3
Poor Whites

When my family and a team of us from the Mendenhall ministry moved to Jackson in 1972, we purchased several buildings, including a rundown house in one of the roughest and poorest neighborhoods in town, not far from where I live today. The old house was very big, and we called it the Samaritan Inn. The idea was for it to be a temporary place to stay for people who were visiting from out of town or didn’t have a place to live or were stuck because their car broke down. It wasn’t so much a shelter as it was a guesthouse.

We negotiated a low price for the house, but it was rather messy and would have been a good candidate for one of those extreme home makeover shows if there had been such a show back then. There wasn’t, so we turned to our good friends Paul House and Cal Malcom. Both were pastors at First Presbyterian Church in Aurora, Illinois, and they brought a team of professional builders from their church in for three weeks to fix things up. It was a real-life extreme home makeover. We liked the results and were ready for guests.

Like in Mendenhall, we figured we would mostly reach out to black folks in the area, and we did. But the first people to come to our Samaritan Inn were a white, dirt-poor couple from out of town, whose vehicle had broken down and they had no other place to go.

In New Hebron, Mississippi, I grew up around poor whites who felt they were better than blacks and expected us to move out of their way when they were walking down the street. They experienced all of the advantages of being white. They were oppressors, and common knowledge through the years was that in rural areas, poor whites sought to become sheriffs, cops, or guards in order to have some power in society. So we did not have a great relationship with them. At the time I didn’t realize these whites also had been damaged and that oppressing blacks gave them a sense of worth—a twisted sense of value, no doubt, but in their eyes, value nonetheless.

When our poor white guests arrived at the Samaritan Inn, I was caught off guard. I wanted to treat them like many people want to treat the poor: I was going to buy and prepare them food and even wash their dishes. Such acts of kindness would have made me feel good but also might have made them feel as if they couldn’t think for themselves. Vera Mae had a better idea. She said, “Let’s give them money and let them buy what they want to buy and eat what they want to eat.”

On February 7, 1970, while I lay on the floor of the Simpson County Jail in Brandon, I made the decision to preach a gospel stronger than my racial identity and bigger than the segregation around me. It took this poor white couple coming into my home—and some good thinking by my wife—to teach me to start practicing what I was preaching.

To be honest, I had never given a second thought to poor whites. I still regarded them negatively—as redneck, trailer-park white trash. The wealthy white people could help me, but what good were the poor whites to me? But then that couple showed up on my doorstep. My automatic response was to treat them the way whites had treated poor blacks—to patronize them. But these people were teaching me, John Perkins, the guy who was supposed to be leading the church in reconciliation, a lesson in what it really means to be reconciled to one another.

Poor whites have lived in the backwoods and outskirts of towns throughout the South as long as there have been whites in the South. While the Southern gentlemen and belles of antebellum white society built a world of prosperous plantations, the first poor whites were likely descendants of Celtic criminals who had been banished to America. Poor whites included others too and were generally stereotyped as uneducated, lazy, simple outcasts. Early on they were labeled “poor white trash.”

The term itself may have first been used in the Baltimore/Washington, DC, area to describe unskilled white laborers who competed with blacks for post–Civil War reconstruction jobs, but it soon made its way south and became an ugly slur, likely used interchangeably with cracker, hillbilly, and redneck.

Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Faulkner wrote about poor whites, but an English actress named Fanny Kemble gave the most disturbing account. On January 6, 1833, during a visit to the South, she wrote in her journal, “The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash.’ It was equally used by whites.”1 Other accounts tell of times when blacks taunted by whites with racial slurs would fire back with the insult “poor white trash” as if it were tit for tat. Just how often the racial slurs flew, no one really knows, but none of it was good.

Just because some whites use heinous, callous, and abusive language to describe black people does not mean that we, as black people, are justified in responding with racial insults of our own. I can understand how it comes about. We as a people have been beaten down so much that calling poor whites a hurtful name is almost a cry for dignity. I get it. But it is a backward cry. In a way, it’s an attempt to make poor whites feel the way we did when whites would fling racial slurs our way. But for us to do the same thing to poor whites that wealthy whites were doing to us only throws everyone into the same mud heap. A better way is possible. We all must have the compassion, wisdom, and mutual respect to rise above slander, slurs, and snubs to a place of love. What we ought to be striving for today is a new language of love and affirmation that will replace these hurtful slights. What if we started calling one another “friend,” no matter our race, politics, or economic class? Friends, I like that.

People often ask me if there’s anything I would do differently if I could go back. Like anyone else, I’m aware of mistakes I’ve made, and I’m sure I could have done many things better. But there’s one thing I know I would change if I had the chance to do it all over again: I would do more to help poor whites. I wish I could say that once my eyes were opened, my actions forever followed. But they did not.

I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but in Mississippi the relationship between blacks and poor whites has been complicated for as long as I can remember. Where I grew up, black and white sharecroppers living on the plantation got along with one another, at least somewhat. We would come together to slaughter a hog or help one another out from time to time. People knew one another and got along pretty well—as long as they were out in the countryside.

