J. Todd Moye’s Use of Class Struggle in Let the People Decide

The civil rights era in the United States is often perceived as a national movement occurring between 1954 and 1968. The common known features of the civil rights movement include civil disobedience, sit-ins, boycotts, and peaceful marches, as well as a series of court cases fought by the NAACP. The examinations of these events often focus on the cities that gained more attention from the media and the public, e.g. Birmingham, Greensboro, Little Rock, Selma, and Montgomery. While all of this is true, J. Todd Moye, in his book Let the People Decide, presents a different perspective by examining the civil rights movement by focusing on Sunflower County, Mississippi from the mid-forties until the 1980s.  Moye’s examination of four decades in a rural community illustrates the periods of transition into and out of the small period that is often exclusively considered the civil rights era. In addition, Moye ties the race struggle to economics, demonstrating the influence of class struggle on race relations, and depicting the impact of the civil rights era on a single rural community.

 

Moye decided to examine civil rights through the perspective of a southern rural community, but he chose Sunflower County for several reasons. Sunflower County, Mississippi was the birthplace of Senator James Eastland, one of the most powerful desegregationists, who served the U.S. Senate from 1943-78.  Sunflower County also happened to have one of the densest populations of blacks at nearly seventy percent.  Although a large percentage of the population in Eastland’s hometown was black, his idea of representing the people of his state was strong opposition to human rights. In 1957 he appeared in an interview with Mike Wallace, where he claims that segregation was a choice made by both blacks and whites, “It’s a matter of choice by both races…I’m suggesting that the vast majority of the Negros want their own schools, their own hospitals, their own churches, their own restaurants.”  However when Mike Wallace asks, “Their own buses?” Eastland responds “It would be impractical to operate two sets of buses, certainly.”  

 

In 1962 the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee began organizing in Sunflower County. Their initial goal was to gather blacks to vote. Among those willing was Fannie Lou Hamer. The dozen or so blacks who attempted to vote were denied however. Fannie Lou Hamer was evicted after defending her effort to vote to her boss, and as a result became a full time activist. Moye’s story focuses on the disenfranchised blacks that made up the majority of the community in Sunflower County.

 

Sunflower County was majority blacks, but all of the money and power was in the hands of the few white landowners. Robert B. Patterson formed the Citizens’ Council in Indianola. Patterson’s Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist organization, was made up of middle and upper class white men of Sunflower County. They formed after the Brown decision and used economic intimidation to subvert the collective action of African American’s to achieve social equality.

 

 

J. Todd Moye, in Let the People Decide analyzes the effects of the civil rights movement in rural communities, as well as the effects those communities had on the civil rights movement. The juxtaposition of disenfranchised blacks and powerful white men such as James Eastland and those that made up the Citizens’ Council shows a unique view of class and race struggle within a community. It is, in fact, Moye’s inspiration for the book: “This project began one day around 1993 when I learned that Fannie Lou Hamer… and James Eastland had lived within spitting distance of each other” (269).  Moye chooses to follow the oral stories of African American’s who made up the majority of Sunflower County’s population. The history of race struggle in Sunflower County is still very much a part of history, but as is always the case, the white people involved wish to leave it in the past. Blacks and whites always see history of racial tension in different perspectives. Blacks acknowledge that they come from a culture that was oppressed in a country they helped build and fought wars for. Whites however, always wish to distant themselves from their past oppression. Until whites can acknowledge that the things they did were wrong, and that they are not that far in the past, perhaps a common truth will smooth over modern tensions. This is Moye’s intention by relating race struggle with class struggle.

America’s Need for a “Common Truth”

There are many people today who, when addressing race issues, inevitably bring up slavery. The phrase often heard is “it was so long ago, why are we still talking about it?”  As ignoble of a characteristic slavery is for America’s history, these people somehow miss the much more recent and brutal Jim Crow era. When Southern Democrats “Redeemed” Southern politics during Reconstruction, an entirely separate problem was created which established black Americans not as property, but as citizens of the United States who were inferior. This period was categorized by exploitation, disenfranchisement, threats, and violence at the hands of Southern whites. Laura Wexler’s book Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America addresses these issues in an impressively detailed report of a lynching that happened in rural Georgia on July 25, 1946.

 

The Tuskegee Institute recorded that between 1882 and 1968  3,445 black Americans were lynched. Where lynching was a somewhat popular system of extra-legal “justice” and happened to whites as well, it doubled as a tool of terrorism against blacks. Often the victim was accused crimes relating to theft or some type of sexual assault against a white woman, though guilt was never proven in court and the reason always boiled down to “transgressing the rules of white supremacy” (Wexler, 76). In the case of the 1946 Georgia lynching that Wexler writes about, motives for the crime were established as revenge for the stabbing of   Barnett Hester, though she theorizes several ulterior motives.

 

So what makes the 1946 Georgia lynching a case worth investigating fifty years later?  At this time lynching was on the decline, but news organizations all around the U.S. were reporting it, and the NAACP was at its peak. The morning after, NBC reported “One hundred forty million Americans were disgraced yesterday, humiliated in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world by one of the most vicious lynchings to stain our national record in a long time” (Wexler 81). Public outcry and pressure from Walter White of the NAACP swayed President Truman to deploy the FBI on the case. However, the problem, which was constantly addressed by White, was that there was no distinction between lynching and murder, and unless it could be determined that a state official was involved, the federal government had no authority to prosecute. This left local police responsible for pursuing cases of lynching the same as murder. However, lynchings in the South often took place with the support of the community, leaving local authorities uninterested, and cases closed on “death at the hands of persons unknown” (Wexler, 66).  Though Truman failed to enact a federal law against lynching, this case in Georgia showed that while lynching may be tolerated in the rural South, the American public and the Federal government would condemn and pursue charges against any case of lynching. Wexler attributes the decline and disappearance of lynchings to “the rise of  black political power, the transformation of the South from a largely agrarian society to one industrially based, a lessening of the prevailing isolation of rural communities, and an increasing knowledge on the part of lynchers that they’d face investigation, if not punishment” (Wexler, 205).

 

In an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition Wexler says that her inspiration for writing was the question of race relations she was left with after the beating of Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson. Her search for honest truth lead her to a four-year investigation in Georgia, where she interviewed over one hundred people, and read uncensored FBI reports. She learned that the attitudes of many white people today are often the same as those of the whites of Walton and Oconee counties in 1946. Wexler summarizes the segregated views of the lynching: “For many black people, the lynching was the most horrific thing that ever happened in Walton or Oconee counties, but for many white people, it was mainly an annoyance, an event that smudged the area’s good name” (Wexler, 267). The answer that Wexler found was that our segregated memories and perspectives on events “destroy our ability to tell a common truth” (Wexler, 267).