Four years ago we moved to Scooba, MS, population 600 or so. It's in Kemper County, next to the Alabama state line. Not much has happened in Kemper County. It's all farmland. It used to be cotton and corn, owned by white farmers and worked by black
sharecroppers. When farm profits crashed, the white farmers sold their
land to the timber companies and moved away. The black sharecroppers
were left with no work and no way out except for a degree from the old
agricultural high school, now turned into a community college. The farm
houses were torn down and what used to be a landscape dotted with the
lights of tiny family farms is now mile after mile of blank pine
plantation, it's paved roads torn out and replaced with dirt to
discourage traffic. The buildings on Main Street are being torn down
for bricks; there's only two left intact. The rest are piles of rubble
being wrapped in plastic and shipped out.
The biggest thing that's happened locally took place about half an hour from here, right outside Philadelphia. Fifty years ago last Saturday night three civil rights workers were murdered in the cause of defending state's rights against those who would help the state's citizens register to vote. It's hard to find the exact spot these days. There's no marker.
It happened just down the road from the Neshoba County Fair, a teeny-tiny gated vacation community for second-tier rich people out in the middle of nowhere. It's not what you usually think of when you hear the words "county fair", more like a miniature Jackson's Hole (without the scenery) than an amusement park. You find it by looking for the tiny pastel houses enclosed in a huge, black iron fence. Sixteen years after the murders, Ronald Reagan would kick off his first Presidential campaign with a rousing speech defending state's rights. Not one word did he say about the blood spilled on the ground just beyond the gates.
I remember Mississippi folks being surprised, and quite a few of them disturbed, by that omission. Some people defended him, saying he was incompetent, not amoral. "He's an actor. He doesn't know the context."
It was 1980. The world did not yet know that Reagan was a supremely competent political campaigner who always knew the context.
But we would learn.
The biggest thing that's happened locally took place about half an hour from here, right outside Philadelphia. Fifty years ago last Saturday night three civil rights workers were murdered in the cause of defending state's rights against those who would help the state's citizens register to vote. It's hard to find the exact spot these days. There's no marker.
It happened just down the road from the Neshoba County Fair, a teeny-tiny gated vacation community for second-tier rich people out in the middle of nowhere. It's not what you usually think of when you hear the words "county fair", more like a miniature Jackson's Hole (without the scenery) than an amusement park. You find it by looking for the tiny pastel houses enclosed in a huge, black iron fence. Sixteen years after the murders, Ronald Reagan would kick off his first Presidential campaign with a rousing speech defending state's rights. Not one word did he say about the blood spilled on the ground just beyond the gates.
I remember Mississippi folks being surprised, and quite a few of them disturbed, by that omission. Some people defended him, saying he was incompetent, not amoral. "He's an actor. He doesn't know the context."
It was 1980. The world did not yet know that Reagan was a supremely competent political campaigner who always knew the context.
But we would learn.
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