Black Power

In the Delta, it’s too late to turn the clock back now.

By Phil McCausland

Voting Rights Act of 1965

-- The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting. It outlawed literacy tests, poll taxes and other devices used to disenfranchise minorities.

-- It required southern states and a few others to get approval from the Justice Department or the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia before changing voting procedures. This was known as the “preclearance clause.”

-- It allowed for mass enfranchisement of racial minorities and is considered the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted.

-- In Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the preclearance clause. It said singling out states with a history of discrimination was no longer necessary. Mississippi quickly implemented a law that required voters to show identification to vote.

-- The rest of the law is intact. It is still illegal to discriminate in the election process. But civil rights groups complain that challenging discriminatory laws is now slower and more expensive.

-- U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., is pushing an amended version of the law, restoring the preclearance clause with provisions he hopes will pass Supreme Court muster. But it has been slow to advance.

The snipers lay in wait on top of a nearby building. Two sharpshooters in black jumpsuits with high-powered rifles set in the crotch of two gleaming tripods. It was a Friday morning in early March. The sky was a pristine blue, perfect weather for shooting.

A radio crackled with news that the buses would roll in at 11:45 a.m. The snipers pushed their scopes to their eyes and squinted, controlling their breathing. They set their sights on the entrance to Ground Zero Blues Club – Bill Luckett’s and Morgan Freeman’s juke joint in Clarksdale.

When the buses rolled up, the first one out was John Lewis. In the 1960s, he might have been the snipers’ target. But today, the gunmen were there by order of a white mayor and police chief, assigned to protect the black congressman and 20 colleagues on a nostalgic victory lap through the Delta, celebrating what civil rights has wrought in a place that resisted it as strongly as any.

Ayear ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. AfricanAmericans, including U.S. Rep. John Lewis, protested loudly, recalling the way things were before the law was passed.

Nowhere in America was the protesting as heartfelt as it was in the Mississippi Delta where the law, which banned discrimination in voting, represented nothing less than salvation to a desperately poor, heavily black population. Finally, after a century of oppression, African-Americans were no longer threatened, fired, kicked off plantations, beaten or killed for aspiring to vote.

Besides banning discrimination, the law specifically outlawed literacy tests, poll taxes and other devices routinely used to disqualify black voters. The Supreme Court kept all of that intact. But the court struck down a clause that required federal approval before any change in election procedures in states with a long history of racial discrimination. In the South, the preapproval clause was a potent weapon used to prevent a white majority from turning the clock back. The Justice Department objected to Mississippi voting changes more than 170 times.

The Delta became the law’s crowning achievement, proof positive of its radical power to abruptly change the political landscape and, in the process, the culture of an entire region. Today, nearly 50 years later, Mississippi has 950 black elected officials, almost 200 more than any other state.

And the Delta is a big reason for that. From Tunica to Vicksburg, where white cotton and white people used to rule, blacks control politics. Today, in this region where blacks outnumber whites nearly five to one, white politicians know that to win a countywide or citywide election, they must consider what black voters want.

That’s a radical change from the way it was.

“When I came to the Delta in 1962 to do voter registration, there was not a single black elected official in this whole state, yet the population of blacks was nearly 40 percent,” said Charles McLaurin, a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) foot soldier. “They had only between 5 and 6 percent total registration in the state. … Black people were hostages in this state.”

In a fit of hopeful optimism, the late state NAACP chief

Aaron Henry once declared that black people would use their votes to make the Delta their “Promised Land.”

But today, that dream is still unrealized. Indeed, it often seems as if blacks are still hostages here, but this time to economic forces largely beyond their control.

Since the 1960s, white flight, NAFTA and farm mechanization have left the rural Delta with limited capital, few jobs, and an emaciated tax base. The Promised Land has become a resource desert, forcing public officials – black and white –¬ to deal with some of the toughest political problems in America: rampant poverty, runaway unemployment, a deeply entrenched dependence on welfare, failing schools, segregated schools, epidemic teenage pregnancy and nation-leading rates of obesity, heart disease, asthma and strokes.

