Not a Pretty Sight:Mississippi 1966

Over at Balloon Juice, Dennis G. takes apart Gov. Haley Barbour (Foghorn Leghorn) for his faulty memory of events during the civil rights era:

In the summer of 1966 Mississippi was ground zero of the Civil Rights struggle and the focus of world wide media attention. By that time Haley Barbour was a student at Ole Miss. As June 1966 began, a well known former Ole Miss student decided to take a walk. His name was James Meredith and a few years earlier he became the first African American to attend Haley’s school. Somehow, I think Haley Barbour and his fellow students at the University of Mississippi would have known the name “James Meredith”. And Haley might have remembered that name and the connection to his school when James Meredith was shot by a white racist as he began his walk from Memphis, TN to Jackson, MS.

Meredith began his walk to prove that black people could register to vote in Mississippi and should not be afraid of white violence anymore. He had called his quite walk his March Against Fear. He was shot on June 6, 1966. The act of white supremacist terrorism made completing his march a Civil Rights campaign priority. Within days Martin Luther King, other leaders and activists came to Mississippi to complete Meredith’s March Against Fear.
By June 21, 1966 Dr. King had been marching in the State for days and there were many public rallies. The marchers were greeted by young white men waving the Confederate Flags and hurling insults from the sidelines of the roads where they marched or in the places where they tried to speak. Haley could have his memory of seeing Dr. King that summer as one of these young men stalking the marchers (or he could be one of those rare young white Southerners in 1966 who supported Civil Rights, but if that was the case why can’t he remember taking that stand).

Read the whole thing, if you can.  Reading Rick Perlstein or David Halberstam in 'The Fifties' or any other history of that time, it is hard to comprehend the outrageous violence and racism which were perpetrated.  And it isn't just the South, although that is where it was worst.  Reading about Boston during the school busing uproar is almost the same.  White flight has taken away some of the tension, by leaving blacks stuck in the inner cities, where whites can ignore their problems, but things haven't ever healed.

Update: I edited the title, it was originally overstated, at least compared to Stalingrad or Leningrad, 1942 or any Nazi camp.