However, as soon as some of those poor whites got into town, they would act like they despised the very same black folks they were neighbors with. One of these men—Old Henry, we called him—lived out near my grandma’s house. He and his family were very poor. His sister and brothers and aunts all got along just fine with us, and so did Henry, when he was around home. But once he was dressed up and out on the town to shop, he became just as mean and racist as could be. Old Henry never did anything to physically harm anyone—he just didn’t want the whites in town to think of him as being on the same level with us blacks.

The poor whites didn’t really have anything going for them except their whiteness and the fact that blacks had to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to them. Since that was about all they had, they held on to it real tight. That’s why I developed a strong dislike of poor white folks for a while—they were the ones who did most of the damage to blacks in rural Mississippi. For example, the deputies who beat me in jail were poor whites. They had a little bit of authority and a black man to hate. I was one person who was lower than them in society, and they took out all their anger and fear and insecurity on me.

Many people in the black community weren’t really any better though. I came from a family of bootleggers, who operated much like those who own a pawnshop today. Our customers were often the poor white folks trying to get some whiskey during Prohibition in Mississippi. It was a complicated situation, because we would give some credence to poor white folks to sell them liquor and get their money, but in reality, we resented them. Religious blacks also would pretend they liked the poor white folks but ultimately resented them too, telling jokes behind their backs and expressing hate for them. The truth is no one really liked the poor whites in Mississippi. They had almost no supporters, except the sheriffs, deputies, and Ku Klux Klan. The poor whites were even forced to have their own churches separate from the wealthy whites. While the wealthy whites went to First Baptist, First Methodist, or First Presbyterian in town, the poor whites were kept out, much like us black folks, and had their own country Pentecostal churches. This separation fed their resentment, and often the pastors of these churches were leaders in the Ku Klux Klan.

The wealthy whites also used the poor whites as tools of oppression, making them overseers or guards or sheriffs charged with taking care of the dirty work to keep black people in their place so they didn’t have to. In reality, though, this just fueled the resentment between blacks and poor whites.

My daughter Joanie vividly remembers an experience she had during her first days at the all-white school:

I got off the bus with a strong determined face. I went to my sixth-grade class and decided to sit in the front. There were two other blacks there—Patricia and Erskin—but they lasted only a few weeks before they returned to the black school. We looked at one another in shame and fear. Each day went by like a year. Playground time was the worst. One time, as I stood by the wall, not invited to play with the other children, a white girl stood by me against the wall. She was a trailer-park type and a bit of an outcast as well. We started talking. I felt she was different and would be my friend, but as soon as a group of popular girls came by, they looked at us in disdain and the white girl walked off. She told me later she couldn’t be my friend. I guess she needed to survive the mean girls too. That was an awful blow to me. I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now. Trailer-park-poor whites in Mississippi needed to be accepted by the powers that be. Yes, they had more rights than blacks, but because they were poor, they had a lot of fitting in to do too.

You might remember in 2008 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said that poor white folks “cling to guns or religion.” He was criticized for his politically incorrect comment and should not have made it, but he wasn’t all wrong. For a long time, poor whites like Old Henry and the guards at the Simpson County Jail had a strategy for feeling better about themselves. Having blacks beneath them made them feel superior, but those old ways are rapidly going away. Thinking they were superior was wrong—don’t think I’m saying it wasn’t—but I’ve gotten to where I can feel compassion for them because something they had (or thought they had) is slipping away from them.

In 1971, my friend Charles Evers ran for governor of Mississippi. His brother Medgar Evers was the state NAACP field secretary who was shot and killed in his driveway in 1963. Charles came pretty close to uniting blacks and poor whites around issues with which both could identify: pulpwood and poverty. His support of those working in the lumber industry persuaded poor whites to support him.

Charles didn’t win the election, but he sure did an exceptional job of reaching across racial lines to try to uplift a downtrodden group of people.

Until she passed away in early 2000, my cousin Teet and her husband, Hicks, lived out in the country. Sometimes, when I didn’t have anything pressing on my schedule, I’d go down and spend the day with them. Their house and the countryside were a retreat for me. Sometimes we would visit the local church, which distributed food to people in need. While the food was from the government and food networks, this simple operation was run by black folks at the church who had been part of the civil rights movement and knew how to address needs in the community.

Not just blacks came for food. Many poor white folks came too. Sometimes when I visited the church, I would just hang back and watch the people come and go as they picked up food items. I always found the behavior of the white people quite curious. Their body language showed so much shame. One would almost think they were stealing the food.

I noted also that these white folks really didn’t have a voice or anyone in power to stand up for them—that they too were victims exploited politically by those in power. Many times the man of the family would not even go inside to get the food; rather, he would sit outside in the truck and send in his wife. I wish that I had done more for this group of people. I’ve gone from almost hating them (when I was young and angry and they were bigoted and violent) to genuinely loving them as brothers and sisters. I think about how many poor whites respond to me so positively when I speak today. Often I can see a spark in their eyes. I’m truly sorry that I’ve neglected the needs of these neighbors of mine and have not responded often enough to the spark.