Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Even in Mississippi. Similarly, Negroes were admitted to previously all-white hotels and eating places in Savannah, Thomasville and Warner Robins, Ga. In Texas, Dallas' Piccadilly Cafeteria, a motel and lunch counter in Longview, restaurants in Palestine, and Austin, and a Beaumont drive-in were integrated. Thirty-three Memphis restaurants, including one of the city's largest downtown cafeterias, opened their doors to Negroes. Kemmons Wilson, chairman of the Memphis-based Holiday Inns motel chain, noting that he had instructed his motels to obey the new law, said: "The alternative is eventually anarchy, chaos and destruction...
...Even in Mississippi, land of violence, there was quiet compliance. Negroes played golf on Jackson's municipal course, ate at a Vicksburg whites-only lunch counter, and, drawing scarcely a disapproving glance, checked into and ate at Jackson's two leading hotels and a motel. In Jackson, the way had been paved by a Chamber of Commerce policy statement urging local businessmen to "comply with the law, pending tests of its constitutionality in court...
Faulkner understood not the legal but the human facts. He understood that the crisis between white and black is not only a crisis for the South but for every American, however many miles may separate him from Mississippi. He understood that legal sanction was one thing, but emotional acceptance was another...
...knew was William Faulkner. He was born there, in Mississippi, heir to and prisoner of the crinoline-and-lace tradition; he died there in 1962. In writing 19 novels and 80 short stories, almost all about the South, he won through to an understanding that in its richness, scope and completeness, tragic vision and comic invention, will not soon be equaled. At his best he penetrated the magnolia curtain of Southern illusions to the secret springs of motive and action. He said, in effect, "This is the way it feels to be Southern"-something the North needs to know...
...defeated whites clung to the past when Mississippi had been one of the richest states in the Union and Jefferson Davis the rebel President. They were scared because they felt that they were few and the Negroes myriad; they were stubborn because only by convincing themselves that the Negro was somehow inferior, like a pet or a horse, could they justify their long crime of refusing to recognize him as an equal human being; they were violent, partly from the strain of sustaining this myth, partly from fear that if the myth was once cracked, at any point...