The Soul of Mississippi, through the eyes of a native son

Jackson, Miss.’s newspapers were typical of those in many Southern cities as the Civil Rights Movement unfolded: Events were ignored, reported as crimes or treated as annoying affronts to the established social order. The coverage helped maintain the institutional racism, discrimination and inequality that was pervasive at the time.

Reading it today, the reporting (or lack of it) by The Clarion Ledger and the Daily News seems inconceivable. Exploring the digitized pages gives a revealing picture of the journalism of the time and shows how one community, fearful of change, failed to  grasp the significance of what was happening to it. And what was true in Jackson was true across the South and around the country.   

Here, Ronnie Agnew talks about growing up in Jackson and the role newspapers played in maintaining the status quo. It also is a tale of the remarkable change that has occurred in Jackson and in American journalism. Agnew is African American and has been the executive editor of the Clarion-Ledger since 2002.   

By Ronnie Agnew

Editor of the (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion Ledger

     He still doesn’t like to talk about it, although nearly 50 years have passed. The hurt revisits him, and remembering reignites painful memories that are emotionally locked away in some deep, quiet place that he considers off limits to the rest of the world — even to those closest to him. So he fights an internal struggle to forget, a daily battle where he is not always the victor. To remember that evil period forces an elderly man who has witnessed too much hate to go back to a place where he prefers not to go. In his own home, he was the rock, the protector. Outside of it, he was a sharecropper working for pennies on the dollar, enriching others while his own family struggled to survive.

       As a younger man, he knew his place and as long as he remembered the rules – never make eye contact with a white person, never speak to a white person unless spoken to – he had a better chance of remaining safe. There was a fear there that was passed on to my siblings, and to me.

      In 1950s and 1960s Mississippi, we were taught never to break the code of segregation, to live a separate life because separatism offered the best chance of survival. My father didn’t know whether the occasional threats of violence were real, but he was unwilling to take the chance.

      The tragic story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was killed and his body mutilated because he allegedly whistled at a white woman is the stuff of history books. But not to my father, my late mother and the scores of black people who viewed the boy’s 1955 murder as an intimidation ploy. It was the Ku Klux Klan’s way of showing superiority. Although the cowardly murder occurred in Money, Miss., its effect spread quickly throughout Mississippi. Black people were afraid for their lives, and many of them took off for the perceived safety of cities that dotted the northern interstates. They settled in St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Ind. – anywhere but Mississippi, their native land that had abandoned them, frightened them, left them feeling that to stay would mean certain death. They went in search of better jobs, but their desperation to leave was to escape the Jim Crow South.

     My dad would have none of it. In some inexplicable sense, he enjoyed life on the farm, where outside of his sharecropping responsibilities, he raised hogs and chickens and cows that produced milk that was sold to area dairies. While my mother pleaded with him for a change, he fought to maintain the life that we had. While others fled, including all of his siblings, he chose to stay. He vowed never to leave Mississippi, a place that even today remains a contradiction. It is a place that is fighting hard to distance itself from its past, yet still is stained by it, and by the unsolved civil rights crimes of the 1960s that makes peace elusive to families who have found no closure.

     My family was touched by tragedies in the Civil Rights Movement in ways most will never comprehend. In our three-room shack with the leaky tin roof, outhouses and water that had to be fetched from a well, each heinous murder was treated like a death in the immediate family. The slaying of Medgar Evers. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy. the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death at the Lorraine Motel. Bobby Kennedy’s death. The slaying of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney in Neshoba County. The news of each tragedy traveled through the cotton fields occupied by the country folk by radio and word of mouth. Each death would elicit wails of sadness that pierced the stillness. President Kennedy's and Dr. King’s deaths would bring about the most emotion. The hope that the men represented died with them, and though most of the folks in that community had limited education, they recognized the historical importance of their loss.

    The country folk, who lived on unpaved roads in shanty homes, could not afford newspapers or televisions. Even if they had been able to afford newspapers, they would have had to find the few brave enough to chronicle the atrocities of the civil rights movement. Sadly, the newspaper where I am now editor was not one of them. The Clarion-Ledger’s archives on the Civil Rights Movement are an embarrassment, all the way to the headlines that took a pro-segregationist point of view. The newspaper regularly killed news stories and printed racist propaganda at the request of the powerful and now defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission whose mission was to preserve segregation by spying on the activities of those involved in the movement. The Sovereignty Commission was dangerous. My newspaper, the one that today has found redemption in solving civil rights cold cases, had a reputation of working hand in hand with segregationists who inflicted pain on black citizens.

     But there were those who, at great personal and professional loss, could not stand idle as wrongs were being committed. The Delta Democrat Times, led by Hodding Carter, and the Lexington Advertiser, headed by Hazel Brannon Smith, were newspapers run by white editors who did what the Clarion-Ledger would not: Stand up against violence and segregation. If the Clarion-Ledger had been different in the 1950s and 1960s, Mississippi would have been forced to expedite racial reconciliation, rather than wallow for decades in shame in front of an entire nation. Today, I am proud to say, the Clarion-Ledger’s transformation into an advocate for change has been nothing short of remarkable. It is a newspaper that confronted its demons and prevailed as a publication that speaks loudly for the people. It is a newspaper that has single-handedly brought to justice violent men and their heinous acts that bigotry once shrugged away.   

    Equally as remarkable is my personal journey that brings me to this newspaper, to Mississippi, the land of my birth, and to its people, whom I admire for their ability to forgive.

