====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
Note by Hunter Bear [January 9 2010]: Our webpage, "Mississippi Stories" has been getting much more traffic lately -- quite likely because of the recent discussions about Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, and his interesting but quite fallacious retrospective fantasies designed to re-write in softening fashion the very long, brutal, police state epoch in the sanguinary history of the Magnolia State. Like a vast number of others, I am very glad he pardoned the long and unjustly imprisoned Scott sisters and I am willing to see some decent strains in his psyche. But he's dead wrong on the Citizens Councils of America and its deeply hateful nature -- and some other creative ventures of his into historical fiction. [He quickly retreated on some of this, but the controversy is doing more than lingering.] The White Council movement, which began in Mississippi following the 1954 Brown desegregation decision was very bad news indeed -- a superficially polished and self-proclaimed segregationist [hate] organization which, for a time, controlled much Mississippi thinking and exerted considerable influence in other parts of the South as well. It also created an atmosphere in which racist violence came to be comfortably accepted by a great many white people. In time, because of the sturdy perseverance of the civil rights movement, it -- and its comparable kin -- faded although some of the same kind of thinking prevails in Dixie [and elsewhere in the country.] Back to Governor Barbour for a moment. He was born in 1941 and his home town is relatively small Yazoo City in the county of Yazoo -- at least as racist as the rest of the state in those days, and worse than some. Early in 1962, at an NAACP meeting in the "Negro" Masonic Temple on Jackson's Lynch Street, I was sitting with eight or nine others on the stage. Among our group was a visitor from the North -- noted comedian Dick Gregory, fairly new to Mississippi. The meeting was underway when a Black man, obviously not in good physical shape by any measure [he was, I believe, in his 50s and looked to be 70 or 80], came into the auditorium with the assistance of escorts. He had just been released from the Mississippi State Penitentiary in which he'd been imprisoned for years. His "crime"? He was one of those who, in the wake of the Brown decision, had signed a petition asking that his children be transferred into the white schools. The Citizens Council controlled Yazoo by that time. The man was framed on a frivolous charge, others who signed were forced out of the state, and the Yazoo schools, and Yazoo City, and Yazoo County -- and the entire state remained firmly in the Council's context of "States Rights and Racial Integrity".] This extremely moving episode deeply affected everyone present. Following that, Dick Gregory committed himself to the cause of civil rights in the "Closed Society." And "Greg" did just that for years. Although a bit dated, this material of ours is current enough: MISSISSIPPI STORIES -- THEN AND NOW [HUNTER GRAY MAY 25, 2002] UPDATE NOVEMBER 6 2007 COUNCIL OF CONSERVATIVE CITIZENS [AND THE OLD CITIZENS COUNCILS] AND ERLE JOHNSTON [HUNTER GRAY MAY 27, 2002] UPDATE NOVEMBER 6 2007 THE SOUTH: IT'S STILL ANOTHER COUNTRY [HUNTER GRAY OCTOBER 5 2002] http://www.hunterbear.org/mississippi_stories.htm HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ and Ohkwari' Our Hunterbear website is now more than ten years old. It contains a vast amount of social justice material -- including much on techniques of grassroots activist organizing. Check out http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm See Outlaw Trail: The Native as Organizer: http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm [Included in Visions & Voices: Native American Activism [2009] See our extensive course on activist Community Organizing -- often with new material: http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm And see Chicago Organizing: Our grassroots approach vs. top-down styles: http://hunterbear.org/chicago_organizing.htm ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
