Word: yazoo
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...YAZOO: INTEGRATION IN A DEEP-SOUTHERN TOWN by Willie Morris. 192 pages. Harper's Magazine Press...
...both a Southerner and an American like Willie Morris is to engage in a perpetual war between states of mind, between the received past and the acquired present. That past requires continual reconnaissance. So in January 1970, Morris took the first of six trips back home to Yazoo City on the edge of the Mississippi Delta...
...into believing total school integration would never happen, the townspeople were too busy to notice him. As had previously occurred elsewhere in the South when integration began, hard-core segregationist parents enrolled their children in hastily organized, expensive all-white private "academies." But they did not really catch on. Yazoo's 11,000 citizens are about evenly divided between blacks and whites, but only 20% of the city's white pupils were pulled out for private schooling. Adult acquiescence was veiled in all sorts of rationalizations. One white mother argued that because her son customarily kept his head...
Morris' journalistic learning, or non-learning, began at age twelve, when he became sports "editor" of the Yazoo Herald. A decade later he came briefly to public attention when, as student editor of the University of Texas newspaper, he editorially accused the Governor and state legislators of collusion with oil and gas interests. He was asked to resign, but refused. The university countered by appointing a faculty supervisor for the paper. The next day Morris wrote that the appointee would "bring to the Daily Texan ... the sensitivity of high salary and position...
...equally large number are convinced that, given time, white and blacks can coexist. "Those of us who are here have got to learn to live together in this situation," explains Don McGraw, personnel director of the Mississippi Chemical Corp. "It is upon us." Like McGraw, a majority of Yazoo City whites are willing to keep their children in the public schools unless the ratio of blacks to whites gets too high, something that is not likely to happen if the parents themselves refuse, as they have commendably done so far, to panic...