John Lewis was beaming as he hopped from the bottom step of the bus. Bill Luckett, a white mayor elected by black votes, stood at the front door to shake his hand. Twenty other black and white congressmen, their friends and staff slowly filed from the buses. Lewis cracked jokes, hugged old friends, met new ones, thrilled to be back in a state that once caused him so much trouble.

In the cool cocoon of the blues club, the deputy Democratic whip of the U.S. House of Representatives paused to look back and pinpoint what made such a pilgrimage possible. “I grew up in rural Alabama and my own mother and father, my grandparents and great-grandparents couldn’t register to vote until the Voting Rights Act was passed. It gave people a sense of control of their own destiny. It changed the South and America forever.”

Today, despite their differences, white and black people in the Delta get along as well as anywhere in America.

Carver Randle, a black lawyer and former NAACP leader who became a Sunflower County supervisor, has seen a real metamorphosis in his home town of Indianola. He lived through the tough civil rights battles, fought racism in the trenches. Now, he says, people are making an honest effort.

“The people here have become very decent,” he said in a law office filled with warm wood and plush chairs, just a few steps from where Fannie Lou Hamer’s proud signature jumps from the pages of an old voter registration book in the county courthouse. The walls are yellowed by cigar and pipe smoke and covered by various degrees and congratulations.

“If a white person goes out of a door, he wouldn’t slam it in your face. He’d hold it until especially a lady walked through it, even if she’s a black. That kind of courtesy, that kind of intelligence. I don’t think people are going out shouting the N-word openly, because it would hurt us.”

Randle agrees the vast cultural divide has not been completely bridged, and it is often quite obvious. For the most part, blacks still

TOP RIGHT: Highway Patrol officers push Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other marchers off a highway during a march through the Delta to Jackson in 1966. PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS BOTTOM RIGHT: In the early 1960s, federal registrars were sent to Mississippi to register black voters and were promptly overwhelmed with applicants. PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

go to black churches. Whites go to white churches. Public schools are almost all-black. Private schools are almost all-white. It’s rare for either race to go to the other’s home for Sunday dinner.

Yet, recently a startling new trend has emerged. Despite the fact that 70 to 75 percent of the population is black, 5 of the Delta’s biggest cities – Greenville, Greenwood, Clarksdale, Indianola and Cleveland – have elected white mayors. Weary of grinding poverty, black voters looked to anyone they believed might be able to help them fix their streets, find them jobs and get the stray dogs to the pound, regardless of race. It would be easy to read too much into what may be a temporary development. But in terms of bridging the racial divide, it is a hopeful sign.

And there are other signs of hope.

An innate survival instinct has kicked in. Having realized they must work with each other or see the Delta perish, small groups of white and black leaders are coming together to push communitybuilding projects they believe could save the region. The crown jewel of these efforts is the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, erected as a joint project of the white and black communities in Indianola, once the cradle of the White Citizens Council. In effect, this too is fallout from the Voting Rights Act. The powerful preclearance clause may be gone, destroyed by a conservative Supreme Court, but the law’s overall influence remains.

At Ground Zero Blues Club, local blues musician James “Super Chikan” Johnson sat on stage, twiddling and tuning his guitar, which was a sight unto itself. It glinted in the dim lighting, not because it was a finely polished piece directly off the factory-line, but because he builds his own and customizes them with bottle caps and old Army gas canisters. Suddenly, Johnson leaned back and released the truest of blues licks. The kind of lick that makes your back vibrate in waves and your feet stomp uncontrollably.

And that’s when it happened.

Out on the floor, in front of the stage, John Lewis started dancing. And not like a man who’s been beaten or broken by racial intolerance, not like a man in his 70s with the heavy responsibilities of a congressman, but like a problemless 18-year-old kid who finds freedom in face-melting guitar solos.

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer threw off his suit coat and lost himself in the music, as well. Then Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton got up to join them and danced without a concept of past or future. Three mid-seventies veteran members of the U.S. Congress swung hips to the mind-blowing guitar playing of “Super Chikan.”

