Jim Crow Told Through the Lives, Black and White, of One Mississippi Town

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/books/review-hattiesburg-william-sturkey.html

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In his memoir “Omaha Blues,” Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The Times, recalled getting a survey in the mail. “Have you ever heard of Hattiesburg, Mississippi?” it began. Lelyveld checked “yes.” He proceeded to the next question: “If yes, in what context?” “My father was beaten there with a tire iron in the summer of 1964,” he wrote.

Lelyveld’s father, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, had traveled to Hattiesburg as part of the Freedom Summer drive to register black voters. The kind of racist violence that resulted in an image of the bleeding Rabbi Lelyveld transmitted across the news wires “was as old as Hattiesburg itself,” the historian William Sturkey writes in “Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.”

By 1964, though, something was changing. “The old tactics,” Sturkey notes, “were losing their edge.” Brutality had long been deployed by white supremacists as a weapon and warning, but now, instead of stifling morale among Hattiesburg’s black residents and civil rights activists, it was strengthening their resolve.

Sturkey’s book is a study in unintended consequences — a portrait of a Mississippi town from its founding in 1882 through the depredations of racial apartheid, ending with a brief coda on the civil rights movement. The close-up view affords us the chance to learn how segregation operated on the most intimate level, in the everyday experiences of Hattiesburg’s residents. The personal histories of black and white townspeople are recounted in alternating chapters, showing the unexpected points at which they diverge and intersect — all the better to understand what the historian C. Vann Woodward called “the strange career of Jim Crow.”

Sturkey, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pursues two main threads in this illuminating book. The first has to do with black agency: By highlighting the perspectives and actions of black Hattiesburgers, he shows the variety of ways in which they responded to the grim reality of segregation by resisting or escaping or otherwise trying to make do. The second has to do with the town’s white power brokers, who sought to maintain an unyielding, repressive racial order while also navigating a fluctuating economic one. In responding to a new economic reality, Sturkey says, some of the town’s ardent segregationists, despite their most ruthless efforts, inadvertently opened the door to Jim Crow’s undoing.

“As they were in real life,” he writes, “the fortunes of the oppressors and the oppressed in this book are at once separate and intractably bound.”

Hattiesburg became known as a hub for the railroads and the lumber industry; located in the thick of Mississippi’s Piney Woods, about 70 miles north of the Gulf Coast, the town was a draw for new residents seeking their fortune. But William Hardy, the Confederate veteran who founded Hattiesburg and named it after his wife, couldn’t realize his vision for an economic powerhouse without the help of Yankee money — an issue that would come up again and again in the so-called New South. “The former Confederacy,” Sturkey writes, “was broke.”

This dependency on outside investment becomes a running theme in the book. At various points in the town’s history, its white business leaders tried to square a stubborn desire for economic growth with a stubborn commitment to bigotry.

Sometimes they succeeded in having it both ways, forcing Northern-based businesses to abide by local “customs,” regardless of any moral qualms (which may or may not have worried Northern businessmen) or economic inefficiencies (which most certainly did). In 1933, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce persuaded Reliance Manufacturing, a Chicago-based company, to build a factory in town. The chamber’s representatives were elated. One of them told the audience gathered for the plant’s opening that the building was “an expression of your humanity” — even though, as Sturkey points out, “only white people were allowed to work there.”

But material self-interest wasn’t always so compatible with the voracious demands of Jim Crow. During the depths of the Great Depression, with Hattiesburg relying on charitable donations to feed people, the mayor issued an ultimatum to the Red Cross: Forgo its nondiscrimination policy and stop serving African-Americans, or else vacate its offices at City Hall. (The Red Cross refused and was kicked out.) The Philadelphia Tribune was mildly incredulous at the audacious display of brinkmanship: “Even the gnawing pains of hunger are unable to make the white people of that God-forsaken section forget their white supremacy.”

One imagines that Hattiesburg’s black residents were less surprised — they had been contending with some of the most destructive manifestations of racism for their entire lives. Sturkey traces the story of Turner Smith, who moved with his wife, Mamie, and their children to Hattiesburg in 1900. Turner was born into slavery and emancipated as a toddler; even though he and Mamie were both trained as teachers, post-Reconstruction Mississippi continually cut funding to black schools, so Turner worked as a carpenter and Mamie as a laundress.

Some black Hattiesburgers used their earnings to move north as part of the Great Migration; an exodus to Chicago during the early part of the 20th century took with it roughly half of the town’s black population, leading some desperate white business owners to beg their black workers to stay. Other white proprietors tried scare tactics, warning of Chicago’s supposedly deadly cold. “Well I, for one, am glad that they had the privilege of dying a natural death,” one migrant said. “That is much better than the rope and torch.”

Any gains in black mobility and financial independence were fragile, vulnerable to a racial hierarchy that asserted its authority in cruel, capricious ways. But even modest and precarious improvements, Sturkey argues, were nevertheless real. Four of Turner and Mamie’s sons became doctors; one of them owned a pharmacy in town and held N.A.A.C.P. meetings in the back room.

Sturkey’s cleareyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.

When describing a voter-registration drive that resulted in ostensible failure — the county registrar refused to register the applicants, but their efforts created a useful paper trail — Sturkey explains the necessity of such incremental and painstaking work: “Every attempt mattered. Each added to the total.”