Hattiesburg

An American City In Black And White

De: William Sturkey

Narrado por: Bill Andrew Quinn

Duración: 13 h y 34 m

Resumen del Editor

If you really want to understand Jim Crow - what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it - you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

Sturkey reveals the stories behind those who struggled to uphold their southern "way of life" and those who fought to tear it down - from William Faulkner's great-grandfather, a Confederate veteran who was the inspiration for the enigmatic character John Sartoris, to black leader Vernon Dahmer, whose killers were the first white men ever convicted of murdering a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Through it all, Hattiesburg traces the story of the Smith family across multiple generations, from Turner and Mamie Smith, who fled a life of sharecropping to find opportunity in town, to Hammond and Charles Smith, in whose family pharmacy Medgar Evers and his colleagues planned their strategy to give blacks the vote.

©2019 the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2019 Tantor

Hattiesburg: an important slice of Black history

The last sentence of the final chapter wraps it all up with a bow, almost like an equation. But it is more of a lesson on the definition of progress. And proper focus.

Insightful

By demonstrating the racial and economic factors of this one deep South Town, it helps provide larger context to issues that still face us today, when politicians are still using phrases like "states rights" in their justification of legislation.

Old habits die hard, and and while listening to this audiobook you will probably see the more subtle tactics of things like voter suppression as they are still being applied today.

The Hub City of the Civil Rights Movement

Another free download that is not my usual choice of reading. But, I am vaguely familiar with the city due to the University of Southern Mississippi and its proximity to Biloxi where we used to vacation at times, so I thought I’d read it and learn something. Like, how many bubbles are in a bar of soap, but we’ll get to that later.

The subtitle tells you that it’s more than just a history of the city but is focused more on the racial aspect, but it does give a decent outline of its history. Hattiesburg is a relatively young city, which didn’t exist even as a settlement until after the Civil War. Around 1880, Captain William Hardy was surveying for a railroad, and as he rested near the point where the Leaf and Bouie rivers joined, and saw the potential in the great pine forests and with its location equidistant between the Mississippi capital of Jackson, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama and fairly close to the Gulf. After his survey was complete, he returned and purchased a sizeable portion of land there. A town was founded in 1882 and was incorporated with 400 residents in 1884, the year the first railroad came through to New Orleans and a few years later another was built through the city from Jackson to Gulfport. Captain Hardy named the city in honor of his wife, Hattie. The city’s economy grew around the growing demand for the straight and tall pines from the forests in the area, some of which were 6 to 8 feet in diameter, and with investment capital from northerners for sawmills and other supporting industries. It, in what should be a lesson for later times, ignored warnings about the gradual depletion of the forests and the impending doom when the great trees were gone and not enough had been done to ensure future sustainability. And, what was even more unfortunate, that doom came at about the same time as the Great Depression making it difficult to replace that industry with anything else. It struggled along until an almost abandoned military establishment, Camp Shelby was expanded into a training facility as America prepared for the possibility of war and even more when the US entered World War II. It later attracted other industries and it also had an educational institution that became the University of Southern Mississippi. 

But, the real focus is on the comparative history of Blacks and Whites in the period after Reconstruction as political power shifted back towards those who continued to see Blacks as inferior and the era of Jim Crow became more and more institutionalized. Author William Sturkey builds his narrative not only around historical accounts but even more around interviews with Hattiesburg natives, both black and white, describing their personal experiences. He especially focuses on one family–the Smiths–following them for several generations showing their persistence that eventually led to their excelling in education and, with some others, building a growing middle to upper class. The chapters alternate between the stories of Blacks and Whites and, while his writing style is more academic and sometimes a little repetitive and dry, the content makes the book much more personal than an academic tome. One thing that comes across very clearly is that the survival of Hattiesburg was extremely dependent on its black residents. While they were persecuted to degrees that are hard to imagine to many today, they maintained their fortitude and continued to build, in the areas where whites didn’t want to live, their own strong communities. They were forced to create a supportive, nurturing, and self-sufficient community, in Hattiesburg centered around Mobile Street, an area that often flooded. And churches became the center of the community. Interestingly, in this Bible Belt city, there were a lot more of the Black community in church on Sundays than in the rest of the community. 

And when significant numbers started leaving in the great migration, suddenly the business community took notice and tried to convince them to stay. Most of those who left followed the rail line to Chicago and formed their own community there, maintaining contact with Hattiesburg, and the Chicago area black newspaper even had a section devoted to news from Hattiesburg and sent copies back by railroad porters to be distributed among Hattiesburg residents.

While Sturkey does not shirk from describing the brutality of the treatment of Blacks and recounting numerous examples of unequal treatment, he does so without sensationalizing them. And he notes that the constant threat of violence was not limited to Blacks but was meant to ensure that Whites would also stay in line and not stand up. He shows how the white community not only benefitted but became more and more dependent on the black community and he relates their stories as well, those who longed for the old days and desired to preserve some semblance of “the Southern way of life,” including even the Faulkner family starting from the author William Faulkner’s great-grandfather who was a Confederate veteran. There were the lynchings, but there were also many more instances of less lethal actions meant to keep them in line from burning crosses in the yard, to beatings, to burning houses down. But the way to ensure that the law stayed on the side of the white population was to ensure that Blacks could not vote. That was also enforced with threats later, with the eyes of the rest of the nation increasingly focused on them, it was enforced through denying voter registration to most Blacks by enacting onerous laws and by adding restrictions that allowed county voting clerks to deny voter applications for the flimsiest of excuses. And that leads to the most famous of all questions that were asked of Black applications by the clerk of Forrest County, which was, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” Conveniently for the clerk and others who wanted to limit voting to whites, no one ever answered correctly. In 1955, there were 7406 black Hattiesburgers who were of voting age. Sixteen were registered to vote. Education was also unequal. He quotes figures for many decades for how much was spent per white student and how much was spent per black student and the disparity is eye-opening. Then there is the story of Clyde Kennard who tried to register at the University of Southern Mississippi and was repeatedly denied. After a while, he was hounded and then falsely accused of theft (the accuser recanted later to no avail) and when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was denied treatment and required to continue to work in a labor gang until his death.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that Hattiesburg became one of the centers of the Southern civil rights movements, especially from the Freedom Summer of 1964 but continuing on from there. Sturkey has written an interesting account of the city’s role and its genesis over time.