Sylvester Hoover was born and raised in Greenwood. He runs Hoover’s Grocery in Baptist Town, an area of clapboard homes on one particular side of the railroad tracks, and takes tourists on civil rights and blues tours.

TOP LEFT: From left. Stokely Carmichael, sweater over shoulder, and Floyd McKissick, right, lead marchers toward Jackson. A coalition of civil rights groups rallied to finish James Meredith’s March Against Fear after Meredith was shot south of Memphis. PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS BOTTOM RIGHT: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left and Stokely Carmichael, right, had different philosophies but they marched together after James Meredith was shot. PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

Most importantly, he was born just before the Voting Rights Act passed. He well remembers when, at age 5 and 6, he was expected to pick cotton, dragging a 20-pound bag behind him.

But being born in 1956 had its advantages. He didn’t have to live under the daily strain of a Jim Crow South for long. His siblings weren’t so lucky.

Hoover was the only one of his parents’ children to graduate from high school in Mississippi. His brothers were sent north to Chicago to escape the cotton fields when they turned 15. His mother sent his sisters when they were 13. “She didn’t want the boss man flirting with her daughters,” Hoover said.

This created a disconnect between Hoover and his siblings because he never had to experience the true long-term brutality of the cotton fields and the hopelessness that AfricanAmericans felt before they could vote, eat where they wanted or use whatever water fountain or bathroom was closest.

That’s why Hoover remains in the Delta, while his siblings have chosen not to return.

“They say, ‘Bastards! They’ll never change!’ It’s because of the experience they had when they were here, it wasn’t civil rights,” Hoover said from behind his cash register. The store is a simple one-room quick stop. Regulars float around the room drinking Budweiser or Coke. Hamburgers sizzle, racks are stuffed with chips and candy.

Hoover’s siblings might not understand how black voters could elect white mayors. Bill Luckett in Clarksdale. Steve Rosenthal in Indianola. John Cox in Greenville. Carolyn McAdams in Greenwood. Billy Nowell in Cleveland.

All of them have something in common. Their histories are deeply entrenched in the Delta. They’re respected by their peers and have worked with the black community to move their towns forward. They realize they must be sensitive to black needs or lose the next election. For decades, race was the overriding issue. White people voted for white candidates. Black people voted for black candidates. But black voters proven to be more pragmatic.

“Black voters have been historically more likely to consider a white candidate than vice versa,” said Tim Kalich, editor of The Greenwood Commonwealth. “It’s been tough for black candidates in local politics to get white voter support. But black voters have been a little more open to vote for a candidate of another race.”

It’s a break from what used to be the norm. No longer can politicians solely depend on the same playbook of polarization, using partisan and racial politics to divide and conquer. It happens, but not nearly as often.

Some black leaders say some white politicians in the Delta owe their success, at least in part, to the fact that they have more resources to throw at a race. They can hold fish fries and campaign dinners and feed people, while a black candidate may not be able to afford that.

Whatever the reason, race is no longer always the trump card.

It could be argued that the Delta can no longer afford to play the typical political games. For a time, black and white mayors and commissioners could get away with doing the bare minimum, while allowing their towns to fall into debt and disrepair. But voters are losing patience. Broken streetlights are to be fixed, drug dealing and violence are to be investigated, derelict homes are to be salvaged

and bettered. Race can’t be the number-one factor for Delta voters.

That doesn’t mean that it never is. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. There are quite a few, and white mayors, like their predecessors, have to deal with them. Bill Luckett had not been mayor very long when black Clarksdale Commissioner Buster Moton became a thorn in his side. Finally, when Moton ignored frequent warnings and persisted in talking even when he wasn’t recognized, a frustrated Luckett resorted to having him removed from the dais. A police officer then arrested Moton and charged him with disorderly conduct.

For 13 years, Moton has represented Ward 4, composed predominantly of poor African-Americans. He doesn’t like it when he doesn’t get his way and when Luckett voted against him a few times, he went on the attack.

