First Impressions of
1960′s Mississippi
~Dave Waldo
My wife and I recently saw the movie “The Help.” It was a wonderful movie about an ugly period in our country. The story took place in segregated Mississippi during the 1960’s. The movie showed the fear and brutality that kept black maids “in their place” as southerners used to say. What made this movie so great was the courage of some in bringing their stories to light, and it was done in an entertaining and sometimes quite humorous way. I highly recommend that you see this movie. Again, the movie is called “The Help.”
The movie reminded me of a trip I made once. I was living inLos Angeles and working for the Defense Contract Audit Agency in June 1967 when I was sent to a class for 3 weeks inMemphis Tennessee. I don’t remember any of the auditing instruction. What I do remember were my impressions and experiences.
I was fascinated to get out and see the city even though it was extremely hot and humid. I enjoyed walking from the motel to downtown Memphis, seeing the Mississippi River, and walking along Beal Street which was famous for it’s jazz. I also walked in the neighborhoods and saw people sitting and talking on their large front porches. This was before air conditioning, so front porches were quite nice. I ate catfish and frogs legs and tried some ocra which I did not like . . . yuk! I talked with quite a few of the local people, and I was amazed that it seemed like they were still fighting the civil war. Of course this was during the time of the civil rights struggle, just months before Martin Luther King would be killed in Memphis. So, you can imagine how emotions were running then.
One Sunday three of us, a guy from Maine, a guy from Ohio, and I, rented a car and drove a short distance into Mississippito go swimming at a lake we spotted on the map, LakeSardis. I noticed that all the water in the streams and in the lake was a dirty brown color. That was strange. I wondered why. After enjoying a swim in the dirty brown lake, we drove into this small dark looking town. All the houses were unpainted. In fact it looked like they had never been painted. It reminded me of some pictures that I had seen in magazines of the old south, poor and dilapidated, where the colored people lived.
Outside of town on the highway, we spotted a small ice cream store. “Let’s get some ice cream,” one of the guys said, so we stopped. I walked up to wait in line, but everybody ahead of me got out of line to let me go first. I said “no, no, you are ahead of me.” But they wouldn’t get back in line until I got my ice cream. That’s when I realized that they were all black. I felt very uneasy about the whole situation. That was my first and last experience of segregation, and I didn’t like it.
Imagine the brutality that these people must have endured over the years to cause them to be so docile. They were even scared to let me take my turn in line for ice cream. From then on my first impression of Mississippi as a bigoted and brutal place has stayed with me.