The Past That Would Not Die by Walter Lord

Author:Walter Lord [Lord, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, American, United States, Civil Rights, Social Science, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, 20th Century, History
ISBN: 9781453238462
Google: Z-7yqtVPC74C
Goodreads: 13577107
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1968-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

“Bring Your Flags, Your Tents and Your Skillets”

IN AN OLD ABANDONED schoolhouse near the little town of Pavo, Georgia, eight men gathered on the night of September 28 and began laying their plans to rush to the relief of embattled Mississippi. At oil-rich Shreveport, Louisiana, a police officer who said he was acting as a private citizen prepared to sound a call for recruits. In the red-clay Florida hills north of St. Petersburg a local Citizens’ Council man estimated he might raise as many as 500 armed men. At Mobile on the Gulf Coast 115 members of the Citizens for the Preservation of Democracy discussed their own plans to help—each volunteer would wear a red bandanna.

In sun-baked towns throughout the cotton belt dozens—even scores—of hot-eyed volunteers were preparing to march, not that there was any sign of the vast legions talked up in Jackson. Nor were they all coming on their own. Many needed, and were getting, considerable encouragement.

They were summoned by a private line installed in Alumni House on the Ole Miss campus. The phone was in Room 121, which along with Suite A next door formed the state’s “command post” during these days of mounting crisis. Beginning September 27, several hundred dollars’ worth of long-distance calls were made from this number to points all over the South. The gist was always the same: “Governor Barnett wants you and your friends to get on the campus for a showdown with the federal government.”

Only those involved know for certain who made the calls. The place was like a bus station during these days. Aides, hangers-on, Citizens’ Council stalwarts were constantly coming and going … making themselves at home … using the phone. The calls could have been placed by many people—or very, very few.

Only one thing is certain: Ross Barnett himself placed none of them and knew nothing of the project. He wasn’t even there while the calls were being made. But as always, people were jockeying for position, capitalizing on his uncertainties—and using his name. The ultimate irony, according to Mississippi gossip, came when the Governor was even stuck with the phone bill.

Whoever made the calls, there’s good reason to believe they no longer expected to stop the federals. Mississippi’s ordinary citizens might still live in fantasy, but not so this particular segment of extremists. By now their real strategy lay in another direction. If it had to happen, they thought, make it as big a mess as possible … do whatever might call the greatest national attention to the raw deal they felt they were getting. Thus the same group that protested loudest about using troops against American citizens was secretly trying to bring this very thing about.

So the calls went out, and some were heeded—but why? What drove normally law-abiding citizens to answer the appeal of another state for volunteers to fight their own federal government? Some were people as lost in Confederate mythology as any Mississippian—they too heard those distant bugles. Others were simply anti-Negro. People

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