“Bill was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It’s either Bill’s way or the highway. So Bill don’t understand that he’s a one-term mayor,” Moton said. “He will never be mayor again because you don’t do people like that. Bill don’t know politics, he don’t understand politics.”

The Effect of the voting rights act

Thanks to the Voting Rights Act, federal examiners moved into the South to register voters and black voter registration spiked sharply upward. The chart compares black registration rates with white rates in seven southern states in 1965 and 1988.

69.2 68.4 75.0

62.6

56.8 63.9 80.5

77.1 75.1

19.3 27.4 31.6 96.8

69.9 74.2 80.5

46.8 58.2 65.6

Black White

75.7

56.7 61.8 61.1 63.8 68.5

37.3 38.3

6.7

1965 1988 1965 1988 1965 1988

Alabama Georgia

Source: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Louisiana

1965 1988

Mississippi

1965 1988

North Carolina

1965 1988 1965 1988

South Carolina Virginia

GRAPHIC BY KRISTEN ELLIS

The backlash against white mayors is often racially based, and Moton, for one, doesn’t mind playing that card.

“The way Bill is doing things here in Clarksdale, it’s like he’s trying to put all black people back in chains, like in the slavery days,” Moton added.

Luckett is utterly frustrated by this because, he says, he is trying his best to unify both races. And Moton helped Luckett get elected. Yet when Luckett voted against Moton at commission meetings, Moton began calling him racist. Luckett finds this ridiculous.

“I joined the NAACP about 25 years ago as a lifetime member,” Luckett said from his City Hall office. “I’ve promoted racial equality. I’ve invited the [William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation] over here as soon as I took office to try to avoid some of the tension that I saw coming.”

The interview is interrupted by a black police officer. He has a subpoena for Mayor Luckett requiring him to be a witness at Moton’s upcoming trial in city court. (He was eventually fined $364.) After the mayor signs and the officer leaves, Luckett shakes his head and continues.

“The former mayor, who happens to have been black, warned me about the racial tension that would be on the board, because he typically did not vote the same way that one of these commissioners [Moton] would have liked him to vote on certain issues. I have tried to do my best to remediate the situation, but it won’t go away.”

It’s a tough line to walk for citizens and politicians. There are almost two different societies, two different cultures, in such close proximity and yet so vastly dissimilar, with each one jealously guarding its prerogatives and traditions. This then, is the big challenge left to the Delta. And it is one that has vexed the world since time immemorial.

Nevertheless, people in the Delta are trying to work out this tired problem. The Winter Institute has been invited by several towns to create biracial committees, called “Welcome Tables,” to work through race-based growing pains. The Smithsonian-quality B.B. King Museum has helped put Indianola on the map. Then there is Greenville’s attempt to breathe new life into its waterfront and downtown. Cleveland has broken ground on a Grammy Museum. All these have at least some potential to bring whites and blacks together to work towards that Promised Land.

“Super Chikan” wails a screeching solo, which Tim Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator, takes as an invitation to jump on stage. He pulls a harmonica from his pocket and puts it to his lips. Everyone is dancing now, all of them with bellies full of catfish and sweet tea.

Kaine is killing it. He manipulates his blues harp like a champ, sliding his mouth up and down, amplifying the energy of the everenthusiastic Super Chikan, who pauses for a second, slightly stunned to be accompanied by a United States senator.

TOP RIGHT: Sylvester Hoover in his Baptist Town grocery store in Greenwood. PHOTO BY JARED BURLESON BOTTOM RIGHT: Bluesman Super Chikan lays down some licks at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale for visiting congressmen and senators on a civil rights pilgrimage. PHOTO BY IGNACIO MURILLO

Lewis is still bouncing. Hoyer is still swinging. Norton is still rocking. And for that moment, everyone forgets the struggles that brought them here. Just for a second, it feels OK to call this the expected. It’s OK to call this normal.

