(Ed note: This is the fifth and final excerpt from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Follow these links for excerpts one, two, three, and four.)
Within a few years following Freedom Summer, Richard M. Nixon exploited a political opportunity to harvest white Southern votes for the Republican Party through a strategy that leveraged the region’s racism, fundamentalist religions, and conservative policies to inure to his benefit and for future Republican politicians, who maintained the strategy with some variation from time to time. The strategy gave respect to the white Southerner, and that respect compounded a Republican hold on the solid South. In fact, many would say it has all gone too far and too long. One can surely now make an argument that this strategy, first formulated by Nixon and endorsed with little qualification by Republicans then and later, and even further inculcated by Trumpism, has over time actually come to mean much of Republicanism with its own not-too-subtle racism, its exclusionary, nativist tendencies, and its wide and various attempts at voter suppression, having their very roots in white Southern political practices. Indeed, Republicans from the rest of the country frequently looked south for guidance. Over time, the white Southern mouse ate the elephant.
So much to be repudiated and dismissed by the white South coalesced in the Freedom Summer moment; “nerve-racking” for many, the white Southerner was now convinced that the “new day” exalted characteristics reminiscent of the frightful history of a hundred years earlier. The Republican Party’s Southern strategy relied on this fear for anticipated real and imagined adjustments to a preferred style of life. For some white Southerners, a recollection of Reconstruction had even been evoked.
Freedom Summer held firmly to its Northern mission, joining the phalanx of individuals who assaulted Mississippi’s social and racial fabric. Some have called this nexus the fulcrum or lever of the Civil Rights Movement, for the combination of the maneuvers set much of an activist nation against the white South, and the ramifications would be felt for another fifty years. Freedom Summer illuminated and foretold unprecedented change for the region, change I recognized then to be inevitable, but change that, for some very explicable reasons, most white Southerners were in no frame of mind to make. Even at that age, I realized in every ounce of my bones that this was a revolution, a second Civil War, if you will, that the white South could not prevent, and yet, in so many respects, the white South would not, could not apprehend that inevitability, that justified inevitability. Little did they know or expect that very shortly, they would be dealing with the greatest codification of emancipative legislation and administrative procedures for the actual freeing of African-Americans since the advent of slavery.
Within a few years, the South saw its local public school systems completely integrated. Moreover, the country witnessed, after the Selma march to Montgomery, the protection of the blacks’ right to vote, which would have considerable influence, especially in places where blacks matched or outnumbered whites. Fair housing, an aggressive affirmative action initiative to make up for past grievances, and equal employment opportunities, among other programs, became realities. To confirm that these inordinate legislative and administrative efforts weren’t frittered away, an elaborate enforcement system by the federal government came into existence to protect the interests and rights of African-Americans. Most of these actions were specifically targeted with the white South in mind.
When I left Harvard in the fall of 1964, I went south for a learning experience as part of the broader and more personal understanding of the country’s Racial Revolution. By the time I left Arkansas for New York City in early 1968, my views on both race and the liberation of African-Americans had crystallized more fully. I came back to the South after Freedom Summer mainly as a student although I had my inclinations and underlying suppositions. Still, to speak on the subject then would have probably been to posit a series of interrogatories about the situation and the black struggle. By 1968, as I left Arkansas, I had a firm grasp of myself in the context of race and the black liberation movement. In about eighteen months and after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., I returned once again to southeast Arkansas, but this time, I put my more congealed and codified views about race and black liberation to work by teaching, before integration of the local public education system, sixth through the twelfth grades at Drew School, the all African-American public school in Monticello.