So the Heffners Left McComb by Hodding Carter

Author:Hodding Carter [Carter, Hodding]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496807489
Google: XH_pjgEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-01-15T00:43:26+00:00

That editorial was the last in quite a spell—the three months of the long, hot summer in fact, the period in which some thirty church burnings occurred—on the topic which was the only one discussed anywhere in those late spring days in McComb. Oliver had said everything he knew how to say, he had reasoned with his readers, he had given them facts which should have reassured them. With the advent of the first COFO workers, blind emotionalism gripped the area. Reason had no validity and editorials addressed to reason would make no impression. Oliver’s enemies and some of his friends said that Oliver started running scared in June. Certainly he was physically afraid, as would be anyone but a congenital idiot if he has more than once been promised a bomb through his bedroom window and been actually beaten on the streets. But Oliver Emmerich has been threatened before and those warnings had not stilled his editorial voice. In the summer of 1964 there seemed no way to make the voice of reason heard, but as soon as he thought the time had come he struck again. It didn’t come soon enough to do the Heffners, who were his friends then, and are now, any good.

In May most people in McComb preferred more exciting reading matter, heady stuff having to do with the preservation of Southern womanhood and the white race, the Communistic Supreme Court, and who wants their daughter to marry a nigger anyhow?

But Oliver’s editorial had at least one endorser. Red Heffner, Episcopal lay reader, home-town booster, a damn good salesman, and the best charcoal broiler in town.

At the beginning of the summer of 1964, McComb was a community hag-ridden by fear, fear of a skirmish line of Northern students coming to spread foolish notions about civil rights and to plant seeds of insurrection in the heads of the good darkies of the city and Pike County and Southwest Mississippi; fear of the federal government and the all-seeing agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; fear of what might happen next anywhere; fear of the Ku Klux Klan; fear of economic disaster for the individual and for the town. This must be understood if what happened to the Heffners is to be understood. Through the long days and longer nights most of the people of McComb mourned, but not openly, over the bombings and the burnings and the beatings which destroyed the once attractive image of their town. The perpetrators were but a handful. But those who did nothing about it made up, until the leaves of autumn began to fall, all but a tiny fraction of the citizenry. The Heffners’ tragedy was a personal one. The larger tragedy and the shame of it were McComb’s.

The fear must also be understood if one is to believe in the very existence of a preposterous organization for self-defense against invasion, Help, Inc., to which most of the families of Carroll Oaks and Westview subdivisions belong. The first president was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.