Word: pascagoula
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...workers, they didn't expect much in the way of government benefits--and they didn't want to be taxed to pay for them. Many workers owned a fishing boat or a vegetable patch that they could work until the yard started hiring again. When people in the Pascagoula area wanted redress against a big company, they tended to look to the courts, whose juries could be quite populist. Southern Mississippi is home to a small but aggressive plaintiff's bar, featured twice over the past year on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and on episodes...
...Pascagoula was settled over the years by immigrants from France and Spain, Lebanon and Yugoslavia--but by very few slaves. In Lott's youth, as now, blacks numbered only about 18% of the area's population, and whites did not feel as threatened as they did in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi Delta. While most neighborhoods were segregated, the races mixed easily on the streets and in factories, where jobs were available to everyone...
There were, of course, many distinctions based on race, including the segregated schools that some of Lott's friends came to see as unjust. But Lott had enough trouble at home; he didn't need to stir up any more if it could be avoided. And in Pascagoula, it could. Most of his white classmates could say, as Lott does, that "race just wasn't that big an issue for me growing...
After earning a B.A. in public administration, Lott enrolled in the Ole Miss law school. By now his parents were separated and unable to help him financially. He had saved some money from summer jobs at a root-beer stand in Pascagoula and at the local hospital as a janitor mopping rooms. He took out federal student loans. And he secured paid jobs with the university, first as a recruiter and later as a fund raiser for the alumni association, where he expanded his political network...
...Vietnam War was heating up, but Lott, like other students, enjoyed an exemption until his graduation from law school in 1967. By then he had married Tricia Thompson of Pascagoula and, according to Selective Service records, secured a "hardship" exemption because of the impending birth of their first child Chet. Lott says he was so focused on his studies and student political matters, such as getting soda machines in the dorms, that he didn't think much about either protesting the war or volunteering for it. Vietnam, like civil rights, was another uncomfortable subject to be ducked...