-American to teach at Western Washington State College, he taught there for eight years before moving on to the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a trailblazer then and continued to be so for his entire life. I do believe, no matter how hard our society tries, that we are a racist society which we have worked so hard to hide throughout our history. We hide it in our history, we bury it whenever we can, excuse it when it occurs, and are quite adept at looking the other way. A lot of not in my backyard. I’m not sure we will ever be rid of racism, it generates itself behind the closed doors of our homes, allowed to fester and grow, and try as we will, whether through legislation or schooling, it continues to hide in the corners of our society. When Trump was elected, he “let the dogs out,” so to speak and what we see now in our society has been hiding there forever. Sad to say, but I don’t think it will ever go away. Perhaps when we are all “brown,” which will occur over the next hundred years or so, we will be able to accept the fact that we all came from the same mother, once upon a time, somewhere in Africa. However, that is no guarantee, as is evidenced by the hatred engendered in the Middle East by religious groups all from the same family and of the same blood. Cain and Abel wasn’t it?
What Donald Trump and his crazy little deputy Stevie Miller are doing with such vile delight is not only mass deportation. It is more like ethnic cleansing. At the beginning, Trump was slandering immigrants without documents and those who did have some form of proof that they were in America legally — ICEmen took them anyway. Trump has no love for black and brown people, especially those coming from what he calls “shithole countries.” But the way our armed thugs in ICE treat people makes us wonder about the shithole state of our America under Donald J. Trump.
I won’t pretend racism can ever really go away, but it could certainly be much gentler than it is in America, and the way we’ve been doing it since Eisenhower used the military in Little Rock … might be right, but it’s wrong. I mean, after the early gains, in the last 50 years I don’t really perceive a lot of material improvement, for all the institutional efforts, and in the process we’ve stoked discontent that brings us people like Trump.
The way out, is economic. America, the earth’s richest nation though it may be, is stained with poverty, and the color of that stain is brown and black. Not every poor person is black, of course, but only they have the visible stamp of poverty, and that keeps racism alive.
Everyone down there at the base of the economic pyramid, has to have the means to come up. That doesn’t mean just the usual America the land of opportunity scam where we point to an individual or two who climb out, and it doesn’t mean handouts. It means that real work has to receive real pay, where a day’s work is enough to thrive – enough to go well beyond basic needs and basically live the same lives as the rest of society.
We were actually closing in on that a little in King County, in ’60s, when black households for example had nearly the exact same rate of home ownership as white. Because a lot of black men were working at Boeing. It didn’t make society color blind, but if it had been real and not just a local surge in special jobs, in a generation or two, it would clean things up a lot. The improvement in pay has to go not just to factory millwrights, it has to be everyone who works. Hotel cleaners, meat packers, stock room workers, everyone who works must get paid enough to be a real member in full standing in our society.