Without the protection of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance clause, black people expect the troubles of the past to resurface. Those fears were fanned this year when Mississippi implemented a law requiring a photo ID to vote. Early response immediately broke down along racial lines. Blacks thought it would decrease black turnout. Whites claimed it would combat voter fraud.

Bennie Thompson, the state’s only black congressman, saw it as proof of institutionalized racism in state government. He warned that it would disenfranchise black voters.

“Given Mississippi’s history, I can say that this voter ID bill by itself is one of the prime reasons I think that the need for a new voting rights bill is there. Mississippi left unchecked will begin to turn back all the hands of political progress in this state.”

“When she was poor and But Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann took hungry, you could take steps to avoid such criticism, including an outreach advantage of her, but with a effort to offer rides to the courthouse to get free IDs degree in biochemistry, she is and a policy that allowed not going to take so much crap.” 10-year-old driver’s licenses and student IDs and the like to suffice at polling places. – ANDREW YOUNG In the end, there were few if any ID complaints in the hotly contested Republican primary for U.S. Senate, a race where a heavy black turnout in the Delta made the difference in Sen. Thad Cochran’s victory over Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel. Perhaps the conservative-leaning justices are right, and Mississippi no longer needs to be under the watchful gaze of the federal government. Perhaps they’re wrong and, encouraged by the success of voter ID, the Legislature will pass laws to disenfranchise voters and push the Delta back toward its scary, intolerant past.

It’s early May in Oxford and a little more than a hundred University of Mississippi law students sit in the hot sun of the Grove, covered in thick, black graduation gowns, trying to find shade under the branches of the trees.

Congressman John Lewis has returned to speak to the graduates. On the platform behind him flies the Mississippi state flag, the one with a smaller Confederate battle flag conspicuously embedded in its upper left-hand

corner. This is a campus where three students recently hung a noose and a Confederate flag around the statue of James Meredith, the school’s first black student. If anyone has the right to be outraged at this, it is John Lewis, arrested 40 times and almost beaten to death fighting for civil rights.

But Lewis is not discouraged.

“When people tell me nothing has changed in Mississippi, I say, ‘Walk in my shoes!’” Lewis says. “This is a different state. We are a better people. We are on our way to the creation of a beloved community.”

Andrew Young sat in his comfortable office and stared out his window on the ninth floor of an Atlanta skyscraper. This close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations pondered the high court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act. He found himself underwhelmed.

“We never depended on the Supreme Court in the first place,” Young said. “We never even depended on the president. It was good we had them on our side, but it was, basically, the people’s determination that they were going to vote or die.”

Three years ago, Young said, he returned to Memphis, where he saw King assassinated, to give a speech. He felt a tug from the Delta, just an hour or so away. He wondered if the old battleground had changed. So he headed down to Marks, where he and a few others started the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 and set out for Washington in a mule train.

In Marks, he came upon a church. A young black woman walked out, and he approached her.

“I said, ‘How you doing, little sister?’

“She said, ‘Fine.’

“I said, ‘What are you doing with yourself these days?’”

She explained that she was a biochemistry senior at Ole Miss and was visiting family in Marks. She wasn’t sure what she would do with her degree. But she wasn’t worried, there were plenty of jobs to be found in biochemistry.

That struck Young silent for a moment. This was such a drastic shift from the Mississippi he’d seen in the early 1960s, when black people weren’t welcome at Ole Miss. Then, the Delta had been a place of segregation, protests, beatings, boycotts. He couldn’t help himself. He flooded her with questions. What about the racial makeup of Ole Miss today? Was it 5 percent black, 10 percent?

“She said, ‘It might be somewhere around 15 to 20 percent.’ I was shocked. See? To me, that’s more indicative of what’s happening in Mississippi than what the Supreme Court says.

“When she was poor and hungry, you could take advantage of her, but with a degree in biochemistry, she is not going to take so much crap.”

He reflected for a moment.

“They can’t turn the clock back now. It’s too late. People won’t let them.” Design by Kristen Ellis

Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett won with a heavy black vote. PHOTO BY THOMAS GRANING