   Born in 1962, I was too young to understand the historic battles of the 1960s of which I write. The stories relayed to me by my father, my late mother and many older Mississippians have helped fill in my gaps. I, too, am a survivor. I was known as “the baby born in the fields.” On the day before my birth, my mother, slumped over by the repetition of labor pains, picked more than 200 pounds of cotton that was overdue for harvesting. The next day, she told my father she was too sick to help. I made my entrance into the world that day, not at the hands of a doctor, but at the hands of my Aunt Lucille, who, though never formally trained in any field of medicine, also helped my mother bring my eight brothers and sisters into the world.

      There was a vision and wisdom in my mother that, to this day, I fail to fully understand. She had a dream for us that she lived to see fulfilled, the dream of watching eight of her nine children receive college degrees, with the hope of giving us the opportunity to get far away from those cotton fields that came to symbolize poverty. And then at 54, she died, the result of a heart that worked too hard. The nine natural childbirths, the grueling toil of the cotton fields had proved too much.  She died not knowing the unthinkable, that her son would grow up to be editor of the Clarion-Ledger. She died not knowing that four of her children would be educators and that the others would use their skills to become nurses and computer programmers.

        But she did die knowing that Evers, King, Kennedy and so many others helped her develop a vision that stretched beyond her circumstance. Like King, she did not make it to mountaintop at the same time as we did. But she made it just the same. At 82, my dad has now witnessed what he thought was once impossible. The smile on his face is permanent, and it does not reside there just because of the pride he has for his children. He’s just as proud of the new Mississippi and his choice to remain here. He is proud that hate has been replaced by love. He is proud that Mississippi has come farther than he could have possibly dreamed. He is proud that his state, once scorned and pitied, is far down a path to racial harmony. It is his home and he feels a sense of accomplishment, a sense of fulfillment, that change has come to a place that once had blood on its hands.

By Jerry Mitchell

The Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

   In an era of darkness, The Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News provided no light.

    During the 1950s and 1960s, the sister newspapers regularly killed news stories and printed racist propaganda at the request of the state's now-defunct segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.

    "The papers were unabashedly racist, cheerleaders for white supremacy and the status quo, as little connected to real journalism as Joseph Stalin was to democracy," said Hodding Carter III, whose family ran the Pulitzer-Prize winning Delta-Democrat Times in Greenville. "They were organs of the segregationist establishment, creating news on demand and `covering' the civil rights movement, black aspirations and national politics with blatant dishonesty. It is not possible to overstate just how bad they were."

    The newspapers played a role in keeping the public in the dark regarding the events leading up to the June 21, 1964, disappearances of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

    Records show commission agent Andy Hopkins met with T.V. Gamblin, then-vice president of Citizens Bank in Philadelphia, Miss. Hopkins and Gamblin are both dead now.

     Hopkins asked Gamblin why the FBI knew about the June 16, 1964, burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, but Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey had yet to be notified.

   "Mr. Gamblin stated that he was partially responsible for keeping this matter reasonably quiet as ... an industrialist from New Jersey was due in Philadelphia on Wednesday after the church burned on Tuesday night for the purpose of possibly locating a new industry in Neshoba County and that he, Mr. Gamblin, contacted ... The Clarion-Ledger (and) the Jackson Daily News ... and asked them not to publish anything regarding the burning of the church, as he felt that it might have some bearing on whether the new industry located in Philadelphia," records show.  The Clarion-Ledger obliged.

     Instead of printing the church-burning story, readers saw headlines such as "Half Molten Mass Under Earth Crust," "Negro Teachers Will Visit Fair" and "‘Showboat' Opens."

    Word of the church burning still got out because Bill Minor reported the story for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

    Minor said Philadelphia resident Florence Mars told him she'd heard about the fire in the Longdale community.

    "I found a grocery store in the community and called there," Minor said. "I got to talk to Bud Cole," one of several members beaten that night by the Klansmen.

    Minor's story made the national wire.

    Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney heard of the news while they were training with other activists in Oxford, Ohio, and sped their arrival in Mississippi to investigate, recalled Schwerner's widow, Rita Bender.

     When the trio disappeared, the newspapers carried stories quoting the governor as saying the disappearances could be a hoax and that the trio might be in Cuba. The newspapers also ran stories of supposed sightings of the trio around the U.S.

    The truth came 44 days later when FBI agents found the trio's bodies.

Just how close the newspaper was to the commission and to state officials is made clear in memos. Clarion-Ledger management received commission reports directly through at least 1967 - and complained when they were cut off.

    "We had a call from Charles Smith, City Editor of The Clarion-Ledger," a June 29, 1967, memo reads. "Mr. Smith said he was calling on behalf of Mr.

Tom Hederman, Editor, to ask why he had not been receiving our confidential reports."

     Erle Johnson Jr., executive director for the commission, explained that the paper and others had been "cut off until after the elections."

   Hederman and Johnson have since died, but Minor pointed out the papers were far from alone in Mississippi. "There were very few places that told the readers what was really going on - the institution of segregation was crumbling," he said. "That's the message they should have been telling but didn't."

    That same year, 1967, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News were the worst newspapers in the United States.

    In the early 1970s, Rea Hederman took over the newspapers and began to turn them around, Minor said.

      Gannett Co. bought out the papers in 1982, and The Clarion-Ledger won the Pulitzer a year later for an education reform project that Hederman had mostly guided.

     The two papers combined in 1989 under The Clarion-Ledger name.

     Carter, a former CEO of the Knight Foundation, said since those "bad old days," The Clarion-Ledger has become a newspaper.

    "At its best, it has been a beacon of honesty about its own past failings while leading the fight to undo past injustice," he said. "To someone like me, gone now for a couple of decades, the paper I find when I return to Jackson has literally no discernible connection to the contemptible rag I knew so well 40 years ago."